@aidan,
Rebecca--you are disputing with intellectual pygmies.
Their naive strawman is that religious literature is to be read literally rather than allegorically. They seek out people who read it literally and batten onto them as a terrier battens onto a rat. It is easy you must see.
In Dante's Divine Comedy there are three beasts besetting mankind: incontinence, violence and fraud. These are residues of animality in human nature and mankind is doomed if they are exercised without restraint.
The punishments Dante inflicts upon such reversions to animality are merely fanciful expressions of what he thinks they deserve for the sin of placing cultural mankind in a position of unviability. His many jests throughout his masterpiece make it clear that no literal sense was to be read into the work.
The foundation of the work is the freedom of the will, or the right of private judgement, with a condition of accountability. It is mere poetic licence which exaggerates the accounting in order to forcefully make the point. To attack it because it is a ridiculous portrayal is to betray a spavined intelligence which not only misses the point but which is likely to miss any point which can't be read off an instrument. The instrument becomes their god.
And Dante is dealing mainly with elite personages. The powerful. He deals with those who "lived without infamy or praise" in Canto III on first entering his Inferno. Their punishment is neither good nor bad. In Canto IV with those who lived outside Christianity.
After that the elite. And the sorry fates he provides for them are nothing but a metaphor for variations upon a guilty conscience in this life.
Our twee atheists have nothing to say about the inhibition of incontinence, violence and fraud in respect of the ruling class. Or from what source any such inhibition might arise for those who make the laws. In practice they erect walls around themselves, maintain a secret police and control information.
farmerman speaks of the Golden Rule but abstains from saying where it derives from. He even implies that doing good is only for a selfish motive. It "makes sense" he says. It is a strategy. A gambit. Which is to say that he has no sense of virtue and is only considering utility. And feeling virtuous is a nice reward in itself.
And his sense of what doing good means derives from a Christian source.
A well known prose translation of the Divine Comedy by Charles Eliot Norton has these words in the introduction--
Quote:The aim of Dante in the Divine Comedy was to set forth these truths in such wise as to affect the imaginations and touch the hearts of men, so that they should turn to righteousness.
A propaganda exercise for sure but with the aim of preventing mankind from self destructing.
The evolutionist and atheist position sets forth its truths so as to turn the imaginations and hearts to unrighteousness and the uninhibited play of incontinence, violence and fraud. It can do no other. The Marquis de Sade wrung that subject dry over 200 years ago. Not that any of our sweet Christian atheists would ever dare to read such a brilliant exposition of the logic. It might even be that they are prevented from doing by the educational authorities.
Atheists even engage in fraud on this thread by pretending that the "good" they do is not because of fear of the law or the disapproval of custom and tradition but due to some inherent virtue they claim to possess which could never be derived from the position they take and could not even be justified from it.