Recently, A@G started a thread called "A belief in an afterlife is the most dangerous of all beliefs"
I have been thinking about the necessary consequences of a belief in the afterlife, particularly a belief in the resurrection as envisioned by Jehovah's Witnesses. I came to some of the conclusions that A@G did and this post was originally meant to be a response on that thread, but I went off topic a bit and I didn't want to spoil the point Lance was trying to make.
Here it goes:
One especially pernicious aspect of this belief is that it trivializes death as you commented on. This of course gives God, however you like to spell his name, a free pass whenever he orders the extermination of entire ethnic groups, with the exception of a virgin who happens to catch the attention of an Israelite soldier as he is righteously murdering her father, mother, brothers, and any non-virginal sisters.
When discussing the imminent destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah with Abraham, God expounds on the generous nature of his justice by indicating that he would spare all of Sodom if only ten righteous men were to be found among its inhabitants. The principle here seems to be that the innocent are never to be destroyed along with the guilty (they may have to lose decades of their life aimlessly wandering around a wilderness though).
Were the infants and toddlers who drowned in the Flood deserving of the death dealt to them at the hands of God? I once heard a speaker raise this question and then answer it with another question: "Well, when you're getting rid of the cockroaches in your house do you just kill the adult cockroaches?"
And what of the children of the Midianites and the Amalekites, the firstborns of the Egyptians, and David and Bath-sheba's first son? This is to say nothing of the many close calls (Moses' uncircumcised son), cases of guilt by association or community responsibility (36 men who died in the failed attack on Ai), and instances where the punishment doesn't seem to fit the crime (children who make fun of Elisha).
My belated point is that if you believe that such ones are going to be brought back to life, in a paradise no less, it is much easier to excuse the acts of God that cut their lives short to begin with. Since God has made provisions for sinful people, all of whom are deservingly condemned to death already, to live forever on earth, so we have no right and no reason to ask why he subjects innocent people to horrific deaths.
Thus, death, even torturous ones, can be trivialized by the belief in an afterlife.
jabberwock
