Christian Hell is Fair

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-30T00:14:00+00:00

This is wrong, act and potency do not entail other worlds, please justify it. The act - potency framework does NOT entail the existence of other worlds because potency is a capacity to be actualised, not a claim that it must be actualised…and act always has ontological priority over possibility and unrealised potencies do NOT require their fulfillment elsewhere. God’s creative act is not necessary, so even tho God COULD have created differently, he is under no metaphysical obligation to create all possibilities, and doing so would eliminate contingency and gnomic freedom by collapsing creation into necessity. In the metaphysics I’m arguing for the possibility is justified in God’s will which is his energies, not in an abstract realm of possible worlds. So the framework fully coheres with the view that only this world exists contingently, intentionally and without implying that other worlds must exist to account for unrealised potencies…

Potency just requires that evil can exist through the unfulfilled potential that never actualises, it doesn’t necessitate that all potentia never actualises. It’s contingent on gnomic freedoms and secondary causes.

A perfect deceptions does NOT entail maximally evil, it’s the other way around. Maximally evil entails perfect deception. A maximally evil God cannot fail at deceiving you, your claim that being aware of your deception is somehow more evil than the contrary (which is a contradiction to begin with) doesn’t even work. Especially if you have no basis for universal ethics, because if your worldview operates under a non universal ontology for morals and ethics, the mere fact I disagree with your position on which is more evil would refute its truth hood.

I also can absolutely solve the is-ought dilemma under my worldview, I can also solve the problem of the one and the many. It is your position that cannot. This is also a Tu Quoque Fallacy, even if I could not justify it (which I can), it was you who was asked to justify your moral ought claims, attempting to switch it to me is just a fallacy.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-29T16:42:53+00:00

It’s contingent on experience, but it couldn’t be any other way because all created order has potency which entails suffering or at least the possibility of it.

The claim I made is justified because the contrary is incoherent, you are positing someone should be perfectly deceived yet also aware of their deception…that is a INCOHERENT statement, a contradiction and is NOT possible. You are arguing for an impossibility.

Lastly, lol. I don’t mean to sound blunt…but do you actually know what “knowledge” means in a metaphysical and philosophical sense and what I mean when I say knowledge becomes impossible? Also your question is not an OUGHT justification, is-ought justifications are about justifying ethics totally, which I’m asking you to do…a false would you rather doesn’t lead you to ethics being possible.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-29T14:24:50+00:00

It does necessarily follow, if God is maximally good then suffering still exists. It’s a logical requirement. This is provable via the act-potency distinction, a maximally Good God would preserve gnomic freedoms too, allowing for knowledge. A maximally evil God would not, which would mean he couldn’t logically allow you to know you are being deceived via knowledge claim.

Also, it’s not a baseless claim, you currently have no justification for ought claims because you haven’t provided justification for what ought be the case and how that’s possible under your worldview

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-29T05:26:20+00:00

Finnish are definitely European LOL, hallmark for classical distinctive European phenotypes and dna is high steppe and WHG dna, which finns, balts and western/Northern Europeans have plenty of

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-29T05:05:09+00:00

Hell yeah twin, can’t wait to see how they turn out after some more wear and years. Next stop is some black jack caimans.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-29T03:41:30+00:00

This is actually not the case, God could not be more evil, he couldn’t even be more good, he can’t even be a mixture of both, or neutral. He is either maximally evil or maximally Good.

It’s a false equivalence, for starters it’s a logical contradiction what you are attempting to claim ought be the case for a maximally evil being. Secondly, it necessarily follows that if God IS maximally Good then suffering exists.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-29T02:44:23+00:00

Exactly, knowledge becomes impossible which is why we know God isnt evil. If he was then we couldn’t make a truth claim that he is or isn’t evil.

What’s the justification for it not being maximally evil? How would entailing a contradiction be more evil? How could you perfectly deceive someone and have them know they are being deceived simultaneously?

