Grokking History's Most Appalling Doctrine

That doctrine is ECT

I’ve frequently been impressed by the lengths that people will go to to justify pure evil. Any sober reading of history makes it abundantly clear that our moral faculties often go awry, leading people to support evil things—the holocaust being a notable example. Yet one doctrine is so mind-blowingly horrifically sadistic and evil, that I’m genuinely surprised that people find it defensible.

What is this doctrine, whose malice is so vast that it dramatically outstrips the horrors of the ideology behind Nazi concentration camps? An idea professed by loving Christians, yet one so bone-chillingly evil that it couldn’t be dreamt of by history’s worst criminals. The idea is eternal conscious torment. More specifically, the notion that endless suffering will be doled out to those who don’t believe in Jesus.

Here is a plausible principle: people don’t torment for all of eternity those who they love. One who doubts this principle has gone beyond a simple ethical mistake; they just don’t understand the meaning of one of the terms. Reread the previous sentence, and see if you think that it can be sanely doubted.

Think about just how malevolent this doctrine is. Consider the situation 10 billion years into the eternal conscious torment. Quite literally billions of people have been tormented for 10 billion years each, for crimes that were committed in the first 0.0000008% of their lives¹—a fragment that is a much smaller percent of their life than the first month of your life currently is. Each of these person has, at the hands of an allegedly perfect and all loving god, plausibly endured more torture than the holocaust—torture that could be ended at any time. These people are not sadistic evil dooers; they are your neighbors, coworkers, friends even.

Yet the horrors don’t end there. Imagine god sets up wellness checks every 10 billion years, where he checks to see if he should continue the torment. The doctrine of ECT has to hold that god after this ten billion year period, should keep it going. That after this ten billion years of torment has already happened, god should actively continue this ignoble torture machine. Not only is 10 billion years not enough, googol years won’t be enough. This torment must last forever.

Yet this isn’t the full extent of the depravity. Theism additionally has to hold that the victims of the holocaust—mostly Jews, who didn’t believe in Jesus—will endure more torment at the hands of an all loving perfect being than they did at the hands of Hitler. Is that really plausible? Could moral perfection really sanction infinite torment?

If you believe in eternal conscious torment, you believe in something absurd. You fundamentally don’t understand what it means to be all loving, and have developed such insane cognitive dissonance that you’re willing to sign off on infinite misery. You believe in something very much like square circles—yet far more insidious. The proposition you believe is so mindbogglingly sadistic and confused it may as well be saying the following

the holocaust was justified because square circles decreed it

It’s truly hard to imagine a more evil doctrine. The most evil doctrine would, no doubt, involve infinite torture. The only way to make a doctrine more evil would be to make the infinite torture criteria more expansive. Yet this insane sadistic nonsense involves holding that most people will be tormented forever. Not some rare exception—infinite torture is the standard operating procedure.

Our judgment of ECT should be unequivocal. ECT is pure evil. It is a reductio to deference on philosophy of religion related questions and any view which professes it. If Christianity dies out, it will be widely regarded as nuts. As well it should.

1. Assuming they live 80 years