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Christianity is the religion I'm best acquainted with, seeing as it's the one I was raised into, albeit a fairly unorthodox and liberal take on it. Since my teenhood, I've felt very conflicted about the whole thing.
On the one hand, a large majority of the historical figures I admire most were guided and inspired by one version or another of the Christian faith and the noblest facets of its ethics. When it (seldom) lives up to its own standards, it's perhaps the most awe-inspiring life philosophy. On the other hand, I find many of its tenets, or at least their most commonly agreed upon interpretations, to be highly objectionable and frankly intolerable.
While Christianity may well have a claim to the most crowded lineage of moral paragons, its history is also marred by the countless atrocities committed in its name, like most other religions. Even now, droves of self-proclaimed Christians spurn the beating heart of Jesus' message to instead obsess on the dregs of the parasitic dogma layered on top of it. The latter is littered with heaps of distasteful and incoherent rubbish it needs to answer for.
Furthermore, it seems the minute someone displays an openness to spirituality and the slightest of fondness for Jesus' teachings, they get swarmed by proselytic Christians angling to conscript them into their gang by means fair or foul, which irks me substantively. Why should every person imbued with spiritual inclinations be forced to bend the knee to whatever religion has the most peer pressure backing it up in their culture? It's perfectly fine, and dare I even say commendable, to be a spiritual independent (or whichever other strand of free-thinking heretic you prefer to style yourself as, I don't judge).
As such, I felt impelled to put down my vehement contentions in writing as an unordered series of self-contained posts listing the reasons why I personally will most likely never convert. As an added bonus, once I've externalized them, they'll serve as a publicly accessible reference that I can point people back to in case of need.
I am well aware that raising such objections to widespread religious doctrines isn't a novel undertaking and harkens back to a long, old, and abundant tradition. However, none of those I've come across so far have addressed my idiosyncratic pet peeves quite to my satisfaction. As we say where I'm from, "On est jamais mieux servi que par soi-mêmewhich roughly translates as "you're never better served than by yourself"".
In this post I'll be addressing one of the most heinous and damning tenets of Christianity as far as I'm concerned, namely the filtering of souls.
Introduction #
Before anything else, it would probably be helpful to define what I am talking about. The filtering of souls is the metaphysical concept according to which souls survive earthly death to be sorted within different planesHell, Heaven, the Elysian Fields, Hades, Valhalla, Hel, nothing/annihilation, etc. based on their actions during their mortal life and in which they will usually stay trapped for the rest of eternity (or until the end of the world).
This theory has noteworthy implications that are often glossed over. In metaphysical theories where life on earth is only a smaller part of a greater whole, its surrounding narrative context and the superseding structure that birthed it into existence inform what function it was made to serve.
In a filtering of souls model, earthly life dictates a soul's ultimate fate while being the most transient stop along its journey. Consequently, its main purpose is simply to sort you into the right afterlife bucket, usually based on some interpretation of worth (courage, benevolence, etc.). In other words, every human life can be considered as a glorified exam and earthly life itself as a divine instrument of filtering: the Great Sieve.
As such, it's a means to an end rather than an end in itself, in contrast to reincarnation, its main alternative when it comes to metaphysical models for the afterlife. Although we won't be discussing the latter in the scope of this post, in the spirit of fairness I also graced it with its own derisive nickname derived from its implications. Introducing the Great Hamster Wheel. Anyway, let's get back to our original topic.
In all fairness, the filtering of souls isn't a Christian trademark. It is found in several monotheistic and polytheistic religions. That being said, when it comes to Christianity, it makes for a particularly objectionable bedfellow. It seems much more compatible with many of these other religions that preach theological orders of rigid social hierarchies and barefacedly assert "might makes right" as the fundamental spiritual truth, whereas it flies in the face of Jesus' message of love, forgiveness, and universal egalitarianism.
In any case, my criticism for this model will be centered on its Christian version for the rest of this post, even if some of the arguments I'll make, and my overall stance, apply to all of its iterations. If it's any source of relief, I find it highly distasteful overall, regardless of which religion happens to be championing it.
To outline my issues with the Great Sieve, it is a dismal theory both on a logical and an ethical level. Plus, I find its implication on the meaning of life depressingly drab. So without further ado, let's get started with the best opening move to audit these types of overarching narratives, namely asking why.
Why filter? #
My first line of questioning concerns the necessity of this system in itself. Why the hell does God even want to filter souls to begin with? What's the point? Don't They have anything better to do with Their eternity?
