The Unpardonable Sin; Satanic Miracles; Love and Trust de Re

I re-read New Wine for the End Times recently, which serves as a reminder of what kinds of New Wine teachings are in the Bible. The New Wine component of MSL can be illuminated by New Wine for the End Times.

One teaching is that of the "unpardonable sin", which is "blasphemy of the Holy Spirit". What does this mean, and should we expect that teaching to be true if all we believe is MSL and not the Bible?

Apparently, according to Philip Brown (author of New Wine for the End Times), it's when you see the miracles that attest to Jesus being the Messiah but you deny to yourself what you see. You say it's from Satan rather than from God. (This from Ch. 7 of the book. Ch. 8, which I read after drafting this, is also on the subject, but didn't change my views as expressed in here. (10th ed. of the book.)).

What Brown says seems like a reasonable inference from the Bible. But does the Bible make sense in this area?

Here's one Biblical passage, for reference (Matthew 12:18-32):

12:18 "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen; my beloved in whom my soul is well pleased: I will put my Spirit on him. He will proclaim justice to the nations. 12:19 He will not strive, nor shout; neither will anyone hear his voice in the streets. 12:20 He won't break a bruised reed. He won't quench a smoking flax, until he leads justice to victory. 12:21 In his name, the nations will hope." 12:22 Then one possessed by a demon, blind and mute, was brought to him and he healed him, so that the blind and mute man both spoke and saw. 12:23 All the multitudes were amazed, and said, "Can this be the son of David?" 12:24 But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, "This man does not cast out demons, except by Beelzebul, the prince of the demons."

12:25 Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said to them, "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. 12:26 If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand? 12:27 If I by Beelzebul cast out demons, by whom do your children cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. 12:28 But if I by the Spirit of God cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you. 12:29 Or how can one enter into the house of the strong man, and plunder his goods, unless he first bind the strong man? Then he will plunder his house.

12:30 "He who is not with me is against me, and he who doesn't gather with me, scatters. 12:31 Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. 12:32 Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, neither in this age, nor in that which is to come.

If I saw a miracle, why would I be sure it was from God, or the particular God that is Jesus? Jesus seems confident that Satan couldn't, or wouldn't, drive out demons. But that seems like something I would expect Satan to be able to do (he's the leader of demons) and would want to do (it could be useful in deceiving people). I would say, from an MSL perspective, that we should be cautious in assuming miracles are always done by good beings.

However, being confident that a miracle is from Satan also seems like a bad idea. Satan can use the belief in Satan to deceive people. I think the Jewish religious leaders described in the Gospels were not being rational if they were sure that Jesus' miracles were from Satan. So if they were confident he wasn't doing God's work, they were choosing to see reality a certain way, rather than what was there. That choice could have been made because they wanted to reject Jesus, a priori, and did not want to see the moral fact that he was a good person, doing God's work. (Seeing a moral fact can call for a change in heart.) An enmity against God, whoever he really is, taken far enough, leads a person to reject God permanently. This is a concern in MSL. (Being the enemy of anyone or anything is dangerous if God reminds you too much of them, or turns out to remind you too much of them, or in some other way by being an enemy of them, you become an enemy of God.)

Probably we should lean toward thinking God was behind a miracle if it did something that as far as we can tell favors God's interests. Maybe it makes sense to assume that such a miracle is from God unless we have a good reason to think otherwise. Did the Jewish religious leaders have a good reason to think otherwise? If not, then they should have ascribed Jesus' miracles to God, and trusted Jesus. However, it is reasonable to be cautious in trusting a miracle-worker and only tentatively ascribe miracles to God, watchful for signs that the miracle-worker actually isn't working for God.

If we take Jesus to be authoritative in everything he said (and believe that the Bible is so accurate in reporting what he said that its words are authoritative as a result), and assume that he literally meant what he said here about "a house divided against itself will not stand", then perhaps we conclude that Jesus knew something about the strange nature of demons, how they don't do strategic things like letting evil people cast them out for deceptive purposes. We might imagine demonic miracles happening (as in Midnight Mass, which I know through this video), but actually, they don't happen. All miracles advance the kingdom of God. Maybe they just happen in bad contexts, are deceptive experiential truths. All miracle-workers are from God -- somehow or other, even if they further horror and evil. Or maybe Midnight Mass is fictional to the point that there just aren't miracle-workers in real life who bear such bad fruit as the priest character's miracle-working. Bad miracle-workers in real life are all frauds who fake their miracles. No actual miracles are done by bad miracle-workers.

I don't know enough to say on this issue. Perhaps as a Christian I should bias myself against calling miracle-workers bad. Certainly if I have no reason to think that they are really working for Satan. But I think without assuming that Jesus is authoritative and literally meant what he said (maybe instead he meant "generally Satan doesn't drive out Satan and if you think he's doing that here, you have been ignoring my character and the quality/spirit of my teachings which indicate that this isn't what's going on here"), the "MSLian" should assume that Satan can drive out Satan, and possibly perform other miracles, although they (Satan) would prefer not to, generally, since they don't like benefiting humans. (I use "they" as both singular and plural since "Satan" could be a collective of demons that is coherently led by one of them.)

Aren't we surrounded by miracles? Some laugh at the simplicity of people who see the world that way, but perhaps the simple see reality closer to what it really is, unjaded. What about the miracle of an argument that comes to a valid conclusion and is true in all relevant contexts? Perhaps the one that proves the existence of God would be a miracle, a noetic rather than sensory miracle. People "see but do not see" both what is in the sensory world and in the noetic world.

Brown thinks that when we see God work in undeniable ways, we are forced to either follow God or reject God. (More specifically in Brown's words, follow Christ or reject Christ.) My thoughts: To know God (to really know God) is to love God, or at least to be strongly called to love God. To see God is to be called to love God. When Satan's deceptions are taken away (all the noetic padding we have to protect us from seeing God), we are stuck with God and our hearts, and if our hearts aren't well-trained, we have a higher likelihood of choosing to reject God rather than love God in that decisive moment.

So we have to be protected from God -- this makes some sense from an MSL perspective. Does this mean that I shouldn't try to prove the existence of God? MSL does not spell out everything about God. It is intentionally incomplete, pointing toward what goes beyond public reason (we can only come to fully know God through our own individual experience, following intellectual conscience rather than what can be argued and established publicly). It sort of does, but doesn't fully, preach Jesus. When it talks about God, does it talk about Jesus? I think in a sense (if Jesus is God) then it must (de re), but at the same time, in another sense, even if he is, it doesn't (de dicto), or doesn't narrow down its "Son" person to being the Jesus of the Bible. So the reader of MSL can turn away from believing in Jesus, as such. Also people who only believe in the Metaphysical Organism, or Speaker, may stop before trying to apply the arguments of legitimism. There is room for people to be irrational (assuming that belief in God is the correct conclusion to rational thinking). Irrationality is not ideal, but it's better than hardening. There is the irrationality that leads to hardening or just is hardening, and there is the irrationality that protects against hardening.

So I would say that in trying to convey the truth, we should be respectful, notably, not forceful (nor, by the way, be any other disrespects, like malicious, lazy, or merciless). A forceful conveyer of beliefs can push another person to build a wall of Satanic deception to protect that other person from God. I'm not sure it's likely or possible to force someone to meet God through words (maybe only miracles like Jesus' can force people to meet God?) but the defense mechanism of believing Satanic deceptions protects people from committing the unpardonable sin, and that defense mechanism, or the beliefs formed as a result of that mechanism, can themselves become part of the spiritual calculus that hardens inside them, creating an obstacle to them coming to love God fully.

From Jesus' example, it does seem like it's better to not be sure, rather than deciding to go all in on a theory that rejects the possibility that someone is from God or is good. There are different kinds of unsureness. "Skepticism" may be loaded against believing that someone is from God. Perhaps a "skeptic" has really already decided that someone is not from God, although on the surface they are openminded. There is an unsureness that effectively ignores that the possibilities might each be real, versus one that effectively assumes that each of them might be real. The latter is safer than the former, since it does not close itself to the possibility that the person in question is from God. (One skepticism/doubting/unsureness closes the discussion, but the other seeks to keep investigating.)

So openmindedness is a virtue that can save you from destruction in hell. Wicked people (those who have sold themselves out to opposing God) can be virulently, irrationally committed to their point of view. Some of them manipulate, intimidate, and deceive openminded people, seemingly because they are deeply sure that they are doing the right thing by doing so. Those that they pressure with non-truth-aligned psychological tactics are thus tempted to closedmindedness. We need to have a definition to what we believe in order to resist lies, but that in itself can set us up to not believing the truth. This is a two-step scam of Satan -- we don't believe the lies that are blatant, and hateful to us (step one of the attack), but we do believe the lie that is closer to the truth, which resists the blatant lie more strongly in the psychological/social battlegrounds than if we are really being rational / openminded (step two of the attack).

If this makes sense so far, it doesn't address the idea of "unpardonable". Why can't God forgive this sin of completely selling ourselves out to being his enemy? Maybe "unpardonable" is a shorthand to communicate with us, but the "longhand" is "if you do this sin, you will have destroyed your own ability to repent, so while God could technically forgive you, he will still have to destroy you"? This would make sense in MSL. The unpardonable sin (hardening) is a choice you make at a discrete moment in time. Maybe it is the last in a series of choices to not see what you see and you don't fully realize what you're doing to yourself, as you go down a progression. (I think the previous sentence goes against things I've said before, so I should try resolve this as I go through my old blog posts.) You do this thing, and there is no pardon for it -- you will not seek pardon for it.

