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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

In religions that believe in hell based on life choices, the ultimate smart move would be all fetuses aborted. The chance of heaven is 100% that way. What chance of heaven do we get if we are actually born? Maybe 10% at most? Billions are being condemned to eternal damnation if the fetuses are allowed to be born and live a life for at most about 100 years. That seems incredibly selfish and silly and short-sighted. We are talking eternity in heaven here. 100 years on this rock is nothing compared to the risk of losing the correct eternity.

So I don’t ever understand the viewpoint of fundamentalists on abortion. It seems like a failure to believe strongly enough in their religious views. Sure maybe the abortion doctor goes to hell, but he is really a dark Jesus figure that has sent multitudes straight to heaven.

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Never underestimate the logical contortions of religions. For centuries the Catholic Church stance was, dead non-baptized, children and babies, would be denied Heaven.

"Catholic Church buries limbo after centuries": https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pope-limbo-idUSL202872162...

But in religions that believe in original sin and potentially heaven with life choices as well as conception being the moment of a soul's existence? Because that's the one we're actually dealing with.

Yeah, this is a good point. I still have a lot of friends from my youth that are pretty serious southern baptists/calvinists, and many of them genuinely believe that aborted babies may actually go to hell. They understand it's a strange thing to say, often admitting they could be wrong, but I suppose it's a more logically sealed version of their beliefs, even if it seems strange.

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”

-Steven Weinberg

Most people I talk to believe in an "age of accountability" and that babies do in fact go to heaven. That age? I'm unsure, it ranges up to about 13.

Ok well not sure as to the data, but this suggests that stillborn babies and miscarriages lead to children going to heaven https://thefederalist.com/2017/05/05/christians-believe-misc...

Some branches of Christianity argue about this based on baptism or lack of it along the lines of "an unbaptised soul can not go to heaven".

This raises the question, instead of performing baptism soon after birth (and therefore disregarding the child's choice, because of course it wants to be baptized) why not perform baptism immediately after conception?

Also let us remember that the description of heaven resembles the description of a Borg cube. Do we really want to send our children to become part of the Borg?

This sounds like a Stargate episode. A planet with only very old religious fundamentalists. They accept their eternity in hell but see it as a worthy sacrifice since all aborted souls go to heaven and when their species ceases to exist they know all sin will be gone. The arrival of SG-1 threatens their plan, so they try to wage war against humans in the whole galaxy.

The vast majority of Christians in the United States believe in salvation by faith alone, not by works.

Seems like a rather strange thing to believe, given that they're essentially worshipping a being that would send an unborn person (in their belief) to suffer for eternity for the transgression of not being able to prove their worthiness of salvation (faith).

But how many people even do the faith part before dying? Billions miss out.

I wrote a short story about this: https://www.spacelove.xyz/writing/wake-up-in-the-sky/

Well hell awaits for the killers. So there's that

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