In the case of Christianity, seeing as one set of souls is rewarded and the other is punished, the filtering implies God is trying to differentiate between desirable souls and undesirable ones. This raises the question of what a desirable soul is in the eyes of God. Based on what we're told, it seems like it is some form of virtue demonstrated through lived choices and actions, or at least compliance with divine guidelines. Questions still remain, however.
To get started, why does God desire worthy souls? Do They simply enjoy obedience for its own sake? One theory I've heard is that God is looking for volunteers to participate in co-Creation. Perhaps that answer is good enough to satisfy you, but it doesn't quite do the trick for me, at least without further elaboration.
What's the need for worthy souls? #
The entire idea that all of our earthly actions only amount to a compressed rating on a spectrum from pleasing to offending God doesn't make much sense to me. Why the hell does God need pleasing in the first place? Are They not supposed to be omnipotent? Whatever could They “want” more than that? If something doesn’t suit Their taste, can’t They just immediately modify it to Their satisfaction?
Furthermore, if we attempt to infer God's intent based on the reality we have access to, our observations of earthly life don't seem to line up with an uptight and authoritarian Creator/Ruler. If God were so fussy and exacting, wouldn't the world be drastically different from the way we experience it? Based on the boundless diversity of entities and species present in the universe and their proclivity towards the weird, quirky, and disturbing, if I were to surmise the portrait of its potential Creator, what emerges leans much closer to that of an "everything goes" open-minded and undiscriminating anarchist.
Outside the natural laws of causality, God seems pretty lax about whatever you choose to do. Go outside, plant your feet in the ground, and vociferate a sustained flow of blasphemy while looking defiantly at the sky: chances are nothing will happen. A few neighbors might give you the stink eye, but you should be able to walk away free from divine chastisement. No righteous smite to be witnessed, be it bolts of lightning, instantaneous combustion, or swarms of locusts. Perhaps the Creator is fuming in the background, holding out for your stay in Hell, barely containing Their fury and bloodlust until then, but that theory doesn't strike me as very serious, nor its God very worthy of respect.
Let us move on to our second, and more important, question: why is this convoluted filtering process required in order to produce worthy souls?
Why can't all souls be worthy? #
Again, isn't God supposed to be omniscient? Can't They just scan each soul and go, "Yep, good one. Nope, bad one."? Didn't They already know when They created them.
Better yet, if God is omnipotent, why can't they create worthy souls from the get go, thus circumventing the need for sorting? It seems like a much faster, easier, and less painful alternative. Under that scenario, no conscious being gets subjected to eternal torture. That seems like a pretty big improvement for a Creator who loves Its creatures and cares about moral righteousness.
The only way to justify this entire setup is to invest great trust in the utmost value and importance of souls choosing to align with God's plan out of their own volition. It needs to be valuable enough to warrant the endless suffering of life on Earth and eternity in Hell.
This is already a pretty big ask, and it isn't helped by the apparent ambivalence and distaste God seems to harbor for free will if you're to believe the standard interpretation of the Bible.
False pretenses & misdirections #
Tainted free will #
It's worth noting that the Great Sieve doesn't embrace a completely pure implementation of free will. The divine mandate is communicated through the revelations and holy texts to at least a portion of humanity, which serves as a first source of warping influence. It is a necessary requirement for compliance, but that's also a limitation on freedom.
More importantly, the threat of eternal retribution will probably motivate many to alter their behavior out of fear rather than genuine integrity. Some may argue that God will easily see through such deceit with Their omniscience, but why communicate the threat at all if it isn't to try and intimidate humans into obedience?
How valuable and sensible truly is the free will project when it serves as a platform for coercion? If I tell you to follow a set of instructions I have for you or else I will torture you for a very long time, how free of a choice are you truly making?
Additionally, the defining characteristic of free will is the near limitless canvas of possibilities and opportunities it opens up. The multitudes of nuances and shades of decisions it allows. The bountiful diversity of identities to be self-determined and embodied.
And yet the Great Sieve bears seemingly no interest in this endless range of creativity and expression. It casts aside this cornucopia in its near entirety save for the ultimate binary verdict: pass or fail. Am I the only one shocked by a squandering of such stupendous scale?
On the basis of its extremely conservative requirements in quality of freedom, it seems a mere quiz would have sufficed by way of Great Sieve. Isn't an entire universe grievously overkill?
Upon further contemplation, it's not exactly free will in itself that seems to be celebrated, but rather souls choosing compliance in spite of having the option to rebel. Free will comes off as a distasteful necessary evil in the eyes of the Creator, barely tolerated to keep up a steady supply of consenting devotees flowing in.