(If you love the truth, you will desire in your heart to see what you see. If there is at least a little bit of this desire, God can work with it to restore you to whatever level of love of truth that you need to be saved. If you are concerned about being out of tune with reality, if at least you consciously think you are, or try to think you are, then you have at least a little bit of the love of truth in you. Perhaps if you don't care, then you don't have it in you.)

What about people who are like Judas? Judas felt remorse for what he did to Jesus. But (Brown argues), Judas committed the unpardonable sin, by so knowingly becoming Jesus' enemy. I'm not sure what I think on this subject. I don't think from an MSL point of view that Judas could have committed the unpardonable sin unless he wasn't really repentant, though very remorseful.

(Judas felt remorse, then killed himself. Did he really repent? Maybe so, maybe no. Remorsefulness and regret are one thing, and repentance is another. Judas did not seem to have hope in himself becoming acceptable, and that lack of hope can prevent repentance.)

I've been undecided in MSL on the role of justice. Is it a primitive of reality? Or is it something socially-constructed? If the former, then maybe we have to pay for our sins, unless there is some way they can be forgiven. For us to be saved, all of our sins must be forgivable -- but perhaps there is an exception for the unpardonable sin of selling yourself out completely to being God's enemy? The Biblical explanation for why it's unpardonable is that it involves crucifying Jesus again. One sacrifice covers all sins, and that's the last sacrifice, so there's no more sacrifice if you break your covenant with God, where he says your sins are forgiven if you trust his Son.

I'm not sure what I would assume in MSL, given justice as a primitive. I have written before about how the "Son" of Legitimacy might have to die for everyone's sins (very much like some theories of the Christian Atonement). I've written before that it would make sense to only have the "Son" die once (see Legitimism Without Atonement). One innocent death balances out all sins, but a second innocent death makes the world unjust again. If the "Son" only dies once, does his death cover the sin of rejecting God intentionally? I think so. If somehow that sin weren't covered by the first death, another death could be arranged. But, a person who completely and irrevocably rejects God is not going to be saved even if they are forgiven. They will have to be destroyed in hell. They might be punished for their sins (the hellish part of being destroyed) as a deterrent to people rejecting God, although those sins would be forgiven (the deeds themselves would not be traumatic/irritating/offending/angering to God because of the restoration of justice by the "Son"'s death, but the action of punishing would still be performed for the greater good) (See Is Eternal Conscious Torment Compatible with MSLN?).

Practically speaking, what's the important thing here, that God does or doesn't forgive, or that we do or do not reject him? Sometimes God is much more powerful than we are. He decides what the world looks like, whom we meet, what ideas we encounter, what our brains are like, etc. (There are other actors influencing that as well, but God is the greatest determiner of things.) However, we are the rulers of our own hearts. We can choose to reject God or follow God, and in this we are the ones who have power over God, forcing him to live with the consequences of our decisions.

Whether rejecting God completely and irrevocably (closing our minds to what we really see so that we can no longer be anti-tempted, knowingly calling good things evil so that we don't have to trust God, or whatever else might effectively accomplish that rejection) is pardonable or not by God, is almost a red herring. What is clear, and of greatest practical consequence, is that our effective rejection of God condemns us to destruction.

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On re-reading, I see that there is a thread in the above that I didn't follow. I said "If I saw a miracle, why would I be sure it was from God, or the particular God that is Jesus?" In Jesus' day, it appears that the spiritual world was seen to be a binary or spectrum with Satan on one side and God on the other. This is more or less the worldview of MSL. MSL gives us (I hope) a fairly high prior belief that God exists and would work in the world, when we encounter apparent spiritual power. But what if you don't believe in the Biblical or MSL worldviews? When you encounter a miracle or a sign from God, you might justifiably not be sure which God, or spiritual being, it's from. Maybe it was Odin, the spirit of Saturn, one of the Dreaming Beings, the God of Islam -- these being spiritual beings that people trust, or have trusted, not to mention all the possible blatantly evil beings. There is an uncountable number of potential ideas about what spiritual power is, if you have no prior belief to ground you.

So in the past, I think I've written something like if your evidence for any one idea of the spiritual world is so low that you could just make up another one with equal rational support, you are not bound to do what that first idea requires of you, since there could easily be an "equal and opposite" idea of what you should do in response to the spiritual world that requires you to do the opposite of what the first one does. Is this how you should approach an apparent miracle, as potentially being explained by anything, and so no practical or fiducial response is required?

Infinities (and thus potential infinities) can be bounded. Of the natural numbers (the whole numbers counting up from 1 (1, 2, 3, ...)), there are an infinite number of odd numbers, and an infinite number of even numbers, but all natural numbers fit in one of those two categories. So the infinities are bounded. Of all the potential gods and spirits we might hypothesize, there are those who are for humans, against humans, or neutral (or we might say that there is a divide that divides the neutral into basically being for humans or being against humans).

And there are only three (or two) kinds of humans, no matter how many humans are born. So we are on the same side as the spiritual beings who are for humans, or against humans, if we are for humans, or against humans. So whatever you think about God's existence, when you see spirits who are working for humans, are you on their side? Do you allow the possibility that a miracle is being done by that spiritual nation or army? Or do you decide that you know that it is not being done by them?

(This is too simple, though. A spirit could be on the side of a certain group of people and not on the side of another. Some humans would prefer a god who favors their group and not another group. But, if we don't know anything else, to see a spirit help one person, I think we should assume that they probably are in favor of all persons, since one person is substantially like all others. Perhaps if you saw someone eating a particular salad, you might think they liked salad in general, with or without some exceptions. This idea could be overturned soon enough, but I think it's a good starting assumption. With spirits doing pro-human miracles, we should be cautiously trusting.)

We have a bias in Western culture against belief in and trust in the supernatural. We are avid consumers of ideas that come through culture, scams though they often are, and even settle on ones that we accept, believe in, and fight for. Why not do the same with supernatural voices? In fact, isn't it the case that many ideas in culture come from "flashes of inspiration"? Isn't it the case that artists feel like something other than them is working through them when they create? A natural reading of this phenomenon is that these accepted modes of being influenced are the tools of spirit beings. So, if we have our favorite bands, philosophers, and intellectual institutions and cultures, why not have our favorite spirits that we listen to? That they are our favorites does not mean they are 100% trustworthy, but we know with ideas, art, and cultures that it is better to trust something than to not trust at all. We trust and even obey our favorite ideas, art, and culture.

If you see a person who is listening to a spirit, does that spirit seem to be for or against humans? You might want to "judge a tree by its fruit". Now, as the Bible points out, people like Abraham and Sarah, and everyone else from Hebrews 11, had hard lives. Could it be the case that the spirit that told Abraham to leave his homeland was a scammer that just wanted him to suffer and make a fool of himself, all in the name of "blessing all the families of the world"? From a Biblical, or MSL, perspective, Abraham was a hero for being that kind of fool. He loved and wanted to participate in what was worth pursuing. But maybe it would have been better for him to not have listened.

Abraham and Sarah were strangers among people who did not share their vision. They probably lived with the indifference of the people around them, grating against them, quenching and starving them. Although I don't think Genesis records this, it's also possible (and likely for people in their situation) that their neighbors were hostile to them. (The experience of the prophets and the early church shows how the descendants of Abraham can experience hostility.) So, if a spirit tells you to do something that is pro-human, isn't that a pro-human spirit? It might not be, it might be some kind of scam to torture good-hearted fools. But who's doing the torture? Isn't it the people (and spirits) who are hostile or indifferent to the pro-human project? Maybe they're the problem, not the spirit that calls a person to the hard life of making things better. It would make a lot of sense for pro-human spirits to call people to fight on their side, but be unable to protect them from all the harm from the fight (if the spirits are not literally omnipotent).

Abraham was able to successfully carry out his small part in obeying the Abrahamic promise. Nothing was keeping him from doing that. Maybe if we live in a dystopia (like in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where individual agency seems to be inevitably crushed by the evil status quo), then someone who hears a spirit calling them to bless the whole world should not listen -- the wisest course of action is to do the little thing that actually can work. I think a lot of people live for some reason as though in an Orwellian nightmare, in this area of their lives, and would not listen to the apparent voice of God. But I think the world we actually live in is not that strictly bounded, and we are still able to plausibly carry out the simple task of abiding by a culture and passing it on to some biological or non-biological descendants (Abraham's task). So for us, as for Abraham, it is rational to pursue the Abrahamic vision, if a voice calls to us furthering it. This doesn't mean our lives will be easy if we listen and follow it, or that we will succeed, but just that it isn't crazy to try.

Why would anti-human spirits call pro-human humans to be more pro-human? It seems like a dangerous gambit. What if the pro-human humans start a religion that is pro-human? It's possible anti-human spirits can scam people with pro-human leadings, but I think our default assumption is that pro-human leadings come from pro-human spirits.