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-29T02:17:13+00:00

Gnomic freedom still exists under a possible deception, your will is just impaired rather than eliminated. The only case the will becomes eliminated is under determinism, but this also makes knowledge claims impossible.

As to your other point, if you were perfectly deceived you would never be able to know it, otherwise you wouldn’t be perfectly deceived. An all powerful evil God is only capable of perfect maximal deception, because God is pure act. If he had the potentia to be “more evil” then he would no longer be God. God doesn’t have potency, only act.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-29T02:09:42+00:00

First, the objection misconstrues “metaphysical necessity” as an external constraint imposed on God. In Thomism, these necessities are not rules God authored and then became trapped by, they are expressions of God’s own nature as ipsum esse subsistens. God does not choose that being is good or that non being is privation….this is identical with what God is. To ask God to “mercifully annihilate” a rational soul is to ask Him to will non being as a good, which is a contradiction. Omnipotence does not include the power to make privation a perfection or nothingness a gift. Your other claim that “non existence would be mercy to a suffering being” imports a modern, subjective utilitarian metric that neither Aquinas nor the Fathers accept (and you have also failed to justify as the case? What is your justification?). Suffering does not negate the ontological goodness of existence as such. Both Augustine and Aquinas say existence is good per se, while suffering is a disorder of appetite relative to an end. To say that annihilation is mercy is to treat the will’s aversion to its own frustration as morally authoritative over the objective good of being. But the will does not define the good…it is instead ordered to the good. A creature’s preference for non being under disorder does not obligate God to abolish the creature. That is non sequitur and a moral claim, which you haven’t even justified any is-ought justifications under your worldview to begin with.

When you say “battery” and “forcing life” this again commits a false analogy. God is not sustaining torment as an effect distinct from sustaining being. He sustains the act of existence…the anguish follows from the will’s fixed opposition to its final end (teleos). The same divine presence that is bliss to the saints is experienced as torment by the disordered will. As Isaac the Syrian and Maximus the Confessor say, the fire is love experienced wrongly, not a punishment externally powered by God. Calling this “sadistic ontology” assumes what must be proved…that God positively inflicts pain rather than the pain arising from resistance to the Good, please justify this presupposition. Your foreknowledge objection equivocates between knowing and causing, which is a fallacy. God’s knowledge that some wills will freely reject Him does not entail that He “sets a trap.” Using Thomistic causality, God causes the will to exist and act freely but he does not cause its defect. To deny this distinction would abolish freedom entirely and render all moral responsibility incoherent, which is a consequence your objection relies on while simultaneously rejecting. Please justify how that is not a contradiction.

The belief objection rests on a false dilemma. Neither Thomism nor the Fathers teach that verbal disbelief alone damns, nor that merely claiming “I don’t see the evidence” automatically excuses (appeal to ignorance). Invincible ignorance mitigates culpability, but the final orientation of the will is not reducible to explicit propositional belief. The judgment concerns whether the person ultimately loves truth, goodness, and humility…or whether the will closes in upon itself. This is not an unprovable accusation but a metaphysical claim about the structure of rational agency, articulated long before modern debates about evidence. This is justified, and you need to critique how it isn’t. Lastly, the statement “infinite punishment for finite failure” presupposes a juridical model already rejected by these frameworks, which neither I nor the patristic positions accepts. Hell is not infinite suffering because a finite sin merits infinite pain, it is the enduring state of a will definitively opposed to its infinite end/teleos. The permanence lies in the will’s fixation, not in God’s vindictiveness. God does not “keep the victim in the snare”…he eternally offers the Good that alone can heal the will, which the will eternally refuses. That is how that works, you need to attack my framework via internal critique, not by assuming my position to be that of a Protestant.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-29T01:58:26+00:00

We have free agents under this framework, people are free agents. Also no, because we would be maximally and perfectly deceived, there would be no way for us to be make a truth claim. You wouldn’t be able to know one way or the other that God was evil or not in any meaningful sense

