This I believe would be a statement of God too, as God Himself would be in Hell for the eternal loss of even one of His children. But this also goes for Annihiliationism as God would be in eternal grief over a child that is no more.
So neither is a satisfactory answer and both place the person at odds with God.
My sympathy for God is greatly tempered by the fact that these are self-inflicting injuries.
For a while I considered Annihilism, but I’m afraid I’ve fallen for full-fledged Universalism.
That is some kind of sweet ,loving god you follow. Why would you?
I’m honestly confused. If I would be at odds with God for my “I cannot be eternally happy if persons are eternally tortured, or lost”, then I don’t see how that works with the command that I am to love my neighbour. If loving my neighbour means being, at the most, uncaring that they are either eternally tortured or cease to exist, then it’s a considerably different definition of “love” than I am used to.
Well, those are always a symptom of deeper problems. Maybe God was molested when He was not even the thought of Himself yet ?
I don’t know how I missed this exciting thread.
Let me see if I have this right. You’re asking whether people who don’t believe in the Christian God are relieved to learn that the Christian God won’t punish them in Hell forever for their disbelief. Is that correct?
@ Mods - please move this thread to BBQ Pit or the Comedy Room so I can give it the response it deserves. 
I have to agree that it could have been reworded a little better. I second the motion to move this thread to the BBQ Pit.
Woops! I made a typo, sorry. I meant to say, “I second the notion….” I didn’t the edit button fast enough.
This will be my final correction (hopefully) to my own post: **I didn’t hit the edit button fast enough. **
I get told that a lot too. I don’t believe in hell, so it doesn’t bother me much.
I’ve always had difficulty with the whole central premise of Christianity.
The story is that God created everything. Then he made a rule which mankind broke. So God punished mankind for breaking the rule. But because God loved mankind, he felt bad about the punishment. So he punished himself instead and that made it okay for him to change the rule.
The analogy I’ve made is that this is the equivalent to a father telling his kids that if they don’t wash the dishs, he’ll cut off their right hand as punishment. And the kids don’t wash the dishes. But the father loves his kids and doesn’t want to maim them. So he cuts off his own hand instead.
Why didn’t he just say he changed his mind about the hand cutting? Why cut off his own hand? It was his rule - so if he decided it was wrong all he had to do was not follow it.
Same thing with God. He was the one he created Original Sin. If he decided it was too harsh, why not just end it? Why did he have to be crucified?
And, just to make this even less plausible, God is omniscient so he knew all this was going to happen back when he created the universe and made the rule in the first place. So even before God told Adam not to eat from the Tree, he knew he was regret doing it. Why didn’t God just tell Adam, “There’s the Tree over there. I’d prefer you didn’t eat the fruit from that tree. But if you do, I’ll forgive you because I love you.”
God wanted to teach us that if we disobey His Commandments, we will be punished. If God knew all along that Adam would eat the fruit, maybe He was just spending His time thinking what would be the best punishment for Adam.
You might as well ask this: Why does God allow suffering?
Need to restate it:
You not being able to be eternally happy because of a soul in eternal suffering is also God’s feeling towards it IMHO. The reason you would not be able to enjoy eternal happiness is God’s reason also.
It’s not that God is feeling along the same lines as you, but God is feeling your heart directly as His, your cry for the suffering He hears and He feels what you feel towards that situation. Your emotions in this are His.
I would also apply this to the annihilated, someone not suffering but eternally gone would also pull on God’s heart and everyone who felt that loss of that soul would be God’s feeling on it.
I was actually thinking about this yesterday. Now, God sets up this obvious booby trap, “don’t eat the fruit, or I’ll know and you’ll be sorry !”. Predictably, Adam and Eve do just that, acquire the knowledge of Good & Evil and are made to be quite sorry indeed.
But what if it had gone the other way ? What if Adam and Eve had never eaten the fruit ? The wouldn’t know what Evil is, would they ? Which means they and their offspring would go around happily doing horrible things to each other and feeling quite content about it, just as they were going about buck naked without a care in the world (one hopes there were no stinging nettles in the Garden). But you see what I mean, right ? Adam would be out there torturing small animals and then raping their corpses, just because he wouldn’t know any better and it sounded like a good idea to pass the time.
How is that Paradise ? And if that’s what God’s original plan all along before we messed it up for Him, what the holy fuck, Dude ?
I don’t have a problem so much with the idea that God allows suffering. To an eternal God, all of the suffering that is possible in a human lifetime must seem pretty small. Heck, even to people, it’ll seem that way to us in an eternal afterlife. Let’s say you had a really horrible life and were slowly tortured to death. As you’re dying you’re going to think the suffering you experienced was overwhelming. But then you go to Heaven and experience supreme joy. Now suppose after about fifty thousand years of total happiness, you happen to think back on your mortal existence. Is the few decades of suffering you experienced going to still seem significant tens of thousands of years later?
And God’s perspective is a lot wider than that. He’s experiencing the entire existence of the universe across billions of years. From a perspective like that, even something like the Holocaust is going to seem small.
But if God did have a plan, why did he change it? And if he was going to change it, why did he wait several thousand years? There were millions of people living under the cloud of Original Sin and God knew he was going to repeal it. So why did he wait until 4 BC to manifest as Jesus? Why didn’t Jesus appear in the Garden of Eden itself?
Because God has an IQ of around 88. He’s functional, but he just isn’t very bright.
He’s forgetful, prone to misunderstandings and occasionally confabulates to cover up his mistakes. Sad, really.
So if i’m understanding you correctly, your position is that there is neither eternal torture or a cessation of existence, since that would conflict with eternal joy? Or I guess alternatively that those things do exist but eternal joy doesn’t.
FWIW, I believe the idea that “God has a Plan” (which spans aeons and hasn’t changed one iota since its inception) is specific to some Protestant denominations. AFAIK Catholics don’t subscribe to this idea, they merely opine that whatever He’s up to, we just don’t (and can’t) get it.
It’s not so much “God has a plan” as “God has an opinion”. If he thought Original Sin was a good idea, he would have kept it. If he thought Original Sin was a bad idea, he wouldn’t have started it. But I can’t see how God thought Original Sin was a bad idea but he was going to go ahead and do it anyway for a few thousand years before stopping.
As for the idea that we can’t understand God, I have no argument with that. As I’ve indicated, my impression of what God would be if he existed is a being beyond human comprehension. But if you accept the idea that God is incomprehensible, then what’s the point of religion at all? It’s all based on the premise that we can understand what God wants. If you make the argument that God is beyond our ability to understand then there’s no point in religion - what God actually wants may be the exact opposite of what we think he wants. For all we know, he just wants to be left alone and human faith is annoying him.