How do we know what is pro-human, or anti-human? There are some things that are clear: dealing with the problems we all recognize, like material poverty. There may be other things that are not so obvious to all of us. Religions (and other antagonists in cultural / axiological disputes) claim to tell us which of the controversial values are actually pro-human, and some of them may be right, and it is worth investigating and potentially trusting what they say. Religions are bundles of values, goals, etc. and some bundle untruths with truths (controversies imply that someone is saying something wrong). But the truth in them probably comes from pro-human spirits, and some of the truth of them is not up for dispute, at least by us (that which aligns with consensus reality). There are certain things that humans can generally know are pro-human (as humans, we have a privileged access to knowing what is pro-human).

If you are really vehement in your rejection of the possibility that pro-human spirits are behind something (especially something that is prima facie good), then you may be closing yourself to the voice of God.

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Am I in any danger of committing the unpardonable sin? I don't know. This passage in Hebrews relates:

6:4 For concerning those who were once enlightened and tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Spirit, 6:5 and tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the age to come, 6:6 and then fell away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance; seeing they crucify the Son of God for themselves again, and put him to open shame.

Maybe I am not, because I haven't tasted "the powers of the age to come" -- or have I? Maybe I have without realizing that was it.

If I reject Christianity, but then repent, does that mean it wasn't the kind of "falling away" that is talked about in this passage? Or is it the case that if I think I repent, I'm not really repenting (in this case "repent" doesn't refer to "a change of my heart" but to something else)?

If I "fall away", does that mean that in doing so I crucify Christ again for myself, or does it mean that in order to do so, I must crucify Christ again for myself? I think that Jesus' blood covers all sins, no matter what. The thing that makes the unpardonable sin unpardonable is that for me to commit it, I have to get in the state of never being willing to ask pardon, of rejecting the forgiveness that comes from Jesus' blood. Jesus doesn't have to be crucified again, in the sense of "dying to cover sins", but he can be crucified again, for someone, when they "despise him to the point of wanting him to die". (Then, despising him so much, they see no value in what he did, and reject his forgiveness.) Am I 100% sure that I interpret things correctly when I believe all this, though?

Should I commit to Christianity out of fear, even though my noetic eyes tell me it might not be true? In that case, I would not be "seeing what I see". Not "seeing what you see" is a risk factor for hardening.

My practical concern is that I find MSL more convincing than the Bible, and yet I have believed in the Bible and had experiences that honestly seem to me to be connected to Jesus specifically, although I am currently not certain if that Jesus was literally the one mentioned in the Bible, or was rather something spoken to me by God because I grew up Christian. I have believed more firmly that they were connected to a being who literally satisfies the Gospels' description of Jesus, but now I am not sure. If I became an MSLian, I might accept the Bible as a guide to preferring, acting, and trusting (including the form of trust that is intellectual belief), out of a sense of generosity toward God, seeking ways to obey him. (The Bible is a likely source of information from God given MSL, because of its resemblance to MSL.) But then, would I have committed the unpardonable sin, by converting away from Christianity to MSL? There is some chance that the Bible is true, in a way that I must accept it in a sort of "conservative" way where I root my belief in its words, rather than rooting them in something outside the Bible. So there would be some chance I had committed the unpardonable sin.

Christians often choose to believe in the Bible more than they can rationally support. (Maybe that's the overwhelming status quo.) When they do so, they choose to obey what the Bible says God wants them to prefer, act, and trust. I don't see how I would be different than them in that. But they would call themselves Christians, and I might not. I think in a sense I would be a Christian, and in a sense I wouldn't be, and that might be enough to have committed the unpardonable sin.

(Taking the name of Jesus is necessary in order to not "fall away"?)

An MSLian believes in the "Son", the person of Legitimacy who bears the burden of finite life, and MSL leads us to think that the Son has particular attributes beyond what MSL specifies (since a person requires more than a few sentences to adequately be described). Could this Son be the Jesus of the Bible? Certainly. So an MSLian who loves and trusts the Son may be loving and trusting Jesus -- only if Jesus actually exists, though. They love and trust Jesus de re, and even de dicto. They can say (de dicto) they love and trust the Son, whoever and whatever he really is, which refers to Jesus -- if Jesus really exists. (By existing, he would fit the description of the Son.)

In that case, the Christian may choose to know less about Jesus (or acknowledge their lack of knowledge) as they identify more as an MSLian, while still being as committed as ever to the person of Jesus.

Would a Muslim object to trying to love and trust the Jesus that actually exists? (I'm not sure, but I'm guessing at least one might not -- the Muslim thinks Jesus is merely a prophet, the Christian that he is God, but the Jesus that actually exists, the way he turns out to be, who can reject?) In that case, if Jesus is God (and has the other important attributes from the Gospels) such a Muslim would have begun to be a Christian, without leaving Islam.

An atheist seeking (and trusting) the truth (the pattern of belief that is trustworthy, including what it points to) could seek and trust whatever the truth will turn out to be, and thus would begin to be a Christian, while still being an atheist.

This is a beautiful thought, and might resolve the issue -- as long as we seek the truth, and seek God as he will turn out to be, we will be okay.

There might be a simpler resolution to my dilemma, which is to say that if something other than me causes me to no longer believe as firmly in the Bible as I once did or sometimes do, then it is not I who fall away. When I see what hadn't been shown to me before (the defeater that lowers my credence in the Bible), or I see what I already should have acknowledged (a gap in my knowledge), then I see what I see, and it is something other than me that determines my reduced level of credence.

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In MSL, Legitimacy must value what is valuable, and try to keep it existing forever. We are valuable. It is only by our power (by our free will) that we fail to exist forever. Legitimacy (God) must forgive us if there is a way. But we can "sin an unpardonable sin" by cutting off our own ability to repent and be open to God's forgiveness.

I believe I should believe in the Bible (to the extent that I should) through MSL. I also believe that I should believe in at least part of it (I don't know 100% which parts) through the connection that Jesus (the literal God or the imaginal/noetic being) has with spiritual warfare (those on Jesus' side can be trusted, and those against Jesus cannot be). If MSL says something clearly, it is true, and I adjust my interpretation of the Bible to be in harmony with it, especially where the Bible is perhaps lacking in fleshed-out detail, as I think is the case with the unpardonable sin. I think the interpretation that the unpardonable sin inherently involves the sinner cutting off their willingness to repent, and involves their permanent effective rejection of God's forgiveness through Jesus' sacrifice, is not incompatible with the Bible. That would be MSL's way of reading things, and MSL I find intellectually trustworthy. So then the question is, is MSL true?

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On this important topic, I think it's worth it to "keep score". Why is it that someone contemplating leaving Christianity (not relying on the Bible primarily, not identifying as a Christian) for MSL would not be at risk of committing the unpardonable sin? Can I give a more organized list of reasons?

1. MSL says that God, by his nature as Legitimacy, has to validate that which is valid, and thus preserve everything that is good forever. The only thing that can get in the way of that is a person's free will. We generally do not make final decisions to reject God. Each of us can make that final decision to reject God at some point. But we would know we had done so, and be unable to (that is, unwilling to) undo that decision, forever. So if we are concerned about maybe having committed the unpardonable sin, we can try repenting. If we are still able to intend to change (and a "mere" conscious belief that we intend counts as something) then we have not committed the unpardonable sin. If Jesus is God (and MSL is valid), then all of the above applies.

2. If anyone loves and trusts the truth or God or God's Son (i.e., MSL's Son) as it/he/he really is, then they have not fallen away from whatever reality is behind our beliefs in the truth/God/God's Son. If Jesus exists, he is the truth/God/God's Son, and our beliefs in the truth/God/God's Son ultimately connect to him. If he does not exist, there is no problem.

(What about the name of Jesus? Christianity claims that Jesus is God and the truth. So if we are theists (those who seek to love and trust the God who actually is, actually turns out to be) or aletheists (those who seek to trust trustworthy beliefs (and ultimately, that which those beliefs point to)) then we take the name of Jesus ("God" and "the truth"), if he exists.)

3. Jesus' blood covers all sins. The unpardonable sin is already pardoned. We can reject that forgiveness, but that rejection is only final if we stop wanting to repent, permanently. So if we leave Christianity, for the sake of truth, we can be brought back to Christianity by better understanding. If we leave it out of enmity with God, if that enmity is not complete and final, then we can be brought back.

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I think those three reasons make sense. Do I 100% know that they are valid? I guess I could have at least a little bit of doubt. (Similar to how I have my reasons to not believe in eternal conscious torment based on MSL, but I can't say for 100% certain that MSL is correct and thus excludes all possible reasons to believe in eternal conscious torment that are out there.)

I have to face the possibility that I could be condemned due to my rejection of Jesus (by diminishing my allegiance to Christianity, or something like that). What do I do with that thought? Suppose I am condemned due to my rejection of Christianity. God's goodness is not diminished. (I imagine some Calvinists may have gone down similar mental paths.) I don't see why I should not work for what is good, for God, even if I don't get to experience the benefits of goodness myself (or only a lifetime's worth, instead of an eternity's worth). Why should I not love and trust God? I can generously love God, even if I have lost my salvation.

It is ethically called-for to preserve your eternal life -- it's what God would want. But if it's too late to do that, there is still a lot of work to do to help others.

--

26 September 2023:

I found a fragment of a blog post that is relevant to this topic:

I think one of the strongest Biblical objections to my writing is the end of Revelation (ch. 21 - 22), where very explicitly it says (21:4) "Death will be no more; neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more. The first things have passed away."

