Ludwig Wittgenstein, on predestination:
Suppose someone were taught: there is a being who, if you do such and such or live thus and thus, will take you to a place of everlasting torment after you die; most people end up there, a few get to a place of everlasting happiness. This being has selected in advance those who are to go to the good place and, since only those who have lived a certain sort of life go to the place of torment, he has also arranged in advance for the rest to live like that.
What might be the effect of such a doctrine? Well, it does not mention punishment, but rather a sort of natural necessity. And if you were to present things to anyone in this light, he could only react with despair or incredulity to such a doctrine.
Teaching it could not constitute an ethical upbringing. If you wanted to bring someone up ethically while yet teaching him such a doctrine, you would have to teach it to him after having educated him ethically, representing it as a sort of incomprehensible mystery.
I’ve been reading Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, and it is here that I’ve seen for the first time that third paragraph condemning the teaching of predestination to the young. He is right. But, of course, most clerics insist that indoctrination must begin in infancy, knowing perfectly well that adults will have nothing to do with it.
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