God only cares for a meager fraction of the broad spectrum of volition and earthly life. The rest is curtly disavowed. Those souls who fail to freely accede are shunned and punished. Their sins are reproved with shame and disgust.
Even vast portions of the Creation itself are repudiated in disappointment. It is a broken world, supposedly in need of reordering by a humanity that is broken itself and thus tragicomically doomed to failure. An impotent progeny to an impotent Creator.
This contrast between the alleged subliminality of chosen devotion and the virulent renunciation of the myriad profane and improper enactments of free will is quite perplexing.
Be that as it may, the Great Sieve still holds another use for free will. You see, it makes for a very convenient scapegoat.
Dodging accountability #
Colonel Ehrhardt: Schultz! What are you trying to get me into now?
Captain Schultz: But, Colonel, it was your own idea.
Colonel Ehrhardt: Shifting the responsibility on me again? Good night, Schultz!
– Ernst Lubitsch, To Be or Not to Be
Free will is often the first line of defense for the ethical qualms raised by theology. It's a handy lightning rod that can redirect the responsibility for a large swath of the abundant evil in life from the Creator towards itself. Free will opens the door for evildoers, and evildoers... well, they do evil things.It is worthwhile to note that this parade doesn't work quite as well when you take a step back from the anthropocentric perspective, seeing as a copious amount of the cruelty and suffering of the world is not a direct consequence of the choices of free-will-imbued human sinners.
In a way, it's as if the Creator is telling us, "Yes, that stuff's really nasty. I don't like any of it either. I had no other choice. My hands were tied. It's not my fault, guys. It's free will's. And yours also, for using it to be big meanies."
But let's not be fooled. Who set up this whole system in the first place? Who has all the control and agency? Let's rewind the story a bit, shall we?
God decides They're into a soul-sorting phase as of late, for some unclear reason. Consequently, They create a large batch of souls and bake imperfection into them as well as an inclination to stray towards sin. Then, God imbues each soul with free will, but with a big catch. "I know you didn't ask for anything. Plus, I designed you to have a pretty big failure rate. Nevertheless, do as I will you to, and you'll be handsomely rewarded; don't, and you'll get horribly punished. By the way, I'll only partially communicate the guidelines to follow and in a very ambiguous manner. Good luck, fam."
And there you go, plopped screaming and naked into this vast and harsh world, left to fend for yourself. You only get one shot, one opportunity, Mom's spaghetti. So, you'd better hope to run into a preacher of the right religion earlier rather than later, or else you might well be in for a world of pain in the afterlife.
So I ask you, upon whom does the "original" sin truly lie? Who set you up for failure but will punish you more cruelly than any human ever could if you flounder? Who created the near endless ways to disappoint Them and dropped you right in the middle of it all but will fall into apoplexy if you stumble upon a single one? And who could change it all in the blink of an eye if they so desired but would rather keep seething and tormenting instead?
It seems God created the DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) modus operandi along with the universe.
It only takes a little reflection for things to start reflecting poorly on God, so enablers have to go out of their way to come up with additional excuses to exculpate Them. Let's cover a few.
One vector of defense might be to point out that it's not God doing the torturing but Satan. Yet God is omnipotent, aren't They? Therefore, They could stop Satan at any point, but for some reason, They let it happen, unbothered in the slightest. To me, it just looks like They've delegated the dirty work to an underappreciated contractor. Or is God supposed to be some kind of chump pleading in vain for Satan to stop to no avail?
Another option is to slightly diverge from the official interpretation in order to smooth over a few rough edges. I haven't been swayed by the two propositions I've heard up to now.
The first one is to simply swipe that nasty, problematic Hell business under the rug and say, "Actually, everyone goes to Heaven. There, there. God is still chill after all." Well, this sure sands off the brunt of this theory's atrocious moral ramifications. However, it also unfortunately throws the entire spiritual structure of meaning for life in the gutter along with it.
If everyone gets a medal, so to speak, then what the hell is the point of setting up the competition, pray tell? If there's no filtering, then under the typical Christian viewpoint there's no purpose left to life on earth, is there now? Why not skip that toilsome step altogether, send every soul to Heaven directly, and eschew all the unnecessary suffering and bullshit in between?
To me a spiritual theory unable to produce meaning is the equivalent of a Fez dispenser unable to produce Fez; it might look interesting and be fun to examine for a while, but I don’t really have much use for it.
The second one is a bit more niche. It does away with Hell once again, but keeps the filtering. Instead of eternal torture, you're merely Thanos snapped out of existence if caught lacking.