22:19 is a very strong statement: "If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, may God take away his part from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, which are written in this book." Is it the case that if I say that I have reason to think that God would mourn the lost, and that we would mourn in order to be in tune with God, that I have "taken away from the words of the book of this prophecy"? It's possible that Revelation is a vision, and thus we should not take it literally. It doesn't take away from the words of a book of poetry to read its symbolism as symbolism. Revelation is an image of a particular kind of life story: going through the cross and then living in peace and rest (like Frodo across the sea?), no longer struggling, having "overcome" like in 1 John. There can be a moment in life like the end of Revelation. And then we decide whether to return to earth to continue God's work, or remain in heavenly retirement.

One reason to think that, if Revelation is inerrant, it must have been symbolic, would be to look at 22:10-11:

22:10 He said to me, "Don't seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand. 22:11 He who acts unjustly, let him act unjustly still. He who is filthy, let him be filthy still. He who is righteous, let him do righteousness still. He who is holy, let him be holy still."

If the time was literally at hand (i.e., the end of the world was coming in a matter of weeks or months), then this advice might make some sense. But if we take this advice literally, over centuries (the distance from the writing of Revelation to now) then we would cause, occasion, allow, etc. massive amounts of spiritual harm. Or if this is not advice, but rather a kind of blessing/curse (a powerful word that makes things so), then the fact that the unjust, over the centuries, sometimes have stopped acting unjustly, and those who were filthy, sometimes no longer are, counts against it being something God literally enacted.

I think that Revelation is either not inerrant (may contain errors), or not to be taken literally in every respect. I do think that it may be an important source of truths from God. In cases where common sense sufficiently strongly rules out it being literally (or inerrantly) true, we should go with common sense. But, as with the idea that the Millennium lasts 1,000 years, if there is no obvious problem, it's wise to consider the possibility that the text is literally true.

If Revelation has errors, should we take them as truth because Revelation threatens us with not having eternal life for "taking away from the words of the prophecy"? They aren't true, no matter how much we heed the threat. Are the errors in a prophecy really prophecy? They might be false prophecy. The prophecy worth heeding and protecting is whatever is true. So then, there is no danger in "taking away from" (failing to heed?) the errors in Revelation, if they exist, and we only need observe the true parts. Would God want us to heed the words of false prophecy?

Should texts have the ability to intimidate us into believing them? Any text that is more than a certain percent trustworthy will seem compelling to us. Then, if it says "If you take away a single word from this, you lose out on eternal life", do we have to accept that and everything else in the text? Even if the text was produced by the Library of Babel and contains some questionable content (literally "questionable", things we would ordinary reject but which we can plausibly accept given the right amount of glory given them).

The possibility of mischief through this kind of channel (some spiritual beings moving someone to write a text which then gains a kind of perennial power over people, enshrining error) seems real to me.

(It could be the case that "taking away from the words of the prophecy" is really about "not corrupting the manuscripts that transmit Revelation".)

--

Keeping score: It sounds like there's a curse on people who change the words of Revelation. If this means that you can't deny the truth of anything in Revelation, then maybe I'm in trouble. But Revelation is a vision which you're supposed to take at least somewhat non-literally. Revelation is written as though the world is supposed to end very soon, but it didn't. That's a pretty major error, if it's supposed to be overall literal. Clearly there are elements of it that are not literally true. If there is error somewhere in Revelation, are we really cursed for not believing it? Revelation can have error from a literal perspective, and if it does, it doesn't make sense for us to believe that error. Or, if Revelation has no errors, but its seeming error comes from a misinterpretation, then if it's questionable how to interpret something, whether literally or not, and how to interpret it non-literally, are we also cursed, for getting things wrong? That doesn't make sense. God doesn't want people to lose their salvation.

Overall, given what else I've written in this post on the unpardonable sin, Revelation's curse on those who alter it only makes sense if it's a case of someone irrevocably rejecting God.

Value of This Life; Life Extension

This is an important topic, and maybe I haven't done it justice here, in terms of content. The form, as I re-read it, is scattered, as well. In theory I could make a better version of this, and maybe I will. But at this point, I don't have the energy/focus to. A lot of times I write these blog posts as notes to myself, which I happen to share online with some hope that others will read them, and I'll say this is one of those.

Introduction

In Establishedness and Loving God, I wrote in one of the sections about why it is valuable for people to live in this life, rather than going straight to heaven, or to the Millennium. This meant that we have a reason to not abort the unborn. Otherwise it might seem like aborting the unborn could be seen as better than letting them live in this life, so that they could be better off spiritually in the next life.

The explanation I gave there was that while the Millennium is a better place, where Jesus is king, it is a more "established" place, in which the spiritual benefits of disestablishedness are lacking.

But then I thought about how unfortunate it would be to withhold disestablishedness from people in the Millennium, if it would be spiritually beneficial. Would God let them be lost if all it would take to not be lost was some kind of difficult experience? And I thought about how it sounds like in the next life there will be bad times for those who were rich, full, and laughing in this life (Luke 6:24-25), and "weeping and gnashing of teeth" in the outer darkness -- hell? or simply corrective experiences in the Millennium? As I recall, Philip Brown's opinion, for what it's worth, is that these dark passages are about the Millennium, not about hell. My sense, without doing the work to really be sure, is that ruling out the possibility that these could be only about the Millennium (the Millennium and not hell) would be difficult.

So I thought that that explanation for why it's worth living in this life (that this life is distinctively beneficial for being disestablished) is not a solid one. It should be possible for there to be disestablishedness in the next.

But then it occurred to me that this life could be valuable as an addition to the Millennium. In other words, the Millennium is a finite amount of time, as is each of our lives in this life, and thus our lives in this life extend the work of the Millennium.

The period of time called the Millennium might be literally 1,000 years long (the Millennium gets its name from Revelation, which is a vision and might not be literal, but details in it could always happen to be literal). Let's say I live 80 years in this life, and then 1,000 in the Millennium. 80 is 8% of 1,000, or if you want to do the math differently, it could be 7.4% of 1,080. That is a decent percentage of the total time. Presumably, getting more time to mature spiritually is better than getting less -- unless this life is particularly bad for people spiritually. Maybe there are too many temptations, not enough temptations, too few anti-temptations, too many anti-temptations in some way, too few influences of any sort that make us change (the result being that we get into hardened habits), or some other problem with the environment in which we decide for or against God. It's possible that this life is bad for people spiritually, more than good, but optimistically, people do grow spiritually (become more in tune with God) in this life, something we have some evidence of, and I think at worst I would judge myself uncertain as to whether this life is so much worse than the Millennium that to live here is a net-negative. So once again, I don't think we have a clear reason to abort children for the sake of their spiritual well-being.

1,000 is much greater than 80. I would guess that 1,000, if it is not the literal number of years in the Millennium (hm... I probably should have called it the Resurrection, an alternate biblical name according to the New Wine System, for cases like this), is meant to not mislead, and so we should think of the time in the Millennium/Resurrection as being "large but finite", I would guess somewhere around the same order of magnitude if not greater. It would be weird for the Bible to say 1,000 when it really meant 1, also if it really meant 10, and also if it really meant 100. Maybe it could really be 900 or 800 years? I can't really be sure. So maybe this life matters more, or less, but probably is no more than about 10% (80/800) of the amount of life that is at play. So if a person were to be aborted, or was miscarried, it's probably only a moderate disadvantage for them spiritually, but not a stark and terrible one. Still, the ethical/practical scales are tilted toward being pro-life, at least to some extent.

MSL duration of Millennium

From an MSL perspective (MSLN without reference to the Bible), how long should we think the Millennium/Resurrection would be? It's hard to say. I would assume that since God wants to save everyone, he would allocate enough time that most people could sufficiently make up their minds to follow him (or if they want, to reject him, knowing what they are doing). But, some people would be basically eternal procrastinators, and need a deadline to come to a decision. So, I will speculate, if I were designing this system, my naive first thought would be to allocate enough time that the non-procrastinators could make their decision, and then maybe a certain amount extra so that the procrastinators could do their relatively rapid, "night-before-the-test" changes to reach their final decision. (God might say "You have 1,000 years to fully repent and come into tune with me." and then extend the deadline to accommodate procrastinators, those who were motivated by the impending end of the 1,000 years, developed a good spiritual "velocity" at the last minute, and asked (individually or collectively) for an extension of the deadline.)

I don't know that God could predict in advance how many procrastinators there would be and exactly how long it would take the non-procrastinators to get through their decision-making processes. There must be a final deadline, because the duration of illegitimacy must be finite (God (Legitimacy) can only endure illegitimacy for a finite time for it to be illegitimate), and that deadline might be "rough", and some people could be lost at the deadline, for not being able to repent fast enough. So I don't think procrastinating on becoming holy is a good idea, and the more that people don't procrastinate, the fewer will be lost.

I still don't know how much time to guess the Millennium will be, apart from the rough clue given in the Bible. I think whatever it will be will be adequate -- generally speaking, basically -- and will be more adequate the more seriously we take the process of becoming holy.

