Hellish heaven

Thoughts I've had before:

A serious but startling statistical analysis by researcher Greg S. Paul suggests that if we include the unborn, more than 98 percent of Heaven’s inhabitants, some 350 billion, would be those who died before maturing to the point that they could voluntarily “accept the gift of salvation.” The vast majority of the heavenly host would be moral automatons or robots, meaning they never had moral autonomy and never chose to be there. Christian believers, ironically, would be a 1 to 2 percent minority even if all 30,000+ denominations of believers actually made it in.

The theological implications are huge. Christian theologians typically explain evil by arguing that this was the best of all possible worlds, the only way to create free will and to develop moral virtues (like courage, compassion, forgiveness and so forth), to make us more Christ-like and prepare us for Heaven. But if we run the numbers, it appears that God didn’t need the whole free will—sin—redemption thing to fill his paradise with perfect beings because no suffering, evil, or moral freedom is actually required as a prelude to glory.

So...what's the point of this life, again? If we have these immortal souls that live eternally, why clothe them in physical form in this world at all? It seems that the vast populace of Hell is anyone who lives past the age of accountability (if there is such a thing), while the vast populace of Heaven is anyone who didn't make it that far.

Christians seem to believe that God is perfect and will not tolerate imperfection, and this is why Hell is a necessity. But on the other hand, do all wrongs involve God, or are there some "victimless wrongs"?

Enchantment

A little nugget from David Brooks today:

Basically, they have to take the enchantment leap. This is when something dry and utilitarian erupts into something passionate, inescapable and devotional. Sometimes a student becomes enraptured by the beauty of math, and becomes a mathematician. Soldiers doing the drudgery of boot camp are gradually bonded into a passionate unit, for which they will risk their lives. Anybody who has started a mere job and found in it a vocation has taken the enchantment leap.

In love, of course, the shift starts with vulnerability, not calculation. The people involved move from selfishness to service, from prudent thinking to poetic thinking, from a state of selection to a state of need, from relying on conscious thinking to relying on their own brilliant emotions.

When you look at all the people looking for love and vocation today, you realize we live in a culture and an online world that encourages a very different mind-set; in a technical culture in which humanism, religion and the humanities, which are the great instructors of enchantment, are not automatically central to life.

I have to guess some cultures are more fertile for enchantment — that some activities, like novel-reading or music-making, cultivate a skill for it, and that building a capacity for enchantment is, these days, a countercultural act and a practical and fervent need.

Something to reflect on -- do the arts cultivate the capacity for enchantment? Does science?

A note on THC and young children

A lot of people are getting concerned about kids finding the cannabis-infused edibles being sold legally in CO and WA retail stores. They want better packaging so that little Jane or Johnny aren't able to open Mom's "special" brownies and partake, since they wouldn't know or care that they have THC in them. Although the article portends a serious problem, the statistics undercut the point they're trying to make:

Compared with the 14 children who were treated after consuming marijuana, the hospital treated 48 children who had swallowed acetaminophen — the active ingredient in Tylenol — and 32 who had accidentally taken antihistamines during the same time period.

So just to put this in perspective: the kids who ate large amounts of weed brownies suffered zero side effects. The kids who eat too much Tylenol will suffer liver damage (it is the leading cause of liver damage in the US). The same thing is true for kids who eat too many (adult) vitamins. Iron poisoning from vitamins and supplements is the leading cause of poisoning in children under five.

In both cases, no sane person thinks we should outlaw Tylenol or iron pills. Instead, the packaging needs to be childproofed, and those who buy these substances need clear warnings on the labels. Then, every responsible adult will put their Tylenol, pre-natal vitamins, and their pot brownies together, either locked away, or high above the reach of a child.