Should God vaporizing your sinful consciousness out of existence still be a bit too harsh for your sensibilities, there's a variant where you get to make the decision instead. You must review your life and assess your worthiness for yourself. In other words, if you're a dirty sinner God guilt trips you into admitting how much of an unbecoming piece of trash you are after all, so I dunno, maybe kys uwu 👉👈.
As you might have guessed, I'm not incredibly convinced. It doesn't really exonerate God. It's just a more convoluted and spineless method to achieve the same outcome. If you're gonna ice me, at least own it. Do it yourself and look me in the eye as you press the trigger.
Moreover, when you think about it, wouldn't this system be likely to disproportionately cause the soul suicide of decent but neurotically self-conscious people with a tendency to be hard on themselves while enabling the mass self-exoneration of narcissistic and self-serving abusers? Definitely an unconventional approach to justice.
All in all, these jury-rigged workarounds only serve as dodgy pretenses to let God weasel out of answering for Their choices. Speaking of which, if we're to believe in the Great Filtering, what type of God are we truly talking about here?
Blood for the Blood God #
I see you’ve been schooled well in all the theological constructions that allow you to hold Me as a vengeful God—without making Me responsible for it.
– Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God - Book 2
The Great Filtering is based on a punitive system of justice. Fail to follow the rules, and you will be chastised. As far as I'm concerned, punitive justice is an irrational and unjustifiable stance. However, it's too meaty of a topic for an in-depth digression in this post, so I'll have to leave it here as an unsubstantiated claim for now.
That being said, what does God stand to gain in causing suffering to all these "failed", unworthy souls? Or in euthanizing them, if we're to adopt the alternative interpretation we just covered? Why create a spark of consciousness and potential only to snuff it out at the first setback? Especially when They were the one to breathe the possibility of failure into them in the first place?
The omniscient and omnipotent Creator has no rehabilitation plan? Is that to be the limit of Their power and imagination?
Even if one ascribes to a model of punitive justice, you must admit that any sense of proportionality gets thrown out the window when we're dealing with endless suffering. If God is indeed in possession of perfect judgment, they should have no need for Hell. Logically, no finite amount of sin, quantitatively or qualitatively, can warrant eternal punishment.
The God who would abide in Hell can only be a bitter, angry, and resentful one. The Creator of the Great Sieve seems to bear no love whatsoever for any of its Creation. Only disappointment, venom, and controlling possessiveness.
And yet we are supposed to simultaneously believe this God champions universal love and forgiveness above all else based on the message of Christ? If that were the case, what the hell are They doing, frantically filtering people and disdainfully throwing out the unworthy?
It makes no sense. God can't be both of these divinities at once.
Even if you've somehow managed to elude any hint of cognitive dissonance up to now, I've kept what I believe to be the most damning objection for last. Indeed, we're still left with quite the pickle: why is the Great Sieve so poorly designed for its alleged purpose of filtering souls?
The worst tool for the job #
My last line of argumentation draws upon the observation that if the goal of earthly life is to serve as a test and filter for afterlife buckets, it does a very poor job of it. Hence, it seems unlikely that this is indeed its purpose.
Unfathomable excess #
For starters, the Great Sieve is incredibly wasteful. For some reason 99.999999999% of the Creation has absolutely no bearing on its actual goal. A simplistic earth with restrained physics would have done the trick. Maybe one galaxy to really cover our bases. But all this space, all this time, all this complexity just for this very constrained use case? It's all for the sake of an infinitesimal sliver of the universe's real estate, one tiny planet, across a duration that's an infinitesimal sliver of the universe's lifespan, just to figure out if a few billion human souls are worthy?
Does God hate optimization? Maybe They're more similar to me than I would've thought, namely highly distractible and very susceptible to bad cases of feature creep. The alternative hypothesis, according to which a universe solely dedicated to humankind is merely the delusions of grandeur of a group of prideful, anthropocentric minds, seems much more parsimonious and plausible.
This is a troubling reflection already, and yet it pales in comparison to what's to follow.
Sloppy and unfair #
If the universe was designed as a form of exam, it is a very unfair and inefficient one.
Almost everyone will agree that the world we live in is rife with myriad inequalities. That being said, for our current needs, we only need to concern ourselves with those related to the quantity and quality of opportunities to prove our worth for the Great Filtering. Not to worry, though; that still leaves us with plenty.
Many Christians believe life starts at conception, and by that they mean the soul has incarnated into the body, hence making it eligible for moral consideration. If so, how is a stillborn soul supposed to demonstrate their virtue or lack thereof? What of a young child who suffered a premature death from a disease or accident?
These examples address lives with a very limited number of meaningful moral choices to make, but what about those whose ability to make them is severely hampered due to factors out of their control?