How does this affect the math done in the previous section (80:1000)? Is the ratio between this life and the Millennium (given MSL) more like 1:10 (relatively close to 80:1000)? Is it something like 1:5? 1:2? 1:1? I can only guess based on my sense of how spiritual growth works in this life, but 1:1 is probably too fast for most people (in other words 80 years of this life, followed by 80 years of "Millennium"). The longer the "Millennium", the more plausible. 1:5 starts to feel like it might be generous. 1:10 and beyond is at least as generous as the literal-biblical 1,000 years. So, I guess this life might be as high as 80/400 (20%) or 80/480 (16%), in terms of how much of a person's development happens during it, for calculations of how bad abortion is in terms of depriving people of time in this life. A really safe assumption might be to make the "Millennium" even shorter, but it seems less plausible the shorter you get. Again, I find 80:80 to be hard to believe. This paragraph is guesswork that for me has at least that much structure.

Life Extension

Notice that prolonging a person's life gives them an advantage spiritually (important caveat: as long as this life is more spiritually beneficial than not, which I think is currently the case and probably always has been up to now). So attempts to prolong people's lives (using things like insecticide-treated bednets to prevent malaria) could be significantly valuable even with respect to the second death, which they do not directly address. But people could end up in local environments where this life is more harmful than good spiritually. Perhaps in some seemingly utopian future, every part of civilization will be more harmful than good spiritually.

Now, in an artificial world, what if people are prolonging their lives with life extension technology, but hardening themselves in the process? They could live 10,000 years in this life -- then, the ratio given above could turn out to be 10,000:1,000 or 10:1, roughly the opposite of the biblical 80:1000. The pessimist in me says that that would be terrible, and that we should avoid doing that kind of thing. Life extension might be one of the most dangerous technologies we can develop, from a spiritual point of view. I do think we should be very careful with life extension, given that risk. But, the less pessimistic side of me hopes that even after 10,000 years of shallowness, ease, emptiness, and lack of loving, 1,000 years in the Millennium could still undo a lot of that, all of that for many people. Still, I wouldn't risk a spiritually shallow extended-life world if I were the designer of things.

(Could God extend the Millennium in response to human life-extension? I don't remember everything I may have written relevant to that, but I do think that if the "size" of God is limited, and if your past is a necessary part of who you are that only exists if it is remembered ("to be is to be perceived"), God may face a tradeoff between extending the Millennium and creating more people because he would run out of resources to remember everyone's pasts. In that case, a further argument against life-extension could be that with enough life-extension, the Millennium might have to be shortened, and that people in the era of history in which they can extend their lives would have an unfair advantage (assuming their lives brought them closer to being in tune with God) than those in the past who could only manage to live 20, 50, or 80 years. The difference between living 5 years and 80 years isn't enormous with respect to 1,000 years, but the difference between 100,000 and 5 years is, and enough 100,000 year lifespans could draw down the Millennium so that it's only 500 years long or something like that.)

What if the Millennium is actually 1,000,000 years long? I think that is consistent with the Bible calling it "1,000". The reader of the Bible could be uncertain whether it means "literally 1,000 years" or "a really big number of years; an age or eon". 1,000 years enables us to trust God to a certain extent, to expect a certain number of years for our spiritual development. So if it's at least 1,000 years, then either the "literally 1,000 years" and "age or eon" interpretations are good in terms of delivering on whatever promise we see in "1,000 years". So 1,000,000 years could be biblical. And there is no reason to think, from MSL, that a 1,000,000-year Millennium is impossible. A ratio of 80:1,000,000 is even more generous than 80:1,000.

In that case, life extension isn't that bad, at least, if it's not extreme. But we don't know that we actually have a 1,000,000 year Millennium.

--

Some of the unfairness of modern or transhuman life extension can be ameliorated (perhaps) by God not giving life-extended people as much time in the Millennium. So, if they live 500 years + the usual 80, and if the Millennium is normally 1,000 years long, they get 500 years in the Millennium. This works out okay, but not if people are extending their lives more than the length of the Millennium. This suggests that some life extension might be okay (maybe 100 or 200 years beyond 80?), as long as it's high-quality from a spiritual standpoint, such that the person whose life was extended wouldn't be at a disadvantage for missing out on the Millennium.

Another thought counterweighing the unfairness of modern or transhuman life extension, is that generally when people live less than, say 60 years, or 40, or 20, it's because their lives are hard. Disestablishedness may be better than establishedness, because it's a more ready teacher of "the cross". So they might not be at as much disadvantage as their shorter lifespans would indicate. Should we still help people in that life live longer? It's good for our spiritual well-being (all else equal), as wealthy people, to live for someone else, and we tend to have atheistic sides to us which say that "this life is all there is", so from that perspective, it still makes sense to help people live longer. From a spiritual perspective, it's for our sakes, but from an atheistic perspective, it's for theirs, and it's because it's for theirs from an atheistic perspective that it's particularly good for us from ours. But even an MSLN theist should care about alleviating unbearable suffering, because that's something God cares about. I think, spiritually speaking, there are diminishing returns on suffering beyond a certain point, and low-hanging fruit for would-be generous people to pick in their own lives by helping those who suffer.

Indexing Things to Other Things

I use sentences like "People are indexed to their culture and not to God", but I realized that this isn't a completely common term, and lightweight search engine use may not give a clear answer as to what I mean by "indexed to".

Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly where I got that term from or the (I think) illuminating specificity of how it was used in that original context or in the definition given there. But I can say how I understand it, and that might help readers of this blog.

Indexing has to do with reference points. One meaning that I may use is "linking yourself to another reality, on a literal one-to-one correspondence, or a correspondence which resembles a literal one-to-one correspondence". On some level you automatically follow the reality of the other thing, perhaps because you choose to be linked that way, or you chose it and it has become a habit, or without realizing it you developed or inherited the habit. Sometimes though the intention to be true to it is a habit, to actually be true to it requires conscious thought and volition, to successfully execute the intention.

You tend to have to update yourself to new knowledge about the reference reality. You aren't necessarily in one-to-one correspondence with the thing as it is, but you are with the thing as it has revealed itself, and your intention, or habit, is to correspond with the thing as it is.

--

A meaning similar to this (probably the source of me knowing about it) is found in math and related fields (economics/finance). If I recall correctly, Kurt Gödel used indexing in developing his Incompleteness Theorem.

Horror Math

Here is a Twitter thread that I wrote that I wanted to put on this blog:

Has anyone made math that doesn't (always) resolve? E.g. X + -X that can't be made 0, but which is always X + -X.

I got this idea from the horror of something that is simultaneously good and bad without resolving to a "shade of grey". (The horror of forcing two opposites into one thing without resolving them.) So it could be "horror math".

I'm not sure it would be that useful, but I note that 2N/(4(X + -X)) resolves to N/(2(X + -X)) in horror math, while in regular math it resolves to "undefined".

Since math is often talking about reality, there may be cases where X + -X talks about reality more accurately than reducing them down to 0. So they should be immune, or partially immune, to mathematical processing.

(How / How Much) to use Resources Against Hardening?

11 September 2023: made a minor edit.

How should we act / allocate resources (how much should we), given the possibility that some people will be lost to hardening? One idea is that if even one person is at risk, it's worth expending effort to save them. If they make it into God's rest, then that is of eternal value. The resources expended to save them will probably disappear at the end of human history or be trivial to recreate if lost.

But in practice, we tend to find it acceptable to not try to save everyone, when people's lives are at risk, either of the first or the second death. We try a certain amount, and then leave them up to their own devices, or chance, or other factors out of our control.

Yet, we do find it compelling to try to save lives, as a society, if enough people are at risk.

--

For reference, what kinds of resources are expended to save lives, from the first death? (Secular life-saving.)

I don't trust myself to come up with specific numbers for COVID-19, so I won't try to say what that is on a societal level. Either someone has done this for the pandemic so far, or someday likely will. But on a personal level, I could ask myself "roughly estimate the unpleasant experiences and foregone opportunities due to trying to deal with the pandemic -- have I spent this much trying to save people from being lost?"

(I think for some Christians, the answer will be "I sacrifice more to save lives on earth that are going to end anyway, than I do on people's eternal well-being." Others, like myself, might say "I don't know.")

I do trust myself with one number, the order of magnitude of potential lives lost from COVID, the lives at stake which our anti-COVID measures have partially saved -- which is in the 10s of millions (judging from the death toll of the 1918 flu of 50 million given by the CDC). We are willing to have a major societal response around the world in order to deal with things that threaten death tolls in the 10s of millions of lives.

On an individual level, what are the risks of hardening? This then aggregates to the societal risk of hardening.

A traditional evangelical (I'll say here) believes that everyone's eternal state is decided at the moment of death. It depends entirely on two factors: God's grace and their response. But God's grace never fails. So practically it depends on one factor, their response or decision to sufficiently fully trust Jesus for salvation. When people die, if they aren't going to heaven, they are going to hell. Hell might be a sort of "separation from God" that is not as literally what the Bible talks about (maybe more like C. S. Lewis' imagination of it), or it could be a more literal being burned in a fire. It lasts forever.

For a traditional evangelical, it is clear that at least all the people who don't profess Christianity, and possibly some of those who do, are in peril as I write this, at risk of losing their chance to avoid the second death, by dying the first, perhaps at their life expectancy, and perhaps much sooner. Traditional evangelicals could actually calculate the number of lost, kind of like how I used the death toll from the 1918 flu as a reference for what the death toll of COVID-19 could be.

