If there is a hell, and people who don’t “know” him go there, how is God a just God? Say you’re a Buddhist, you’ve lived a good buddhist life (which is largely the same as a good Christian life, as far as I know, just without the Jesus): you rid yourself of desire, you helped your brotherman, you didn’t kill, etc. Then, when you die, you find yourself toasting in magma.
I’ve had Catholics tell me that the buddhist can go to heaven, too, because it’s actions that are important, but I’m wondering your take.
I’m sorry, the questions just keep coming to me. I want to tell you that I went to Presbyterian, Catholic, and Baptist schools all my life, and I just can’t sort this stuff out.
My last question, for this minute: What if I just can’t bring myself to believe? Whose fault is that? You can’t force someone to believe something. You can only make them act like they believe.
Sort of, I guess. When you write a check, you declare that it has value, but who knows. When your check is cashed, you have proved that your check was valuable. Repentance is not about promising to better. It is about holding dear something that you now know has value.
To me accepting God is not the lip service of going to church but something much deeper that occurs within the individual. It has a lot to do with accepting the true consequences of our choices rather than reward and punishment by a father fugure. If I say I stalk my pretty neighbor because I really love her then I will likely go to jail until I realize that stalking is not an expression of love.
God and Jesus are not egotists. They don’t care if you use the term Jehovah, Yaweh, Allah, Great Spirit, Mother Nature, JC, or Buddha.
It is the true intent of the heart {or spirit} that matters. That true intent is refelcted in our actions and how we deal with thoise around us. It says several places in the Bible that we will be judged according to our works and rewarded according to our deeds. It also says he{or she} that loves is born of God. To me there are no other qualifiers.
Believe what? I think it’s better to ask what you do believe rather than what you don’t. What do I value? Why? How much? For me it begins by being true to yourself. If you search your own heart and decide you are being true to yourself then by all means carry on. Dare to look at yourself honestly and go forward. I think thats better than following what someone else told you was “true”
The penalty for sin is damnation. One essential aspect of Christianity is the fact we’re all sinful, we all deserve to be condemned by God. However, if we sincerely repent of our sins - “following God”, if you like - we can be forgiven.
The main issue on which I, and cosmosdan, and Liberal would (presumably) disagree with Mines and Joey is whether or not “following God” requires an explicit commitment to the Christian faith, or if it can be achieved by other routes.
(Apologies if the above statement does not accurately reflect the views of any of the named individuals.)
A better analogy would be a prison rather than a country. The choice is being offered to Death Row inmates - “If you admit what you’ve done is wrong, turn away from it, and try and be guided in your lives by my laws and my example, you can go free. If you don’t, if you continue to claim that you’re innocent despite all the evidence against you, if you continue to deny that what you did was wrong - you’ll go to the chair.”
I think, by human standards, such a ruler would be considered unduly merciful.
Who indeed? But people (and angels) do.
<J.Edwards>ARE YOU GOING TO BE ONE OF THEM?</J.Edwards>
I think I would go further than that. The older I get, the more convinced I am that Christianity leads its followers expressly away from Christ. In the hands of church politicians, our Lord has become the theological equivalent of a football mascot.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding for whom you speak, but…To continue the metaphor, though, we’re all in a Supermax not because we are all we went on a murder spree at the Innocent Children and Adorable Baby Harp Seal Convention, but because our very way of living life has been deemed illicit by the authorities. Either we were put on Death Row for crime (sins) we committed (to which I say that is a severe and cruel overreaction) or life itself is Death Row (in which case, we really don’t have much say in how we live life at all, do we?)
I wouldn’t say Chritianity as a whole does this. I know many loving sincere Christians who are on the path and seeking God as sincerely as anyone and are touched by God’s guiding spirit. They in turn touch others. We all have our barriers to conquer. Christian barriers aren’t any worse or better than anyone elses. I do consider a couple of Christian doctrines to be signs pointing in the wrong direction, but realistically, who’s to say that the twists and turns of the Christian path are longer or shorter than the alternative paths one might choose. Each person must be true to themselves and have the courage to express it in their actions and words. That interaction, is all part of the process.
This is a good point, and there are various responses - the following is by no means intended to be a comprehensive account, and I hope that Mines, who, after all, may end up doing this for a living, may have some contribution to make.
The more enthusiastic Protestant churches (as exemplified by Jonathan Edwards) would say something along the lines of “Who are we to judge whether God’s punishment for sin is ‘severe and cruel’? Is a criminal the right person to decide his punishment, or his level of guilt? You may not think that your sins condemn you to lake of eternal fire, but God does!”. Now, speaking entirely personally, this is probably closest to my belief. I have no problem at all in believing that my own sins are more than adequate to deserve the most severe of torments (and, were I to go into details, you would probably agree with me. ). However, I appreciate that this may not be a particularly common attitude in today’s society, and that it’s an approach that is unlikely to win many converts. A more moderate way of putting this is to say that, in order to be admitted to God’s presence, we would need to be perfect, entirely free of sin, and none of us are capable of this without God’s help. If we regard “hell” as being eternal isolation from God, without employing the traditional imagery of physical suffering, this view may appear more reasonable to our human imaginations.
As I understand it, the Catholic position is to deny that there are just two possible fates that await us, eternal bliss or eternal torment. We will receive appropriate punishment from our sins in Purgatory, but this is not (necessarily) eternal, and we may be admitted to God’s presence when our debts are paid.
