It certainly doesn’t help their case that their “legal advisor” (Jorge Puello — who is not in fact a lawyer in Haiti) has been himself charged in more than one country on sex trafficking of women and children.

If they’re not malicious, one would have a hard time proving that they were not criminally negligent.

For me, the answer’s simple: there’s not. I don’t care where I was, my first (and last, and only) reaction upon learning of this would be to find a way out so I could go to her aid.

I’m not defending their point of view, but I’m not sure it’s innately logical.

Now, the idea that an all loving god can allow people to go to hell IS irrational and makes no sense, but I credit humans with enough ego to ignore the pain of others if they are enjoying themselves.

(though, ironically, I’m sure that the idea that their argument only makes sense if you accept that humans are selfish, blind, and short sighted would not go over well with Christians either).

But I’d beg to differ on your second point. To take it to the visceral; Would you still be enjoying space mountain if you knew your sister was being raped? Would you prefer not to know she was being raped, or would you prefer her not to be raped at all?

What would that say about the entity preventing knowledge of the rape?

The argument wasn’t really about the people cast into hell, whether by their own choice or not; it was more about the nature of heaven and the question “How can it be paradise when you know your loved ones are in agony?”

The short answer (for me) is that it can’t: paradise is as much internal (your experience) as it is external (the surroundings).

the second flaw is the idea that you can’t enjoy heaven if your loved ones are in hell. In the micro: Disneyland is still enjoyable even if my sister is having a terrible day. Sure, I might occasionally be sad when i think about her suffering, but when I’m not thinking about it, i’m enjoying space mountain (though heaven better have some better rides than space mountain).

Also, I think this argument is based on the idea that people are cast into hell against their will, which is not really accurate. It’s more about choosing hell. People (in theory) choose to commit terrible acts, choose to make themselves into bad people, and in the end they are the ones that have chosen to go to hell. A nun that I actually like used to compare it to someone who spends their whole life in dark places. If they, then, see two paths; one light and one dark; they are far more likely to take the dark path of their own free will, because they don’t feel comfortable in the light.

her family are all fundies (though I never thought of “Christ is Risen” as a traditional Easter greeting). And I know that her mother is going to raise hell when she sees our altar. But for me, it’s more immediate. it’s not just about my beliefs, but about hers as well. And IMO, the sooner her family accepts her, the sooner we can forget about it and realize that religion isn’t that big a deal between people.

but i can’t be dishonest about myself. So far nobody in her family has asked me about religion, but she knows that when they do, I won’t lie. I don’t have it in me. So we’ll see how that goes.

I had a similar crisis of faith and I’m glad to say that I returned to mine, though in all fairness, we are a different sort of faith and there is no playing on fears. but I have often been close to atheism. And were it not for my personal experiences with religion, I’d likely be an atheist now.