But from an MSLN perspective, instead, it is harder to tell that specific people are definitely lost, and harder to say how much time they have. Most people have a lot more time to become saved than the duration of their lives on earth. They have the whole Millennium. But salvation is much more involved than in traditional evangelicalism. Many non-Christians are being saved because they are listening to God (the Father) without realizing it, and are becoming more in tune with him. Christians who have ceased to grow are in danger of being hardened. Who knows if someday I won't cease to grow?

I think that there is a big practical question to answer, which is "should MSLN people favor an 'urgent' or a 'patient' approach to salvation?" It may not matter too much in the end which is chosen as a global approach, because what is most effective in each particular case is either more urgent or more patient, and we shouldn't try to make sweeping, simplistic practical decisions, when we can simply deal with the people around us as they actually are in their particularity.

I would say the "urgent" approach is like that of the most intellectually honest true traditional evangelical believers. A stranger of that sort encounters you, talks to you, cares about you deeply, pushes you, corners you, forces you to say things, to confront whether or not you have met the standard that they are convinced of. It's sort of jarring to laid-back Americans like myself. I think there is a sort of basic belief in laid-back American culture (properly basic or not) that no one is in any deep danger -- fear is not allowed, concern is not allowed. We are okay and we are okay with each other. The urgent approach is almost unhearable from that perspective.

The "patient" approach is that of theologically moderate people, or those who may have hell "on the books" but practically speaking ignore its existence. In a laid-back, pleasantly loving way, they gently lead non-Christians to make a commitment to Jesus, as though when those converted get to heaven, God will say "by the way, that whole time, you had no idea how much you were at risk of eternal hellfire".

The urgent and the patient approach each have their downsides. Urgent people can be pushy, invasive, and, given the traditional soteriology, "manufacture" a lot of shallow Christians. There is more fear in the urgent culture, which has its upsides and downsides.

The patient approach risks forgetting why Christianity is necessary in the first place. It may be that the beauty, community, and therapeutic benefits to Christianity are enough to attract many people, but then, maybe people don't need beauty, community, and therapy beyond what they already have, or secular sources are better. If it is actually the case that hell doesn't matter, that lack of a sense of necessity is not that bad. But if hell does matter, and patient Christians don't have a sense that Christianity matters, then they won't believe it does, and the people in the culture around them won't believe it does, either -- but actually it will, in a frightful and sorrow-inducing way.

11 September 2023: Originally "in perhaps the most frightful and sorrow-inducing way imaginable", which I think is unrealistic (the human imagination is capable of coming up with extreme thoughts, but the most extreme thoughts probably have little connection to reality). "Frightful and sorrow-inducing" is bad enough.

Maybe it is obvious how New Wine soteriology (especially as I've developed it in MSLN) lends itself to both urgency and patience. Hell is not eternal conscious torment, but it is still an eternal loss to God. Instead of a positive point of decision "for" Christ that seals a person's fate, there is a negative point of decision "against" Christ (hardening). On the plus side, there is a generous amount of time to decide "for" Christ, but on the minus side, the longer that time takes, the more time one could be at risk for deciding "against" Christ. The things we do in this life can give us some spiritual calculus (in the "dental" sense) which has to be undone at some point -- if we hold to it forever, it could be the thing that makes us choose "against" Christ.

As I've described things in the last paragraph, I feel like what is called for is to be "urgent", but with a long time limit. Or maybe what's really called for is something that doesn't map perfectly well with a simple "urgent" or "patient" mindset and actionset. Maybe there is no answer on that axis -- but I think an epistemic "no answer" defaults to "status quo assumptions" or "patience" practically.

It would be nice if we could know something like a "reference rate of lostness" like how the 1918 flu gives us clues to how much COVID could kill if we didn't do anything about it.

Philip Brown (IIRC) estimates that only a small percentage of people will be hardened. (As far as I know, he's the only other person other than me with an idea on this.) From a global perspective, only a small percentage of people died of the 1918 flu (50 million deaths / 1.8 billion total population in 1918 = 2.7%, or 10s of millions / 1s of billions = 1s of percentage points). So then it matters how we define "small". Some "small" percentages call to us to put out total effort. As a Christian civilization (the "kingdom of God"?) we might ought to mobilize a response as strong as that against COVID for the sake of the "1 sheep" who has gone astray. But maybe there are some "small" percentages that are so low that as a civilization we can not worry about things, round it off to zero. Perhaps for those who, like God, are directly concerned with such "sheep", it is called for for them to care, but otherwise the rest of us can live like we're in heaven on earth, or we can rest in the assurance that we and those we know are exceedingly unlikely to ever reject God. (There's danger in that kind of sense of safety, and maybe only those who are really devoted to helping whatever people may be at risk of being lost are maximally safe themselves.)

I think it might be good, in a sequel to this post, to see if I can come up with any reasoning from an MSL perspective that might suggest roughly what the rate of "potentially hardened" (or "those most at risk of hardening" or "the amount the 'death rate' is at play") could possibly be. At some point in the future (maybe a long time from now when I do my Bible commentary) I may be able to find clues from how God approaches dealing with his people, to see what kind of "small" percentage that number might really be, or how he acts in the absence of knowing (given that the decisions we make to become in tune with God, or not, are up to us, in the present and future).

My general sense, as of this point in the writing process, is that reality calls for an urgent response, except that for practical reasons, the most effective response in the long run may be somewhat patient. (Kind of like how sleeping can be seen as valuable insofar as in the long run it serves the purpose of working.) I think for me this should be (and to some extent is) an update away from an inner default of patience.

--

(Later:) If one person is lost, that's an eternal cost to God. Shouldn't we spend all our resources trying to save just one person? Any finite investment pays off if the outcome is eternal good. I think a good reason not to, in any individual case, is because by using too many resources on one person, we let two (or more) other people become hardened. Otherwise, all economic decisions are dominated by the risk of people losing out on eternal life.

People have free will and you can't force them to be saved or manufacture a good state of their hearts. (But you can (sort of) force one person, you, to be saved and manufacture the good state of your own heart, in the sense that who you are is up to you. You are among the people at some risk of hardening someday, as far as you know.) And you can care about other people's salvation in an urgent way while relating to them in a patient way, or with a kind of "modulated urgency" (like the urgency of a deadline... which is 1,000 years in the future).

Those last two paragraphs are about what is rational or even religious. According to rational ethics (the MSLN-based kind) and religion, we should be using all our resources to save as many people as possible from the second death. But, society runs on a different logic.

Society allows itself to not care about things because that's just what it has evolved into. Maybe society says "the individual is required to be ethical but in practice doesn't have to be". (Society does not speak coherently, although it speaks powerfully.)

Society sets a bar for "what we care about", and it motivates itself with some kind of thought process. That thought process has some relationship to what is rational or religious. So, our society says "50 million deaths" (first death) "from the 1918 flu is a big deal and we will do 'whatever it takes' to make those kinds of things not be allowed to do their worst, so we'll put people into lockdown and maybe make them do other things to deal with this basically similar COVID-19 threat". But, if society says that, why not say something similar with the threat of the second death, which could easily put at risk 50 million people? If I'm talking to society, it might make sense to bring up our COVID-19 response as a way to say "According to how society thinks about big populations risking death, we (society and its individuals) should mobilize a response at least as strong as that of dealing with COVID-19."

Even if in reality (rational/religious), we shouldn't need that kind of argument. As humans, "society-style" arguments ("sociological", in a sense) work on us, whether they should or not. (I don't want to say "as humans, society-style arguments work on us" as some sort of profound or normative description of who we deeply are and thus how things ought to be, but more as "this is a sort of bias or bias-like thing that we have to deal with".)

--

Presumably God would always act rationally/religiously, rather than human-sociologically. Also, God's behavior is somewhat constrained by his negotiations with Satan. So I will guess that God's behavior in the Bible isn't the clearest source of information about the percentage of those hardened. It may depict some hardened people, or discuss some kind of concept of hardening.

Re: Against responsibility, by Ben Hoffman

This is another in my series of posts where I respond to blog posts on here instead of by leaving comments. (See also Hero's Journey vs. Absurdism vs. Ancient Judaism and Re: Empiricism is Silly as an Epistemic Basis, by APXHARD.)

The post this time is Against responsibility (archived here), by Ben Hoffman.

You should probably read it before reading this, if you want to fully understand my response.

My response to "Against responsibility"

I like utilitarianism, but see how it could go wrong. One way to help might be to "price in" values that are threatened by utilitarianism into the values being maximized. (Like adding honesty or not controlling people to our list of values being maximized.) This could make for an awkward, hard to fully grasp, and therefore less useful "moral software", if enough values are added to that. But maybe that's okay. If there's a really high-stakes problem, which we have enough time to work on, our analysis of what to do should be complicated, cautious, and nuanced. Maybe we should use simplifications of moral software when we don't have the time or computational resources to do an indepth analysis. If you need a quick answer to a moral question, maybe use an established deontological principle. (This suggests a role for intentionally improving the supply of deontological principles, and for looking ahead to do moral analysis ahead of time of high stakes things that, once they come up, may not afford a lot of time for that analysis.)