Incidentally, the idea that “life itself is Death Row” is by no means unique to Christianity; my understanding of Buddhism is unfortunately very limited, but the Noble Truth of that faith, “Life is suffering”, would appear to express the same view.
This then brings us to the problem of Original Sin, and the fate of those (young infants, for example) who die without having the opportunity to commit any sins; a topic that can be, and has been, discussed in other threads.
As far as I know, the Bible never says the Israelites “roamed” in the desert. They went directly from Mt. Sinai to Kadesh Barnea, and stayed there for 38 years. The “wandering in the desert for 40 years” is a fallacy. They did not “wander” anywhere, according to the Bible.
Yep. 2 million people allegedly camped at a tiny oasis for 38 years, yet not a single trace of human habitation or presence has ever been found there from anywhere near that time period. 2 million people is a city. It’s impossible for 2 million people to live in one place for nearly four decades and not leave a trace.
Incidentally, there are no traces of even wandering nomads in the Sinai Peninusula for the time in question. There are traces from earlier and later times but not during the target time. Amazing that we can detect sites where a small group of people camped for a single night but not something as massive as the Kadesh Barnea settlement. The feces alone would have created a small mountain.
I don’t know where you got your information. Once again, you’ve made a summary declaration about alleged Biblical error based on God knows what. Please see this cite and its accompanying pages:
I don’t know what you think your site contradicts about what I’ve said (I can tell you its headline does not represent any legitimate scholarly conclusion). There is no archaeological evidence for the presence of any human beings in the Sinai Peninsual during the time of the alleged Exodus. I got my information from reading about the actual mainstream archaeology of the region. It is actually a afirly uncontroversial conclusion among Middle eastern archaeologists these days that the Biblical Exodus never occurred. One of the definitive books on this is The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. Finkelstein is one of the leading Israeli archeologists in the world and is Chairman of the Achaeology Department at Tel Aviv Unversity. Here is some info from Finkelstein:
The real death blow for the Exodus, though, is that the archaeology both in Egypt and Israel shows that the Israelites were never enslaved in Egypt in the first place.
An Eastern Orthodox view of Hell counters the idea of “eternal isolation from God” with “eternal alienation from God WHILE eternally in His Presence” - a position I can easily reconcile in my interpretation of the Biblical statements on God’s Love & Justice and also human responsibility & volition.
To be precise, actual Catholic doctrine teaches that the Eternal Debt of our sins was settled in the Death & Resurrection of Christ, while Purgatory is for the repair of our souls to go into God’s Presence rather than for the remission of our sins. Of course, that has not always been communicated very clearly in the Church.
I really should think of something that actually relates to Mines’ OP.
OK- here’s one- is Open Theism and Emergent/Emerging Church trends of any discussion at Seminary? What are your positions?
I don’t dispute anything you are saying. I was just alerting our fellow searchers for the straight dope not to repeat inaccuracies regarding what the Biblical text says, putting aside for the moment question of its historical veracity.
This is not what the text says. They camped at Mt. Sinai for about 14 months, and left Sinai on the 20th day of the second month (approximately May); Numbers 10:11. They camp at several places on a rather direct route to the borders of Canaan. They arrive just before the grape harvest, around July. In Numbers 13-14 we have the story of the great rebellion, where that generation is sentenced to living out the next 38 years in the desert, all at Kadesh Barnea. The narrative of the travels picks up again in Numbers 20.
I can find no biblical citation in the Torah that the Israelites “wandered”. Can anyone point me to it?
No. There are only three people mentioned during that point of the narrative. There is no declaration that there are only three humans on Earth at that point. The fact that Cain talks about fearing persecution from other people indicates that other people exist.
As to Cain “shagging his sister,” the ancient Hebrews recognized that point and dealt with it in several ways, not least noting that laws governing incest were not established (according to their myth) until the Law was handed down at Sinai. Among a culture in which Law is handed down from authority rather than being the consensus of a group, the fact that there was no Law meant that actions proscribed by that Law were not necessarily evil.
Well, that’s the problem. The alleged time of the alleged Exodus is disputable and controversial, which is what the linked article is about. There are scads of archeological artifacts in that area; they just date to a slightly different time period of the Bronze Age. Dio, my only criticism of you in these matters is that you tend to blurt out whatever particular side of a controversy that you favor as though it were settled fact, and leave unmentioned any hint of another point of view. I don’t know whether you haven’t read dissenting views or have just decided not to share them. I always give you these links in the hope that its the former. And don’t go saying “most scholars” this and “the best scholars” that. You know better. Authorities in the social sciences move like the waves in the sea. And that’s because new stuff is discovered every day. You can’t just close the book and say, “Okay guys, that’s it.”
Lib, there are no “views” that any archaeological evidence exists in the Sinai for the presense of any human beings at any time to close to ANY part of the time range for the alleged Exodus (for which the Bible gives two distinctly contradictory times but for which neither one of them works and neither does any time before or after or in between those times).
There is no controversy about this among archaeologists. There is no other side. The cincher is not just the lack of evidence in the Sinai but the fact that the cultural group known as the Israelites never left Canaan and was never enslaved in Egypt. It has long been known among Israeli archaeologists that the Exodus was not a historical event. You won’t find any dissenting views on that in scholarly literature (and before you you cite it, Biblical Archaeology Review is a religious publication, not a real archaeological journal).
