Assume, for the sake of argument, that you suddenly become God, much to your surprise. You must now create an afterlife which ensures that the world is truly just. You are not allowed to just send people into oblivion, but must grant them an existence of some sort (although not necessarily as an individual) which will see them atone for their sins and be rewarded for their good deeds.
I've been thinking about this for a while, and I've got what seems on the surface to be a fair solution, which when looked at more deeply demonstrates itself to be flawed, and an actually fair solution which would require me to have created the universe in the first place and so which may not really count.
The first one is this: when you die, you get to experience the entire life of everybody whose life you touched. That way, it seems, you get not only to experience all the good or all the bad that you've put in to the world, but you get to understand the perspectives of everybody that you've been in conflict with. Perhaps you've got a habit for bluntness that you've never understood can be hurtful to some. Or perhaps you've got a habit of trying to spare people's feelings that you've never understood can cause people discomfort because they wanted honesty from your interactions. And that's just to pick two mild examples.
So far so good. But when you test the extremes, you can see that this is very flawed. Say you're a baby who is born with a previously undetected disease, you live for a single sad, painful day, and then die. In your afterlife you get to experience the joys of anticipation up until your birth, and then the abject misery for everybody which they will feel for the rest of their lives. And none of it because of anything you did.
Or say you're a world-famous musician. You write and perform deep, meaningful songs that give people hope and purpose. Your music has lifted people in depression up and saved their lives. You've written countless "our song"s that hold nothing but happy memories of lifelong marriages. You've advocated for and donated to countless good, well-managed charities and, in doing so, have positively impacted the lives of many disadvantaged people.
You're also a murderer. You once did some research and found someone with no personal attachments and shot them in the back of the head before they even knew they were in danger. They died instantly, nobody ever knew they were missing, and you disposed of the body without anybody ever finding out.
Your afterlife is going to be wonderful. You're going to experience so many positive things that you put into the world, and you're not going to see any negative consequences that you caused from living the life that you took, because your experience of it will end when you encounter yourself.
So I don't think that this would actually work as a system for making the world just.
I think that in order for it to be just you have to steal some of what Hindus believe. In other words, your soul keeps returning to this plane of existence as a learning experience, and you accrue knowledge throughout your different reincarnations throughout time and space - knowledge that you access when not on Earth. And the way to make it actually just is to adapt the idea above - you don't just live the lives of everybody you meet, you live every life. Everybody who ever lived or will live on this planet is you.
So how about you? If you had to ensure that the world truly were just, how would you go about it?
I've been thinking about this for a while, and I've got what seems on the surface to be a fair solution, which when looked at more deeply demonstrates itself to be flawed, and an actually fair solution which would require me to have created the universe in the first place and so which may not really count.
The first one is this: when you die, you get to experience the entire life of everybody whose life you touched. That way, it seems, you get not only to experience all the good or all the bad that you've put in to the world, but you get to understand the perspectives of everybody that you've been in conflict with. Perhaps you've got a habit for bluntness that you've never understood can be hurtful to some. Or perhaps you've got a habit of trying to spare people's feelings that you've never understood can cause people discomfort because they wanted honesty from your interactions. And that's just to pick two mild examples.
So far so good. But when you test the extremes, you can see that this is very flawed. Say you're a baby who is born with a previously undetected disease, you live for a single sad, painful day, and then die. In your afterlife you get to experience the joys of anticipation up until your birth, and then the abject misery for everybody which they will feel for the rest of their lives. And none of it because of anything you did.
Or say you're a world-famous musician. You write and perform deep, meaningful songs that give people hope and purpose. Your music has lifted people in depression up and saved their lives. You've written countless "our song"s that hold nothing but happy memories of lifelong marriages. You've advocated for and donated to countless good, well-managed charities and, in doing so, have positively impacted the lives of many disadvantaged people.
You're also a murderer. You once did some research and found someone with no personal attachments and shot them in the back of the head before they even knew they were in danger. They died instantly, nobody ever knew they were missing, and you disposed of the body without anybody ever finding out.
Your afterlife is going to be wonderful. You're going to experience so many positive things that you put into the world, and you're not going to see any negative consequences that you caused from living the life that you took, because your experience of it will end when you encounter yourself.
So I don't think that this would actually work as a system for making the world just.
I think that in order for it to be just you have to steal some of what Hindus believe. In other words, your soul keeps returning to this plane of existence as a learning experience, and you accrue knowledge throughout your different reincarnations throughout time and space - knowledge that you access when not on Earth. And the way to make it actually just is to adapt the idea above - you don't just live the lives of everybody you meet, you live every life. Everybody who ever lived or will live on this planet is you.
So how about you? If you had to ensure that the world truly were just, how would you go about it?
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3ekcKwc
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