If I had to specify a reward function that's worth pursuing maximally, it would be: "love God". But part of that is being aligned with God's interests, which are very diverse (and include not wanting people to be dishonest or to control other people). You might think that the answer is "maximize salvation of personal beings", and that that is all that God cares about. It is, but (the MSLN approach is), you have to watch out for your own salvation when you go to do altruistic things, because you are a moral patient, part of the world you are trying to help save. Your own salvation depends on you fully coming into tune with God, and your dishonesty or controlling tendencies are an obstacle to that. Also, Satan has a way of using the sinfulness of prominent theistic altruists to make a horror of them and drive people away from God. (Similarly with prominent secular altruists, who are not as closely associated with God, but are associated with other good things.)

I think that practically(/ethically) speaking, we are in a position where virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology are all valid and there are ways all of them call on us. There are times the most ethical way to proceed is to think like a virtue ethicist, other times like a deontologist, other times like a consequentialist.

I think that epistemically speaking, though, reality is finite, countable, aggregable, including what is good, and the good is to be maximized.

Maybe it isn't too hard to count the good. It's just the number of personal beings who can live in heaven, and the thing that makes them fit for heaven is their holiness (how in tune with God they are).

This sounds kind of like evangelical (consequentialist?) metaethics merged with holiness (deontological/virtue ethical?) metaethics. Perhaps that is the characteristically New Wine way of doing things.

--

"Against responsibility" makes me think about my own personality and how it interfaces with effective altruist ideology. I found Singer's Drowning Child Illustration to be awful, true, and powerful. But I don't think I'm really an effective altruist as a result.

I've had that Illustration somewhere in my mind for about 9 years now. At first I was struck by the horror it implied about human beings, as well as by a call for mourning over that, and a drive to move myself. I think these three initial results are spiritually trustworthy and valuable. I was not driven to an exceeding sense of responsibility over the state of the world. I was driven to a sense that my time is not my own, and also that my money is an instrument to be used for good. I think it helped me to develop the sense that I am morally required to do my work.

But, my work is limited, and is not something that I consciously choose. I don't want to claim that I am especially guided by God in what I write (although if I write true things, then I am doing his will), but I do have the sense that I am given most of the materials and motivation for my writing from something/someone outside myself.

I'm not really capable of bending my work according to some kind of ethical formula. That includes expanding it. So, although my work has brought me into stressful situations that were in themselves unsustainable due to the people around me, I don't think I've ever been a true "workaholic". I don't think that my work rules over me or controls me. Instead, it feeds me.

I don't really like competing or controlling, or in general staking my inner life on making the world around me be a certain way. Also, I have a somewhat quiet and weak personality, but also a persistent personality, and on top of that seemingly many constraints on what I am from outside myself, that aren't always socially legible. So in many ways I am who and what I am in a strong way. I think the tendencies and values just mentioned in this paragraph help to blunt or even weaken the force of the EA ideology that is in me both to do good or ill, and (speaking off-the-cuff in this "blog comment") I would say that I don't find myself troubled by the problems discussed in "Against responsibility". But, I have been shaped by EA ideology, and it has helped me to do more good.

I think there is something kind of Buddhist or Taoist in my difficulty in orienting myself to make the world be a certain way, and also somewhat like in the Bhagavad-Gita (detach yourself from the fruits of your action). Maybe I would say in "what I am", I lean Eastern, but in "who I am" or "what I value" or "where I want to go", I lean Jewish or Jewish-descended. And that might describe Jesus. So maybe that mixture of "who" and "what" is a good goal for those who want to follow Jesus.

Spiritual Calculus

In MSLN, hardening is the chief danger. One meaning of "calculus" is "hardened deposits" -- a spiritual danger. The habits and loves we have for idols of whatever sort (or pick another analogous word if you think "love" is too sacred for what we feel for idols) are attachments that can compete, perhaps fatally, with our love for God. They accumulate, and may have to be forcibly removed, by us or by God, if they threaten our salvation. Perhaps they can be prevented with some kind of hygiene (like with calculus on teeth).

If you have something in your life in addition to God, it might not be bad for you. There are many things which are good other than God (in some sense of the word "good"). If they don't fatally compete with love of God, they are basically safe. But if those attachments are hardened (fixing to be irrevocably necessary to you), then they must someday be unhardened or removed.

But another meaning of "calculus" has to do with measuring rates of change and is considered below.

--

The following paragraph contains a brief explanation of calculus, using position, velocity, and acceleration as examples. There are better/fuller explanations elsewhere if this isn't good enough.

In physics, we can measure a particle's position. Then, if the particle's position is changing, it has a velocity. The velocity is the rate of change of the position. If the velocity is changing, it is accelerating or decelerating (has a positive or negative, nonzero acceleration). The acceleration is the rate of change of velocity. We use the mathematical tools of calculus to calculate the derivative of position, and this gives us the velocity. This is the first-order derivative of position. Then we can take the derivative of velocity, the derivative of the derivative of position. This is the second-order derivative of position, acceleration. And we can go on to higher-order derivatives of position, like the rate of change of acceleration (third-order), or the rate of change of the rate of change of acceleration (fourth-order), and so on.

(Thinking spiritually:) You can think of yourself as traveling on a path toward full kinship with God, holiness, being in tune with him. You move closer and sometimes further from him. If your position ever reaches your destination, then you are safe. But until then, if your velocity reaches 0 (you stop moving toward God), and never increases (it is never saved by acceleration), then you are lost.

The world judges people based on position. And it's right to do so. Position enables you to be trustworthy, and the world does not want betrayal. Untrustworthiness leads to unnecessary harm. But this can be deceptive. We forget that it's velocity that's really critical, and a further variable that may or may not be well captured by mathematics, one of "that-which-brings-things-to-completion" ("endurance"? "ultimation"?)

In your spiritual life, you will have position yelling at you to pay attention to it, but velocity may be quieter. Acceleration is even quieter, and the higher-order derivatives of acceleration quieter still. There are an infinite number of orders of derivatives of position possible to compute, and they get harder and harder to sense as you get away from position. But it's certainly useful to think about velocity and acceleration, and perhaps develop a sense for the derivative of acceleration.

If possible, try to remember that other people aren't just position, but are also velocity, and acceleration.

--

The previous metaphor may seem to suppose that progress is linear. But that may not be realistic. Another metaphor: You may be moving toward or away from God in some kind of 3D space. Up until recently, you may have been traveling basically straight toward him (straight-ish but with some error, straight as far as you can see from a distance), but because you were off by some angle, you need to make a course correction as you get closer. Maybe you have to divert around an obstacle that blocks your path, and actually move away from God for a time in order to proceed down your path toward him. (It's dangerous to desire or be comfortable with any movement away from God, but that movement may be what your life ends up bringing you.) In this picture, progress can be a spiral or some wandering path. But that "endurance" or "ultimation" variable still matters. You could think of it like, its health and strength, and the direction its health and strength are headed, are like velocity, and acceleration (respectively) in the other example.

Size of God

Epistemic status: provisional.

Traditionally God is assumed to be of infinite "size", where "size" can be cashed out as power, speed, energy, capacity, or something like that. Under the traditional view, God's mind contains a literal infinity, the awareness of all possible thoughts (each one of the real numbers is there, and all the possible interrelationships between the real numbers, and so on).

I don't know what the Bible says about this -- whether it commits us to that view or not. Also, I am unsure what to think, in terms of MSLN. I want to say that there are no actual infinities. In which case, God is not infinite.

If that is the case, then perhaps the size of what can be created and what can be thought is limited by God's "size". The universe may be extraordinarily large and detailed, and also, in each communication between God and creature, enormous numbers of complex simantic words are related, so that appearances can appear to be of what they are. And God communicates with an extraordinary number of creatures. God shows us what there is and also knows what we may potentially see, what may follow from one presentation of a simantic word (the barking dog may become a friendly dog -- two parts of the meaning of the simantic word that is that dog).

So it looks as though the size of God is very large -- I couldn't quantify it, but as a proxy, maybe someone could calculate the "size" of a computer that could simulate every detail of our physical world, all our perceptions, and all the interrelationships between them which are of practical, aesthetic, or otherwise personal significance.

This possible limit on the size of God would then be a limit on how many people could be created, something relevant to the rest view of population ethics.

Gating Off Voices; Especially Ones That Speak of ECT

Epistemic status: provisional.

31 May 2021: see this addendum.

Gating Off Voices

Not every voice is worth listening to. Sometimes there are voices that tell you you are worthless, a failure, or doomed, or ones that tell you that this life is all that matters, or ones which are other people's misinterpretations of you, or their agendas for you -- there are probably other unworthy voices that are out there.

So it can seem appealing to shut those voices out, to irrevocably invalidate them, so that you can get on with your life.

But what if you're wrong about which voices are unworthy, and one which you shut out might be the voice of God? There is some danger of hardening here.

The state of mind where you put up no resistance to the voices that try to colonize your mind is one in which it is difficult or even impossible to follow God with your whole being. Perhaps your real disposition, underneath all the colonizations, is one of following God with your whole being, if that state of non-resistance to colonization is something you can't help. But if you can help it, it isn't clear to me that preferring non-resistance (such that you don't try rejecting any voices) is a better way to avoid hardening, since that preference roots you in a stable and seemingly undefeatable belief or believing regime, the one in which you can never commit. "I can never commit to God" may be just as hardened as "I reject God".

In that case, you always take a risk of being hardened, so, fearing and respecting the fact of that risk to the appropriate degree, you might as well choose the path that helps you serve God best as you understand him right now, in hopes that he will keep working with you so that someday your understanding presents no obstacle to loving and trusting him. If God doesn't exist, then hardening doesn't matter, so if hardening matters, it matters how we relate to God, and sometimes it is best to deliberately shut out some of the pathological voices in order to hear his better. God can see you trying to hear him, and knows your true disposition, and wants you to succeed in hearing him.