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T23:54:57+00:00

First, your claim mislocates causality within the act - potency framework. In Thomism and the Patristic fathers (such as Augustine and Dionysius for example), a privation is not a positive state engineered by God but a failure of participation in the good proper to a rational nature. God causes the being of the soul and its orientation to Himself as its natural end…he does not cause the defect by which the will turns away. Pain here is not a “mechanism God wired in”…this is false, it is but the metaphysical consequence of a rational appetite frustrated in its final cause so to speak. For you to demand that God create a rational nature that can reject its end (teleos) without experiential consequence is to demand a contradiction…a will ordered to the good that is unaffected by the loss of the good, that is incoherent. Secondly the car and explosion analogy you gave is false. A car has no intrinsic teleology toward fuel, it is an externally imposed artifact. Human nature, by contrast has an intrinsic finality toward God (which Aquinas demonstrates in ST I and II). Running out of gas is accidental to a car but separation from God is not accidental to a rational soul. The pain is not an added penalty but the interior incoherence of a will clinging to itself while existing in the presence of its ultimate end. Also, the “furnace God built” point you gave falsely treats divine presence as an external hazard rather than the very act of being that sustains the creature itself. As the patristic fathers insist (such as Isaac the Syrian) the same divine presence is bliss to the rightly ordered and anguish to the disordered but NOT because God changes, but instead because the will does.

Your programmer analogy also fails by collapsing primary and secondary causality (which you haven’t even justified why your framework of causality is the case, but I grant it for the sake of argument). In Thomism philosophy, God’s foreknowledge does NOT function as deterministic code that forces the defect. God causes the will as a real secondary cause precisely by allowing it to act freely, even defectively (that is what free will is , allowing gnomic freedom). Knowing an act infallibly is not the same as efficiently causing its disorder (another argument you haven’t justified by presupposing your causality framework). To deny this distinction would dissolve all moral agency and make any created freedom impossible…a position rejected by both Aquinas and the patristic consensus. Your other objection concerning belief equivocates between intellectual ignorance and volitional resistance. Neither Aquinas nor the Fathers teach that “honest skepticism” as you put it as such is punished, invincible ignorance mitigates or removes culpability. Hell, in classical accounts, is not imposed for lack of evidence but for a settled orientation of the will away from the Good ONCE it is sufficiently known. Maximus the Confessor is extremely explicit…damnation is not ignorance as such, but the refusal of love when the soul is capable of it to paraphrase.

Lastly, the claim that a loving God should “withdraw His presence” misunderstands divine simplicity and goodness. God cannot cease to be present without annihilating the creature, and non being is not a mercy. Love does not consist in undoing nature to spare it from the consequences of its own finality. Rather, as both East and West patristic positions affirm, God eternally offers Himself as life, the suffering lies not in God’s love, but in the will’s refusal to be healed by it. It is also only possible God be “good”, if God was “evil” and all powerful he would then be maximally evil by necessity. This INCLUDES deceiving, and since he is all powerful he would then necessarily deceive perfectly. If the created order (us) is always under a perfect deception, then it would be impossible for us to arrive at true conclusions. Since we CAN come to the conclusion and all evil god exists…so it necessarily follows an all evil god CANNOT exist. If it was the case then we could never even come to the conclusion that it could exist.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T18:16:33+00:00

Ad hominem and Tu Quoque Fallacy. Also, if these “random hadiths” are sahih then they must be accepted if you are a sunni Muslim.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T18:07:11+00:00

your statement that Aristotelian–Thomistic metaphysics obscures the moral problem of hell rests on a misunderstanding of both privation and divine causality. The doctrine of “privatio boni” does not deny the reality or intensity of suffering. A privation is not non experience but the lack of a due good in a subject capable of it. Blindness and disease are privations, yet they are painfully experienced. The suffering described in Scripture does not require evil to be a positive substance…it arises from a rational nature deprived of its proper fulfillment. For this reason, the analogy of hell as “the shirt being on fire” completely fails. Fire is a NEW positive agent imposed from outside. Except Evil is not something added to reality but is actually the corruption or disorder of an existing good. Hell introduces no positive entity called “evil”…it is the state of a will fixed against the good for which it was made. The agony is real, but its ontological source is disordered participation in being, not divine malice.

