For me, it’s curiosity. I don’t deny a person their right to believe whatever they want to believe, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering why they believe it when all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Call it discussion, debate, or fighting ignorance. I find the subject interesting.
Consider your ignorance fought. 
Anyway, Martin Gardner, who I respect as skeptic and thinker, said he believed these things (despite the killjoy intrusions of reason) because he found them consoling. Didn’t make me respect Gardner any less.
Yeah, that’s what I thought you were going to say.
I did explain several tangible reasons in my post above. If I had to sum it up into one primary reason it is that the concept of faith is concept for which its value does not cover its expenses. The number of people who are murdered every day because of differences in faith trounces (by a large margin) any temporary comfort you say it gives some people. Many atheist philosophers think of death as something no more scary than a sleep more carefree than you have ever had. Epicurus, hundreds of years before Christ talked of death as being no different than what you felt before your birth and that this is hardly something to be feared. As such, the need for faith to comfort one in the hour of darkness is really only needed because the fear of punishment and retribution instilled by religion in the first place.
While you say liberal Christians are less intolerant and less violent they still promote faith in Jesus and the afterlife, and Polycarp in particular still thinks hell is some kind of bad place. How bad they want to admit hell is, is debatable, but if we take Jesus at his word, hell is really bad and really eternal. If we accept this, then it is not unreasonable for fundamentalist to kill unbelievers (who are evil) if they think doing so will result in saving other souls who would have followed a bad example burn in hell themselves. And yes, the bible does explicitly say it’s ok to kill unbelievers for this very reason. Fundamentalist are not generally killing without reason they are killing for reasons based on false premises. Liberal Christians commit the crime of encouraging these false premises, which fundamentalists then follow to their logical conclusions.
I like fighting ignorance. Perhaps you should post on a message board with mission more inline with your views.
I respect him less. As a braver skeptic and thinker put it:
“There is something feeble, and a little contemptible, about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths”
Bertrand Russell
Yeah, but Russell was a dork.
Wow, I take it that’s the best you can do.
Jesus is not alleged by the Gospels to have said anything about Hell.
According to http://www.comparative-religion.com/articles/jesus_hell.php:
Sounds kinda hell-y to me.
Gehenna wasn’t Hell, it was an actual physical valley outside of Jerusalem. It was conceived of as a place of anihilation, not eternal torment. It wasn’t otherwrldly.
Hades was the standard Greek translation of Sheol, which wasn’t Hell either. Sheol was an underworld (pretty much like Hades) where it was believed that EVERYBODY went (not just bad people) to await the eventual resurrection and judgement of all people (after which the bad people would be anihilated). Often times in the Hebrew Bible, Sheol is used virtually synomously to mean “death” or “the grave.”
There is not and has never been any concept of “Hell” as a place of eternal torment (though there are some ideas about temporary punishment).
That should say, “There never has been any such concept…IN JUDAISM.”
Hijack
Very impressive, Dio. Few people that I’ve met of either Christian or Jewish belief have even the foggiest notion of the distinctions you just made. Bravo.
(You all will notice I rarely chime in on religious debate here anymore, because I find rehashing the same things over and over to be be trite and tiresome, ymmv. But I just had to publicly acknowlege Dio’s statements. I may not agree with his world view, but he sure does seem to know what the hell the subject he’s aguing is.)
End hijack
Dio
Just out of curiosity, how did the Christian conception of Hell as a place of eternal torment arise?
It probably emerged from Hellenistic influences in the first couple of centuries and was eventually written about by early Christian theologians like Tertullian and Augustine and became adopted as Church doctrine. The imagery of Christian Hell also owes a lot to Dante.
And here comes Diogenes, right on cue, with his Jesus didn’t talk of hell speech.
Yes, Diogenes I know you believe that. Having watched you debate the issue with me and many others over the years I can’t help but get an image of plugging holes in a dike but running out of fingers and screaming allegory to Lazarus’ rich friend tormented by flame. Suffice it to say that I find your argument unconvincing but I am willing to admit it as a possibility and did so above.
Unless you have changed since we last spoke, you think Christ just murders souls Hitler style. While I disagree with your assessment, I did mention the killing of souls rather than the torturing of souls as one of the contingencies.