A mind that shuts out voices is in danger of becoming intolerant and totalizing. It's important that whatever you do psychologically, whether in the realm of perception, emotion, willing, or intellectual believing, you do it as though God exists. Among other things, God is one who wants you and everyone else to be saved, who is the father of you and everyone else, and whom you and everyone else can trust. With God's Spirit, we don't see things through the lens of control and self-preservation. We can believe firmly without mistreating or enslaving people.

Reality must be that which we can think about?

Does all this give a rationale for refusing to listen to voices that say something like "You have a tiny but non-Pascalian chance of going to a hell of eternal conscious torment"? The thought that you could go to hell might cause you to love and trust in God more. Certainly that's how it seems to have worked as a part of evangelism in the past. Probably it is not necessary to believe in eternal conscious torment (ECT) for that purpose. (Annihilation is sufficiently motivating, and sometimes even that is not necessary to motivate people.) But ECT got people to take God seriously, which is part of loving and trusting him.

On the other hand, the thought of hell, or of ECT specifically, can easily not have that effect. So it's fine to ignore it if it takes you away from God.

(I don't believe that MSLN gives reason to believe in ECT and from what I've read from other people as of today (25 May 2021), I'm fairly confident that neither does the Bible, although I should address that question in more detail at some point.)

I think we might have the effective attitude of "whatever our belief structure, we know that ECT doesn't exist". The thought of ECT is so horrible that if we took its possibility seriously, we would go crazy, and going crazy is a priori not an option for thinkers. Well-being trumps truth -- but we could even claim that truth actually always contains well-being. (Maybe this claim makes sense from this perspective -- to think, feel, and intuit in one whole means that the knowing itself is healed of its fragmentation, and healed knowing perhaps inherently creates and requires healthy knowers.) As an epistemological principle, we could claim that what actually is is always in line with truth, and thus not have to deal with ECT. Something like this seems to be what people may already believe implicitly, at least with respect to ECT.

It does seem odd to say that things which are too horrible to think about productively can't actually happen. We see horrible things happen, but maybe they're not horrible enough? Is there some point at which, as things become more horrible to imagine, they cross a line and become impossible?

So it's not that the inherent horribleness of ECT makes it impossible, it's that when we know that it is impossible, we implicitly know that something else is true which for some reason allows horribleness to happen, but not ECT.

What kind of metaphysical reason could back that up? Certainly the God of MSLN could. Materialism could, as well. Probably other beings or realities could. Whatever it is, it has to be able and willing to (or "disposed to", in the case of impersonal reasons) exclude possibilities, and specifically exclude ECT. We might think that we know for certain that ECT-affirming Christianity and Islam aren't true, but that annihilation-affirming versions of them could be true.

The Proportionality of Truth

Another approach could be to say that belief in ECT causes us to disregard the proportionality of truth. Truth is always a thing which has its relationships. If we really took the possibility of ECT seriously, if it has a vanishingly small likelihood, then if it dominates all the rest of our thinking, we no longer see anything else. But that "anything else" is far more likely than the likelihood of ECT. So to know the truth, we have to take into account all the good of all the "anything else"'s, and those possible goods should not be ignored.

I think MSLN is likely -- I'm sure my credence will vary over time, but let's say today it is 90%. In 90% of possible futures, as long as I remain true to God, I will experience infinite (or, more accurately, everlasting) positive utility. What do I think my credence is of non-MSLN outcomes? As I see things now, there's a tight, perhaps 1 to 1 connection between the idea that reality only consists of consciousness, and MSLN. So what is my sense that there could be reality in addition to consciousness? Maybe 10%. Within that 10%, how much room is there for ECT? I don't really know, but I can try to guess, based on reasons why ECT might exist.

Maybe some kind of God or god-like being might ordain it (like the Stringent Invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster). He would use it to motivate people to care about things. Maybe a human society would. But one could also imagine a sadistic god.

Would humans want to torture other humans everlastingly? Maybe a few would, but what are the odds that they would take over the future, and be able to resurrect you to be part of their sadistic world? We have to imagine a world where people would even bother to remember whatever made you up, in order to faithfully reproduce you (to the extent that's possible) and then torture you (or that copy of you?). Are people (personal beings) really that sadistic? Or would they get bored of that instead? Dystopian futures are certainly possible, but are they likely, and likely to affect you, and will they actually attain ECT? "Eternal" is a long time, and hard to guarantee, unless you have something like complete sovereignty over reality.

So something smaller than 10% allows for ECT, perhaps something very small, perhaps as high as 1%. (These numbers are made up, but reflect my subjective sense today.) I feel like 1% is as high as I would go, as an extremely safe assumption that would definitely exceed the real probability, so as to have a "safe" estimate of the risk.

One remaining filter is, if ECT exists, will I ever be subject to it? Or, in other words, what percentage of existing beings will ever be subject to it? This filter reduces the likelihood further. If ECT is meant as a punishment, then what if most beings simply adjust and stop meriting the punishment? If ECT is meant as sadism, how much do sadistic personal beings update their sadistic satisfaction to match large quantities of people tortured? Or are 1,000 tortured as gratifying as 1,000,000, so they don't bother with more than 1,000? To the extent that sadism is basically just a form of hedonism, why don't sadistic hedonists wirehead, or put themselves in experience machines? They could get away with that much more easily than actually torturing people, in the likely case that sadism is not popular.

Maybe some altruists who are not hedonists would be willing to torture people for all time for the tortured people's own good? To bring justice to someone is to take them seriously as a moral agent. These altruists would have to be unaware of the likelihood that MSLN is true. (As would any of these hypothetical people who might cause ECT.) To torture people who don't really deserve it seems like a risky thing to do, given that there might be a God who has to suffer whatever suffering you cause those you are punishing, who alone has the right to judge and punish people, knowing as he does the actual truth of who deserves punishment. If you exact torture with enough gusto or commitment, maybe you have hardened, since torture is not something that God inherently likes.

Is it likely that altruism will evolve into something that seeks to exact eternal conscious torment in the secular timeline? That sounds somewhat far-fetched, especially given the possibility of thinking of MSLN. But there is some possibility of it. Maybe a particularly worldly-minded religious movement could do it. But for every worldly-minded religious movement that might do it, there would be others that wouldn't.

To return to the subject of gods: Could a god (a superpowerful being) know that MSLN wasn't true? God can know that MSLN is true (if it is), simply by knowing that everything exists, fundamentally, by his will (evil follows from the wills of beings other than him, whose freedom he wills). But other superpowerful beings, no matter how much they could find out, would probably be vulnerable to doubts that the God of MSLN might exist. This would lower such a god's confidence that it could torture us with impunity.

I think, again trying to make an extremely safe assumption, that at most 1% of all beings in an ECT-affected reality actually experience ECT. This assumes that ECT-infliction is not done throughout history, it is (exceedingly?) unlikely that anyone could bring back past people to be tortured in a future present, and when ECT-infliction is done, it generally doesn't affect the whole population, and the likelihood of it happening at all is somewhat low.

So if there's a 90% chance that as long as I am true to God (something which shouldn't be impossible as long as I keep caring about it) I will experience an everlastingly good outcome, and there is a 0.01% (1% of 1%) chance, at most, that I will experience ECT, then the approach of truth is to say I must take the 90% chance of good life forever as a substantial plenitude of potential well-being, which is overwhelmingly real to me, sustaining and building-up to think about, and the 0.01% chance of ECT, while real, does nothing to diminish the 90% of good that is promised. If the 90% can't diminish the 0.01%, the 0.01% can't diminish the 90%.

(Does this mean that God can bear what we consider unbearable forever if he has enough counterweighing good experience? And thus he could bear the pain of ECT for all eternity without relieving it? Here's a reason why not.)

If you can see things that way, I think thoughts of ECT aren't overwhelming. This is proceeding according to an epistemology of this kind of truth, of seeing what is dark but also seeing what is light, and seeing it as a whole. This can be contrasted with a kind of survival epistemology, which sees the avoidance of death and suffering as the criterion when processing reality (instead of looking at reality as a whole for its own sake), which thus focuses (or hyper-focuses) on threat.

This approach does not shut out voices, but adds them, still to accomplish a similar goal.

This may be the answer to the question "Does ECT dominate reason?". ECT does not dominate reason, because as long as we have a significantly more likely "eternal conscious rest" to contrast with it, we will take ECR more seriously than ECT, proportional to ECR's likelihood, no longer "mugged" by threat.

Bad voices close you off to reality

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned voices that say "you are worthless, a failure, or doomed, or ones that tell you that this life is all that matters, or ones which are other people's misinterpretations of you, or their agendas for you". What's interesting about all these voices is that they close off access to other voices. If you're worthless, then you no longer access God's voice, the God who feels your pain and puts up with your sin -- real costs to him indicating real value. Likewise, how can you know that you are a failure, or doomed? Only if you close off your mind to possibilities, including the possibility (the likelihood) of God. When people misinterpret you, they tend to want to limit you, and when they have agendas for you, they want to commit you to some kind of commitment. All of these things try to get you to see just one part of reality.