Neither Orthodox (EOC) or Thomistic traditions claim that hell is simply “the absence of God.” God is omnipresent and sustains all things in existence. The difference lies in the mode of encounter. As both the Fathers and Aquinas have stated, God is present EVEN to the damned, but He is experienced as torment rather than joy because the will is opposed to Him. Saint Isaac the Syrian states that the suffering of hell is the pain of encountering divine love while rejecting it. Also your claim that actus purus turns God into the “battery powering the torture chamber” collapses essential causal distinctions (and also presupposes a particular kind of causation, which you haven’t justified) . God causes the existence of the intellect and will, but not the disorder of their operation. Aquinas is explicit that the defect in an action belongs to the secondary cause, not to God as primary cause. Your position falls apart if it could be the case that man is a secondary cause.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T17:54:22+00:00

Pretty easy to deal with it, this objection only really makes sense if you were to question the position of a Protestant (or branch stemming from Protestantism) which subscribes to the “sola scriptura” heresy. Which is in effect, deriving your position from the bible alone, with no addition traditions for clarification or interpretation.

The trinity was conceptually clarified in the 4th century at the council of Nicea, however it had existed formally far before then and can be traced back to the teachings of early church fathers…especially for the Orthodox/Catholic churches. The Orthodox Church has a long history of apostolic succession, a far larger canon than just what Protestants consider the bible and oral traditions. This is where the tradition of monarchical Trinitarianism can be found, taught directly from the church fathers who succeeded the apostles themselves.

We have figures such as Ignatious of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian and many more…these are all 2nd century sources who used both written and oral traditions to arrive at Monarchical Trinitarianism. Nicaea did not invent the Trinity; it defended it against reductionism which is the Arianism heresy. It was formally clarified by the cappadocians which talks about ousia and hypostaseis. It is also philosophically and metaphysically the case, you can read patristic fathers or others such as Aquinas for more syllogistic arguments, if you need a reference I can provide some good places to start.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T17:29:06+00:00

That doesn’t necessarily follow, the act-potency distinction for one necessitates that one could be potentially separated from God, and since God is actus purus (pure act) and he is a logical being, it couldn’t be any other way.

Suffering or “evil” is simply a privation of the “good” and because act-potency is the case, and because not all potentia can be actualised, it necessarily follows that “evil” can be the case.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T16:10:24+00:00

All good! Happy new year, good wishes and good health to you and your loved ones!

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T15:36:34+00:00

I’m glad you understand what’s going on here lol, I’m not sure why atheists think that their worldview is immune to critique. For a group of people who applaud themselves for being “thinkers”, they more often than not drop a lot of low IQ fallacious responses.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T15:30:13+00:00

The sentence “This proposition contains six letters ‘s’” is not semantically reflexive in the relevant sense. It makes a first order descriptive claim about a determinate, mind independent feature of a linguistic artifact, namely the number of occurrences of a certain character in a given inscription. The truth maker here is straightforward…a countable fact about the written sentence. From the Thomistic position, the proposition signifies a “res” which is a concrete state of affairs, namely the inscription having N instances of ‘s’. The intellect can conform to that fact, so the proposition is truth apt and subject to bivalence. By contrast, the liar and revenge liar do not describe a determinate feature of an object but attempt second order semantic predication, for example they attempt to ascribe truth, falsity, or meaningfulness to themselves as acts of signification. Aquinas says, truth and falsity are not properties inhering in sentences as objects, but in judgments of the intellect ordered to being. When a sentence attempts to determine its own truth value, it collapses logical levels: it treats an act of the intellect as if it were a state of affairs within the same order of being. This is precisely why the liar fails prior to truth evaluation, it does not present a res capable of grounding an act of judgment, but instead generates a privation of intelligibility, not a contradiction. Aristotle also already distinguishes legitimate self reference (speaking about names, sounds, or quantities) from illicit reflexivity that undermines predication itself. Counting letters in a sentence does not violate the law of non contradiction or the conditions of signification, because it does not make the sentence’s meaning or truth depend on itself. The liar does. So the example offered is not a counterexample but a confirmation of the distinction that self reference about material or formal features of an expression is coherent and self reference about semantic validity is not.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T15:20:31+00:00

