Didn’t we already cover this somewhere? When you talk to God its called a prayer, when God talks to you its called schizophrenia.
I swear officer I have to get to church NOW the boss said so. Is even the most fundie cop going to let you go for that. Or drag you in for a drug/alcohol test.
But if the punishment does not fit the crime, is the act of punishing “all-loving”? If the punishment is too extreme, or not extreme enough, I would say no, it is not.
The idea of eternal hell of the fire-and-brimstone variety does not seem to fit many of the crimes the Bible sets forth. I was raised in a home where anything I did considered by my father to be “wrong” was punished with a severe whipping with a leather belt. If I came home late, lied, stole, or spilled a glass of iced tea, my actions were met with the same extreme punishment. I did not consider this “all-loving.”
Similarly, if all “sins” committed are punished by the same extreme action - eternal damnation - then I do not percieve that as “all-loving.”
There is a difference between taking phone priviliges away from your child for two weeks because she lied about her whereabouts and starving the child for two weeks for the same offense. In the former, the punishment fits the crime. In the latter, the punishment is extremely cruel. The idea of hell is to punish all actions with extreme cruelty regardless of the severity of the act itself.
I do not consider exclaiming, “Jesus Christ!” when I stub my toe to be on par with taking another life. Thus I do not believe both actions deserve the same punishment. I would argue that God’s “discipline” is quite different than the discipline with which “all-loving” parents treat their child.
After saying I thought everyone was going to Heaven, etc. and no one paying any friggin attention, I have decided that only myself and Pamela Anderson are going to Heaven and the rest of you can settle this in Hell. 
I have a friend whose father had an inoperable brain tumor. He was receiving hospice care, but had an unexplained spontaneous remission, a real seeming miracle. He was an 82 year old atheist who didn’t believe in God. His daughter told him, “You may not believe in God, but God believes in you.”
Does that mean that God doesn’t believe in all those people who do die of cancer? (Many of them at much younger ages than 82.)
At least no one could accuse him of hypocracy.
How many atheists do you know that do believe in “God”?
If I may…
Hell is not punishment AS SUCH. Hell is that which is apart from the presence of God. As I understand things, God isn’t in the business of punishing people for eternity. He just is incapable of being in the presence of sin, and since all have sinned, we can’t be in His presence. Excepting, of course, a bridge, i.e. Jesus.
With respect, you are in a position to make those judgenments now because (I assume) you are now a parent (or at least an adult) yourself and you can compare what you percieve as reasonable now with the actions of your own parents or of your contemporaries. As a teenager, I am sure that you were disgusted with your parent’s curfew and thought that they were worrying needlessly; as a parent, you may be able to understand better the rationale behind thier actions.
While you do not understand why using God’s name as a swearword is wrong/unacceptable, or why it should be placed on a par with murder, theft, etc., this is God’s house that we are living in, “and as long as you are living in my house, you live by my rules!!” 
[sub]grimpixie stops chanelling his parents[/sub]. Seriously, though - when it comes to the time, I suspect that we will see things a little differently:
We do not know what hell is like, except that it is a place where God isn’t - much of the popular depictions of hell (devil, pitchforks, cloven hooves, etc) are medieval in origin. All I know is that I would rather spend eternity with God than without Him…
Gp
Originally posted by ZOmegaZ:
Tell that to the fundamentalists that still occasionally give me hell for being my cranky old atheistic self. Or the rabid fans of Jesus who screamed at young women that they were going to hell whilst I was escorting them into PP. While you may not think of it as a punishment, I can assure you that there are many out there who feel quite differently. And they have no qualms about making their viewpoint known.
See above. Plus, the bible you put all of your faith in has some points to make about the terrible fates awaiting anyone going to hell. Dunno about your take on it, but that sounds suspiciously like punishment to me.
Waste
Flick Lives!
Congratulations, this is the thread that made me break my longstanding policy of not posting to message boards.
My 2 cents:
I will assume for the sake of argument that an afterlife exists. My perspective on the matter (as a Mormon) is that our experience in the afterlife is determined by us, and how we live.
Therefore, damnation is simply the state of refusing to be united with God. Our condition in the afterlife, no matter how evil we may have been in this one, is far better than we can even imagine as humans.
However, God will not, under any conditions, override our free will. Thus He will not force us into union with Him (and all the other benefits of salvation) if we will not accept Him. And the sort of person we are will not change if we do not try to change ourselves. So someone like Hitler, although he will have the opportunity for eternal bliss, will be “damned” if he persisits in being who he was.
