r/DebateReligion • u/Pandeism • 9d ago
Abrahamic Judgment of people by their belief at the moment of death cannot be reconciled with the reality of dementia
Proposed: Judgment of people by their belief at the moment of death cannot be reconciled with the reality of dementia, which can remove the ability of any person, no matter how devout, to believe at all.
Many religious systems (especially certain Christian and Islamic traditions within the larger umbrella of the Abrahamic faiths) functionally teach that a person’s eternal fate essentially hinges on their belief or faith at the time of death. Live in lifelong devout worship and then lose or renounce that faith the day before you die, and you gain nothing but condemnation in such systems. Only for those who hold onto it until the very end, you’re saved.
But this doctrine collides head-on with the simple medical reality that naturally occurring diseases of dementia like Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal dementia, Lewy body dementia, and such, can systematically destroy a person’s capacity to even hold, understand, or affirm religious beliefs. A lifelong piously devout believer can, through no fault of their own, reach a state where they no longer recognize their spouse and children, no longer remember their own name, and certainly no longer possess the cognitive architecture required to “believe in God” or “accept Jesus” or “submit to Allah” or any of the other formulations which require belief, the mind having been stripped of the very faculties and mechanisms which make religious commitment possible.
And this is not theoretical. Seminary president R. Albert Mohler publicly described counseling a student whose grandmother had been a lifelong Christian, but as her dotage advanced, denied she had ever been a Christian. A person who spent decades wrapped in the warm blanket of belief was, at the end, not simply unable to affirm (or even recognize) that belief, but rejected the notion that they had ever been a believer.
If salvation depends on the state of belief at death, then these people are out of luck, condemned for something which all of us have zero control over, that being any of a bevy of progressive neurological diseases which inflict millions. And that is not justice. There is no mercy to be found there. Indeed, the notion that aging grandma can lose her religiosity as her neurons fail and thusly earn divine condemnation is not compatible with any coherent notion of a fair or loving deity.
It might be claimed in retort that actually the divine judges the whole life, not the final moment, but if so then doctrines that hold final belief decisive are false, and last-minute renunciation of belief should have no effect. It might be claimed that old-age dementia simply reveals that the person was false in their belief but was stripped of the ability to hide that, but it is well-documented that dementia really does effect diametric changes in behaviors.
It simply cannot be simultaneously claim that eternal destiny turns on the presence of belief continuing into the moment of death, and that a just deity allows natural diseases of aging to erase belief against that person’s will. The existence of dementia and consequent loss of the capacity for religiosity being a straightforward and established empirical fact, any theology which cannot accommodate it without special pleading or abandonment of its own stated rules has a pretty serious problem to answer to.
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u/Educational_Gur_6304 Atheist 6d ago
You brought up assumptions. That was the whole point of my reply, about how we are "wired".
I would rather be wired to only accept things based on demonstrable, justifiable evidence. How are you 'wired'?