See, I put the kill part first, and I did so just for you. Also in the thread that was recently closed, where this discussion stems from, I made another concession to your views.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=379546&page=6
Anyway, it really doesn’t matter if you are right, as virtually no Christians read the bible you do, and virtually no Christians agree with you. If you will notice, I was in a discussion with Polycarp, a Christian about Christian held concepts, and Polycarp, near as I can tell, believes some kind of bad afterlife scenario for bad people:
These are not the words of someone who believes a given soul is dead. Dead souls don’t have regrets. I was not in a discussion with you, an atheist/agnostic arguing the finer points of translation. I can’t do both at the same time and I’ll thank you not to muddle up my thread.
Well, this is fun. But in some ways justified.
First point I want to make is, I believe in the freedom of human beings to make value judgments about the data they accumulate about the world they live in. For example, and not to hijack this, I’ve seen an accrual of evidence that suggests to me that Bush partisans attempted to subvert the electoral process in 2000 and 2004. That’s my own subjective evaluation of the data. I respect Bricker’s right to look at the same data and come to different conclusions. I think he’s wrong, but of such matters are Great Debates made.
That’s not a hijack from the topic that badchad set; it’s groundwork for my answer. Because nothing is quite so obvious to me as that one’s evaluations of whether God, a god, gods, the Invisible Pink Unicorn, or anything else in the general category of “the supernatural” exists, is a subjective judgment. When someone says, “It’s obvious that…”, the only thing that’s obvious to me is that whatever comes after the “that” is very likely to be a conclusion the someone has drawn that is at minimum debatable, a subjectively held judgment.
I’ve never been happy with badchad, not because he challenges me, but because his style has always seemed to me to be one of trolling. I’m beginning to get a better handle on where he’s coming from, and will be glad to change that judgment of his motives to something much more favorable, as this discussion progresses – assuming that there are grounds to do so, of course! 
Now, to the key points. First, to me Christianity is about trust. The proper word for that is, of course, “faith” – but that’s a slippery term. For a Rationalist, it means, “something you think or hope is true that you don’t know is.” For a Dogmatist, it means “a body of doctrinal assertions.” I intend to mean neither of these. If I have faith in someone or something, it means I put trust in it.
And the God in whom I have trust, faith, is for me a Person. A somewhat elusive Person to know, but one Whom I’ve encountered and believe that I can trust. I would love to know the context of the quote from me that is badchad’s signature, but I expect it fits in well here.
When you trust someone, you put your confidence in that person despite any apparent negatives. A couple in a happy marriage trust their spouses to be the persons whom they married, to be someone they can each be sure of. Likewise with a friendship, a healthy in loco parentis relationship – really, the gamut of human relationships. To advert to my example above, Bricker trusts President Bush and his supporters; I don’t. That is why we bring different subjective evaluations to the Diebold, Ohio, Florida, etc. data that keep being brought forward by people opposed to the Bush Administration.
When I say “rationalize,” I’m not investing it with positive or negative connotations. Everyone builds a worldview with which they can feel comfortable based on their own subjective interpretations of the data available. badchad’s, Diogenes’s, kanicbird’s, and my own worldviews are all extensions from basic principles we cherish, whether that be the assurance of science and reason seeing through superstition or divine miraculous events. In that sense, we all rationalize – we all construct comfortable explanations of what UFO sightings, accounts of Aphrodite appearing to random Greek hero, the Resurrection, the JFK assassination, Tropical Storm Beryl, and whatever else confronts our consciousness, really are. It means that we have preconstructed pigeonholes into which to tentatively assign a sighting of a Loch Ness Monster, the Virgin Mary miraculously healing a broken leg in San Mejorquenada, Mexico, Condi Rice’s latest press release, and a tornado sighted over Oklahoma.
If you consider, badchad, that I mean I’m intentionally deluding myself, or allowing myself to willfully fall into a delusive state, my use of “rationalization” was intended to be completely the opposite: I am honest enough with myself, and have enough intellectual integrity, to recognize that I could be fooling myself, and to examine my worldview for possible error.
More shortly, in more direct response to your OP.