Salvation is not dependent on a theology test. But we do have to accept God to be united with him. This can be done in this life, or, if for some reason a person cannot do this in good conscience, they will have opportunity in the next (and I imagine there will be plenty of evidence for doing so).
Over and over again, we forget who we are and what we were told to do by God in the Bible. The 10 commandments of the Old testament boil down to what Jesus says in the New testament - That if we follow the two new commandments that He gives us, we won’t break the 10. Love Him and love each other…NOT to judge one another. That is His job. But over and over our proud sinful nature demands that we judge everybody and everything. Our job is not to contemplate matters of God’s judgement, but to find and express more and more LOVE…Is that a bad message? NO! But people take His name, the author of love and peace and kill one another. We as people doomed to death without His help sure know how to judge Him and call Him unfair - What wretches we are and spotty toads to not trust Him to judge fairly. We should spend our time doing the judgement suggested by God, and that is to judge ourselves on how well we have and are serving one another in love. He says that even loving the least person is the same as loving Him. I’ve heard very famous people and absolute fools misrepresent God’s judgement over and over. Jesus called them Pharisees and they had Him put to death.
Over and over again we get slapped around the ears with the bible chronicles
Hey, I’m fond of fiction as well. Don’t * believe* in it though.
About believing in a god:
Okay.
I’ll wait till I’m dead.
Umm . . . thats not quite what I meant but if you live a good life (loving your neighbor and all that) and you are at least open to the possibility of the existence of God, sure you can be saved even if you were an atheist.
So we’ve got to play by your god’s rules because we are guests in his house?
I am inclined to agree with Czarcasm on this one.
To further the discussion…
Let us assume that Hell is not fire and gnashing teeth yada yada yada, but simple separation from God. Which is bad. And never stops.
No one has EVER done anything so bad that the pain it caused was eternal. Hitler and his thugs come to mind…but in a few more decades, what would have been the natural lifespans of the people he killed will be over. In a few millennia, it’ll be something you read about in history books a little. In a few billion years. the earth will be gone. And no one will be hurting over the Holocaust any more.
It seems reasonable to me, at this point, to let Hitler and his men free from whatever punishment is assigned to them. By this point, a creative and omnipotent being could surely have squeezed six million human being’s worth of suffering out of him.
I do not mean to minimize the Holocaust here…I’m sure it will take said God a good chunk of the time between now and then.
But Hell is supposedly forever. And the punishment assigned for the camps and the ovens will be the same punishment I get because I had impure thoughts about the girl sitting next to me in class today.
This is clearly not right.
The analogy of a father correcting his children is spectacularly inept here. A parent corrects his or her children to teach them better manners, not just to make them atone. Eventually you quit punishing your kid so you can see if she’s learned her lesson yet or not.
What’s the point of Hell if it’s eternal and there’s no second chance? None.
Hell not a punishment…again, this doesn’t fly. The Bible is quite clear that Hell is an unhappy place…I’m not sure what the Jews say, but I think nearly all religions paint Hell as a bad place to be. If it’s not punishment, God ought to make it at least tolerable.
So, I take it you don’t accept the authority of Revelation 14:9-11 as an accurate description of things?
Actually, I do not have children, nor do I ever plan on having children. And when I was a teenager (even an angry disgruntled teenager), I understood the rules my mother made as befitting the madness of the world outside. As my previous post made clear, I had an early, intimate relationship with the evils of this world and have done my best to avoid them since then.
However, God’s rules for behavior seem rather extreme and not based in any sort of reality whatsoever. If I am going to obey someone, I need to understand why he or she made the rules for me to obey in the first place, and why they are necessary. I see no such thing in the Bible.
When I read the Bible, I get dictates that I don’t understand. Why can’t I say “Jesus Christ!” in anger? Why can’t I explore different religions? Why is cursing as horrible as murder? All I get is the promise of understanding once I’m dead. When I read books on Buddhism, however, I get concrete answers: I can practice letting go, for example, and see the act of letting go positively affect my life. I can meditate and feel peacefulness encompass me so that I am a better person to everyone I encounter. I don’t have to wait for the promise of an afterlife to attain “heaven” - it’s already here, in me, and in the people around me.
And I must concur that because I don’t believe in Hell, I’m not worried about going there. I believe in a god (spirit, one, presence, what have you) that is so representative of love, it allows you infinite chances to return to this world in different forms until you get it right, live to the fullest possibilities of your potential and gifts - so that your mission is done and you attain utter peace - meaning your soul no longer exists.
This is worse than hell, right?