Damnation is Inevitable

Bzzzt. The word you seek, in the construction that you used, would be “append.”

…. from which a chain of effects appends.

Or, to turn it around:

…. which prepends a chain of effects.

Well reasoned.

Which is terrifying, because it implies that I really can tip the balance against a sinner repenting through my bad example.

Perhaps I could be let off with a warning, officer?

(“propagate”?)

@G – I’m afraid I lose conviction in and comprehension of the metaphor of bad consequences and transferring these bad consequences at some point in the line of reasoning – I just can’t imagine what this might entail.

At present, I make sense of this in terms of a different metaphor – a metaphor of healing (specifically, a healing which requires acceptance of that healing: i.e. repentance).

It’s not metaphor. I probably shouldn’t have said ‘transfer,’ because a transfer isn’t what actually happens. Instead, at this point I believe that the Atonement includes Christ’s total communion with the whole of human experience. It’s not that the consequences of our choices are transferred to Him, its that every choice has a doubled consequence: when I call a man a fool and wound his feelings, I hurt him and Christ both.

Think about when you do something. You make a choice and then something happens because of it, and then something happens because of that, and so on. If you made a choice and nothing is different, you haven’t made much of a choice. The same is true if someone reliably comes along behind you and returns everything to the state it was in before you acted. It would be a superficially pleasant, lotus-eating kind of life, but it would also be incredibly frustrating, because nothing you did would matter much. Groundhog Day illustrates what I mean.

That makes for a hard dilemma, though. Either you and your loved ones are stuck forever with your bad choices, or you live like a pet in a cage and everything you do for good or for ill comes to nothing in the end. Christ resolves the dilemma. He offers to repair your bad choices, but He also experiences all their negative consequences alongside you in the atonement. “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” See also Alma 7:11-12.

I’ll be the first to admit that the Atonement is more important than explanations of the Atonement in logic or metaphor. If this logical explanation doesn’t move you, that’s fine by me, though I believe the logic is sound.

SPDI,
“Propagate” is a truly excellent word for cause and effects, but the word I had in mind is ‘prepend’ and Officer Grammar put me right on how it should be used. Thanks to his little tune-up, all cylinders are firing nicely on my intellectual pretension engine now.

@G -The Alma quotation is very interesting and profound. The second part “and he will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.” – is perhaps referring to Christ’s incarnation – and his temptations and sufferings – as being what might crudely be termed a ‘learning experience’; in some way *enabling*Christ to perform the work of atonement which God the Father could not achieve.

Bruce C.,
Interesting and profound is right. There are a number of different ways you can read it. My tentative belief for now is that Christ’s work requires a highly detailed experience of each person’s unique passage through life; that no one’s mortal experience is generalizable enough (including Christ’s), to be allow a sufficiently detailed empathic understanding of everyone else’s experience from the inside; so that some kind of total communion experience is necessary; but that in the total communion, Christ’s own mortal experience is a necessary reference and entry point for understanding without which it would be impossible.

@G – Further thoughts:

“Meaningful choices require meaningful consequences. Something must *happen* because of my choice. …real choice means that the chooser must become a miniature first cause from which a chain of effects [appends]”

I realize that this is actually a basic metaphysical ‘move; which structures your argument thenceforward. It sees reality as wholly consisting of effects of first causes.

I think this move propels the argument into the realm of classical theology/ monist metaphysics – rather than the more usual Mormon theology/ pluralist metaphysics.

Whereas I make the alternative basic metaphysical move that first causes are IN a pluralist universe of ‘stuff happening’ of which *not all* things are due to first causes.

So an analysis in terms of consequences-wholly doesn’t fit my basic set up! I tend to see us (and God) as working inside a field or environment, in a kind of trial and error fashion – in other words Life (including moral life) is more a matter of things like motivation, understanding, purpose – a matter of direction.

This is ultimately what leads to the idea of eternal progression and evolution, for all entities – including God the Father.

I am not here trying to persuade you to abandon your metaphysical perspective (some chance! – and not needed) – both views have deep problems as well as different strengths – just to clarify where our difference lies.

This is an interesting conversation, Bruce C. Let’s explore this a little, because either I’m not communicating well or else there are points and aspects I’m overlooking.

As far as I can tell, my argument is compatible with “the alternative basic metaphysical move that first causes are IN a pluralist universe of ‘stuff happening’ of which *not all* things are due to first causes. ” I don’t think that being an agent requires that *everything* that happens is a result of my agency. I don’t think it even requires that everything that happens is the result of somebody’s agency. But I do think that it requires that *something* that happens is the result of my agency. It may be that the results are really only on myself. You call this “motivation, understanding, purpose–a matter of direction.” But direction is movement, movement is change, and change is cause and effect. When a human agent experiences growth in their understanding and purpose, choices are involved, though they aren’t the only thing involved.

In fact, I think the logic of choice and consequence is stronger in at least some Mormon worldviews then in the classical world view. I don’t think its monism v. pluralism that matters here. I think its eternalism vs. sempiternalism, or the timeless vs. the never-ending. As you know, I believe that an agent has a kind of timeless unity throughout time with himself, so that the past exists just as much as the present, which is an eternalist worldview. Some Mormon thinkers and you too, perhaps, see the endless succession of time as the only reality, where the past is dead and only “real” to the extent that we remember it and that it structured the present. These are my words, not yours, so if you reject this description let me know, though this is my current best take of what I think the sempiternalist world view necessarily entails, whether its proponents know it or not.

In the eternalist worldview, its at least theoretically possible that a choice at some point in the past is still a choice even if it made no difference to anything or anyone, even the chooser. Because in the eternalist worldview when you scroll out the tapestry of time there is still one little pixel that is differently colored at that moment of choice, even if the whole rest of the tapestry is the same. But in the sempiternalist worldview, in a real sense a choice that makes no different to anything or anybody in the present never happened. Certainly it isn’t meaningful.

@G “the past is dead and only “real” to the extent that we remember it and that it structured the present. These are my words, not yours, so if you reject this description let me know,”

This does NOT sound right, as an expression of my belief! So I slept on this to try and establish what my ‘intuitions’ are on this matter.

It strikes me as one of those things which is fairly clear as a feeling, but hard/ impossible to encapsulate as a coherent abstract scheme.

The feelings includes that past events are real and permanent – so more than ‘merely’ a memory or something past that influences the present – but also that events are sequential. So that these real events of the past are nonetheless of the past – they are not (still) happening ‘now’.

So the universe is sequential, it is never the same twice, it is cumulative rather than simultaneous – yet there is also some kind of direct and *real and active* link between present and past.

I can’t really think how to express this, and it doesn’t make a lot of common sense.

Maybe it is like the notion of a ‘wormhole’ – that we can connect directly and in-reality with specific aspects of the past, not all-at-once but one at a time, via a thin ‘tube’ or thread – but this is unidirectional so the future can know the past as reality, but not vice versa.

That’s about what I feel/ intuit. The constraints I work around are (I think) twofold: 1. linear sequentiality of time and 2. the future being able to link to at-least-some specific past events via an active and real connection.

Maybe a link in which causation can only run one way and knowledge can only run the other.