WHEN HEAVEN LEADS TO MURDER - JANZEN MURDERS HIS DAUGHTER FOR FAITH

The doctrine that we live on after death means that killing is not killing.  If people go to eternal bliss then killing them is doing them a favour.

The doctrine certainly tells us that murder is not really murder.  It is luck that people don't take it seriously enough to do harm with it though they think they do.  It is not the doctrine.  It is luck.  It is the people.  The doctrine remains appalling and some do kill or let others die.  Mormonism used to murder certain sinners in the belief that if they spilled their blood they would atone their sin and go to Heaven.  Gary Gilmore is a well-known instance.  Christian Science lets sick people die without a doctor for it thinks death is not real.  The Bible says God praised Abraham for being ready to kill his young son Isaac.  God asked him to.  Hebrews says that this was because he believed God who promised to make a nation of the grown-up Isaac.  To kill him meant that for God to keep his promise he would have to revive him back to life.  So the New Testament is admitting that belief in an afterlife can lead to murder.

In 2015 Canadian man, Janzen, murdered his poorly daughter and put the following on facebook, "I just could not see my little girl hurt for one more second. I took a gun and shot her in the head and now she is migraine free and floating in the clouds on a sunny afternoon, her long beautiful brown hair flowing in the breeze, a true angel."
 
Naturally his faith in Heaven is to blame for this. He was not posting the above to get sympathy or to justify what he had done. He did not ask for them. He did it to show his faith in Heaven.
 
Atheist blogger J.T. Eberhard wrote, “The culpability for this is, at least in part, on the people who filled Janzen’s head with promises of heaven – even if, like Janzen, they did it out of love.”
 
Christians claim that he wouldn't have murdered her if he had rejected belief in a good afterlife. But only Janzen can tell us and he did. He said as much. People who would ignore a man's testimony in order to deny that faith in Heaven can harm are too biased and low to be worth mentioning. If faith in Heaven helped this man to kill we are expected to enable it to help others to kill by pretending it had nothing to do with it.
 
It was argued by Christians that blaming faith in Heaven is committing a logical fallacy called the appeal to consequences.

Belief in Heaven for this man caused or encouraged him to murder.

Therefore belief in Heaven is false.
 
In actual fact Eberhard is not committing a logical fallacy at all.
 
Belief in Heaven for this man caused or encouraged him to murder.

Therefore belief in Heaven is HARMFUL for some people.

Therefore belief in Heaven is always risky.
 
The Christians told a bare-faced lie and dished out a red herring.
 
Some Christians argued that true beliefs can result in terrible things and bad or false beliefs can cause many good things. This is true. You cannot work out if a belief is untrue by assessing how bad the consequences of it are.
 
The Christians point out that some people who deny there is a life after death have committed suicide because they felt they would never again see their loved ones who have died. You could reason then that whether you encourage belief in Heaven or not it is not going to make much of a difference.
 
A Christian could argue that if some of these people had known they could see their child again in heaven they would not have killed themselves.
 
Unbelieving people who miss their loved ones and commit suicide are doing something very odd. It is killing the memories they have of the loved ones and robbing themselves of any way to keep their memories and their contribution to life alive. It is far more irrational than killing yourself to go to Heaven to be with them again. The unbelievers do not kill themselves because they won't see their loved ones again - they kill themselves because they are excessively stupid and irrational.
 
There are murderers who said they killed people because they did not believe in an afterlife. But they are few and far between. The murderer who does believe is far more common and believing that you have not really murdered somebody but sent them to a better place cannot be seen as anything other than
 
Eberhard blogged “You want to know why I fight religion with all that I am?  There it is.  It teaches people to embrace bad ideas, to believe because you want to believe, to cast aside critical thinking in favor of faith.”
 
Christianity does confess that discarding critical thinking is dangerous and claims that people should look for and equip themselves with evidence that their beliefs are true. But in practice this is a rarity. And Catholicism is careful to gain supporters not through faith but by conditioning them as children and imposing a membership on them in the Church. Worse, nobody is told why they should stay out of the Church. An honest religion would present both sides. Catholic children are never told for example how Jesus supported the murders committed by Judaism at the behest of his God.
 
Eberhard is accused of saying that religion is bad because some will kill others to put them in Heaven. This is supposed to be as irrational as saying, "Do not say it is a sin for gay people to have sexual relationships with each other. Some people might be overcome with shame and commit suicide." How can religion then avoid Eberhard's judgement? It depends on how remarkably good and convincing the religion is. Catholicism for example is no better than any organisation. And all religions suffer from delusion. They care little for evidence except when it suits them. Eberhard is right and his argument is not an argument from bad consequences.
 
Religion says that we should not abandon beliefs that seem to drive some people to do bad things. But that depends on how well verified the beliefs are. The worse the evidence the more the religion is to blame if any members use the beliefs to do bad. Religion will say that some scientists use science to foster racism and that gives one no call to abandon science. It is not the same thing. A scientist can only distort science to foster racism. Nobody is a racist because of science.

Religion says that killers are stealing God's authority to decide when somebody should leave this world. If they think they are killing for God or that they have the divine right to then they are killing because of a false belief. They cannot be accused of intentionally sinning. You have to do what you believe. Religion is useless as a deterrent. It is a waste of time telling the would-be killers that it is up to God to end a life.