How is a person born with a severe cognitive disability supposed to compete for the value of their volitional character on an equal playing field with the average Joe? What of Jade, born in squalor, abused throughout her childhood, and funneled towards a life of crime, pitted against Judy, born in a prosperous household, loved and raised by upstanding parents, and scarcely presented with opportunities to cause significant harm? How about Daniel, born without a sense of empathy due to a genetic anomaly, vying against Mark, who showed kindness and generosity from the youngest age?
Let's not kid ourselves. We're not plopped into this world from a blank slate. Both innate and social factors strongly nudge us toward varying levels of moral character. Is God really going to punish you because They gave you more proclivity to sin whilst patting those They gave a head start to on the back for cashing in on their handout? Does transcendental worth in the heavens follow the same model as social mobility on Earth?
In the name of exhaustivity and charitability, let's play devil's advocate for the God of the Great Sieve. Once more, the best defense against this vector of criticism is our poor, good old free will, which will naturally and necessarily engender inequalities galore. Indeed, by making the “wrong” choices, some people will screw up the opportunities of other, yet unborn souls, to make their own. It is an unfortunate but unavoidable side-effect.
Fair enough, but then why choose life in the universe as the means of filtering? It seems like it’s wasting a large amount of valuable assessment by offering very limited actual choice to many contestants.
What happens to all these souls who got the short end of the stick? They were robbed of any genuine, meaningful free will of their own. Does God abide by such injustice? That would be quite horrific.
Alternatively, there might be some kind of backup plan, albeit it would have to be a vast, convoluted, and intricate one. I can't help but note that it's a curiously designed system that features more exceptions than rules
Nevertheless, let's explore these potential contingencies. There are two main ways I can think of to patch up these blatant disparities. Unfortunately for the Great Sieve, they are both awkward and inelegant.
The first is to use an edge-case complementary reincarnation system, in which any soul that didn't get enough of a true chance to prove their worth is sent back for another life until enough first-rate data has been accumulated to make a decent judgment call. This first solution goes against the usual Christian canon and comes off a bit arbitrary, but it's still probably the least lacking of the two.
The second answer is that God is capable of running some form of computation that can take extenuating circumstances into account and remove confounding factors to come to a verdict on a soul's worth regardless. This might seem like a clean workaround, but don't be too hasty to embrace it. It's actually quite catastrophic. If there is a computation algorithm good enough for this task, then the entire filtering process of life on earth is completely redundant, and there would be no reason to go through with it.
Furthermore, these issues are made all the worse when you consider they could have easily been avoided by simply choosing a different design for the Great Sieve.
Better alternatives #
If, at the end of the day, the entire point of life on earth is merely to serve as an exam, wouldn't a standardized test work far better than a convoluted universe? Put every single soul through the same simulation. Everyone can get to experience the same set of situations and face the same arborescence of choices. If necessary, there could be several different types of tests and simulations with varying criteria for different archetypes of souls. This would make it a lot easier to compare results and vastly improve the fairness of the system.
Furthermore, the test's entire past and cast, i.e. every single other living entity that dwells within it, could be merely simulated and devoid of consciousness — "NPCs" of sorts, if you will — save for the soul being tested. This would drastically reduce the overall amount of actually experienced suffering required to sustain the system and greatly mitigate the problem of evil.
If I can easily come up with a better solution as one guy spitballing for a few minutes, how is an omniscient God supposed to have missed this?
If you embrace the Great Filtering model, I don't see how you can avoid assuming God is an architect imbued with transcendental genius and yet inexplicably incompetent at the same time or, at the very least, deeply confused.
Earlier, I claimed this last line of argumentation was the most implacable of the lot. I've come to this conclusion because it is inextricable from the soul-filtering theory. Try as you might to shake off all the other unsavory implications of the Great Sieve with alibis and more family-friendly reinterpretations that feature a moderately less bloodthirsty God, there's no way to escape this one.
Closing thoughts #
So what have we learned?
Filtering doesn't offer a satisfying explanation for life on earth in itself. Instead it raises the question of why that is a necessity in the first place.
Free will gets done dirty. Not only must it bear all the weight of justification and responsibility for the Great Sieve, but it is also spurned and disregarded. Meanwhile, God gets to avoid any form of accountability for the consequences of a system They had, and still have, full authorship and control over.
Speaking of the God of the Great Filtering, They're quite the demented and spiteful chap, aren't They now? And for some reason, They opted for an incredibly dysfunctional tool to do their bidding in spite of the existence of far superior alternatives.
Thus, I'm afraid I personally cannot abide the theoretical model of the Great Sieve in the slightest.
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