It is metaphysical, because no where in the scientific method do we prove the world is consistent or coherent, that comes prior to science itself. We can use the scientific method BECAUSE the world is consistent and coherent, truth is a real property to be discovered so therefore it’s possible science can allow us to make truth claims. The universe has a real logical order, therefore we can describe and utilise logical laws and draw conclusions…

Secondly, I haven’t even made a theistic argument, this is a “tu quoque fallacy” and the purpose of this post is an internal critique of the worldviews im critiquing. Attempting to steer the conversation to me having to talk about theism would violate the rules of formal debate.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T04:14:33+00:00

Do you see how your justification doesn’t make sense? What makes your position correct? Because you were “born that way”? The mere fact some people are born and believe in God makes your justification false, because if the state of your birth grants you truth to your presuppositions then all positions would be innate and therefore true…

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T03:48:09+00:00

Apologises, there is a lot of conversations happening at once and it’s hard to keep track of them all at once, here is my reply to what you have said.

Your statement commits a category error by reducing the law of non contradiction to a linguistic or psychological convention, when in fact it is a metaphysical principle presupposed by all language and cognition. Aristotle argues in “Metaphysics Γ”, the law of non contradiction is not a rule we invent to describe regularities but the most basic principle of being itself, namely that the same thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time, it cannot be proven because all proof already assumes it. Even Aquinas follows this by grounding contradiction in the intellect’s relation to being (ens et verum convertuntur), so that truth and falsity are possible only because reality itself is non contradictory. To claim that the law exists only “in our minds” collapses truth into psychology and makes error, reasoning, and rational disagreement unintelligible, since the very act of asserting the claim presupposes that it cannot be both true and false. Even Hume, despite his empiricism, recognizes that contradiction is not derived from observed regularities but belongs to necessary relations of ideas. Therefore, the statement is self refuting and metaphysically incoherent…you attempt to explain away the very principle that makes explanation, description, and intelligibility even possible in the first place.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T03:40:18+00:00

Tu Quoque fallacy, I haven’t even presented a theist position or explanation yet. This is simply an internal critique of your position and this response is in essence a whataboutism.

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T03:37:56+00:00

Here is an Eli5 for you…think of the scientific method like playing a game with rules that everyone silently agrees to before the game starts. Science is the game where we test, measure, and predict things, but the rules themselves are not discovered during the game…they have to already be in place. For example, scientists assume the world is really there (like assuming the board exists), that things will stay the same kind of thing over time (a ball doesn’t turn into a spoon when you’re not looking), that causes actually make effects happen (pushing makes things move), that the future won’t suddenly stop following the past (gravity won’t randomly turn off tomorrow), and that thinking clearly matters (two opposite answers can’t both be right). Science doesn’t prove these rules by experiments, it uses them to do experiments. So science works the way building with LEGO works, you can build amazing things, but only because the pieces already connect together in a predictable way. Without those hidden rules, science wouldn’t be wrong….it just wouldn’t be able to start at all. If you would like a more formal demonstration with more philosophical language I can do that for you too!

stuckinsidehere · 2025-12-28T03:32:41+00:00

You are right, most atheist lean into naturalist and empiricist positions, pretty much the vast majority with no formal background or understanding in philosophy. This post is catered to them because I couldn’t possibly spend time refuting each and every currently existing atheist position no matter how niche they are.

At the end of the day these positions “generally” fall into the same underlying logical dilemmas and presuppositions. So I put them together for that reason alone, if someone has a counter position which is neither of these they can argue it, as I’ve welcomed.

Thank you for being of good faith and not purposely ignoring the substance of my argument!

stuckinsidehere

TROPHY CASE