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Phoenix
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Benatar's thinking is interesting logic, but I can see several flaws in that logic. First, non-existence is undefined. How can you even properly contemplate it? The notion that all suffering is automatically "bad" is a condition to his argument that has many contradictions in real life. Nietzsche would certainly disagree with him, as would many Catholics. There are many schools of thought that paint adversity and overcoming it as positive in the influence of one's life. "No pain, no gain" as it were. Second, knowledge of existence is limited to the human experience in his case. Other modes of existence may not include the degree of suffering afforded to human existence. Without more extensive knowledge of the universe, I find it to be a conclusion drawn from very limited information. I can see where he's going and what his thinking is, but if existence does extend beyond death, possibly into realms where there is no suffering, as many ideals of a heaven-like existence describe in many varying beliefs, then his definition of existence would be based again on incomplete information.
If one works under the assumption that there is no such thing as an afterlife, and that life as it is was all that there was, then his point is very understandable when it comes to human life. This has always been a fault in my ability to understand Atheism in general. Agnosticism I can grasp, and difficulty in believing in a deity owing to life's difficulties or lack of apparent evidence I can understand, but complete willful Atheism would seem to me at least to reduce life to a state of pointless agony, ending in futility. It would seem that suicide would be preferable to continuing to live, so why someone would want to be an Atheist escapes me. Benatar would seem to have hit the nail on the head in that case, and I think I would be in agreement with him. The problem is that one can't be absolutely certain of what lies after death until they cross that threshold with no chance of return. If you up and off yourself and find out you were mistaken, you can't undo it.
Regarding my premise, I was deliberately leaving Heaven and Hell out of it because it could complicate discussion, though since you bring it up, I'll expound a bit. I'm breaking everything down to the simplest binary conditions. In the first situation I presented, Heaven would be defined as existing in the Eternal Presence of God. Hell is defined as existing completely disconnected from God. The environments themselves would be determined by resultant conditions of those states. Hell would simply be defined as "the place where those souls eternally separated from God dwell". Whether it is pleasant or not to be in either place, or what transpires in either place I was not considering, only the choices made during life and their results. A great part of this thinking involves accepting the following principles about God, that:
1) God is merciful and fair in regards to one's eternal affairs, not to be confused with life always being fair or merciful
2) God wishes all to choose to be with Him in eternity
3) God also grants free will to choose to not be with Him in eternity.
If those conditions are true, one could say that there's nobody in Hell that did not choose to be there. If anecdotal accounts of near-death experiences can be believed, I know of at least one individual who died, went to Hell, decided it's not what he wanted, called upon Jesus to save him, and, while clinically dead and already in Hell, was visited by Jesus and removed from that place and taken to Heaven, before being returned to the earth and his body physically reviving. If such stories are true, and I emphasis this as a conditional statement, then it could be deduced that nobody is in Hell that does not prefer that over being with God. So existing "without God", if that is what the Atheist would truly want, would mean Hell is what they wanted in that case. I know I am presenting this in completely black and white terms, but considering the outcome must be binary, 1 or 0, Yes or No, Heaven or Hell, anyone "on the fence" as it were would eventually be compelled to choose one outcome or the other. Like the poles of a magnet, they would be attracted to one and repulsed by the other once a certain threshold was reached. Again, this is all hypothetical and dependent on certain conditions, but those conditions I draw from existing texts and knowledge of God's character based on Christian thought and scripture.
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