He didn’t…that is, he is not alleged to have done so by the Gospels.
Belief has nothing to do with it. The meaning of the original Greek is not my opinion.
The Lazarus Parable makes reference to “Hades” and to the “Bosom of Abraham.” The Bosom of Abraham was a part of Sheol/Hades. As I said before, there came to be some later, Greek-influenced conceptions in Judaism that the underworld (the TEMPORARY underworld) was divided into “good” parts and “bad” parts. The distinction from Christian Hell is that this underworld was not eternal. It’s not allegory, it reflects a real belief, just not the one you think it does.
I don’t think “Christ” exists at all, nor do I believe that Jesus ever claimed to be God or set himself up as a judge.
All right, then. Is there some reason why the annihilation of my soul is anything I should care about or want to avoid?
I am not going to address the “second coming” bit at all. There have been “Christ figures” – people who, in real life or fiction, have died in a manner that works a major change in people – throughout history. I had a very strong feeling that this young man would fall into that role based on his adolescence, but have never heard anything more of him. And yeah, I played that up for all it was worth, and you were right to call me on it.
As for the “telepathy” thing, though, for once we were 100% on the same side, and you don’t seem to realize that. In that case, recounting my “telepathic experiences” with my ward was in making the point that oftentimes “supernatural” experiences have a very natural explanation – in this case, his and my knowing each other’s motivations, thought processes, and such well enough that the slightest clue would provide a clear insight into the other’s thoughts.
Perhaps. I set a lot of store by civility, though, and your “persistence” seemed to others than me to verge on obsessive stalking. As for the quality of the theology, though, let’s let others be the judge. If I didn’t believe I had the right of it, I wouldn’t be arguing it; if you didn’t believe my arguments to be weak, you’d be agreeing with me, not attacking my arguments. So clearly we need to have third-party judgment on that.
For the “What did Jesus really talk about?” question, I’ll ask you, badchad, to set me some examples of what in particular you allude to. He said a lot of things, presuming we can rely on the Gospels for a reasonable picture of who and what He was, said, and did – and I’ll suggest that we assume we can so rely, for the sake of argument, until and unless it becomes necessary to get into textual criticism to discuss this fruitfully.
I am not going to address the “second coming” bit at all. There have been “Christ figures” – people who, in real life or fiction, have died in a manner that works a major change in people – throughout history. I had a very strong feeling that this young man would fall into that role based on his adolescence, but have never heard anything more of him. And yeah, I played that up for all it was worth, and you were right to call me on it.
As for the “telepathy” thing, though, for once we were 100% on the same side, and you don’t seem to realize that. In that case, recounting my “telepathic experiences” with my ward was in making the point that oftentimes “supernatural” experiences have a very natural explanation – in this case, his and my knowing each other’s motivations, thought processes, and such well enough that the slightest clue would provide a clear insight into the other’s thoughts.
Perhaps. I set a lot of store by civility, though, and your “persistence” seemed to others than me to verge on obsessive stalking. As for the quality of the theology, though, let’s let others be the judge. If I didn’t believe I had the right of it, I wouldn’t be arguing it; if you didn’t believe my arguments to be weak, you’d be agreeing with me, not attacking my arguments. So clearly we need to have third-party judgment on that.
For the “What did Jesus really talk about?” question, I’ll ask you, badchad, to set me some examples of what in particular you allude to. He said a lot of things, presuming we can rely on the Gospels for a reasonable picture of who and what He was, said, and did – and I’ll suggest that we assume we can so rely, for the sake of argument, until and unless it becomes necessary to get into textual criticism to discuss this fruitfully.
Well, no, but the exchange was little more than “my philosopher can beat up your philosopher”, so I went with a punchy zing rather than a pointless extended debate over how much each of us likes our guy and how brave each of them is, etc.
Anyway, Michael Shermer agrees with me, so I’m confident one can be an atheist and civil to those that aren’t.
You know, badchad, you seem to think you know quite a lot about what Christians believe and in particular, liberal Christians. How much experience have you had with liberal Christians outside of this message board? You obviously know a lot about what Polycarp, in particular, believes, but he is actually more of a traditionalist on most matters than most liberal Christians I know. If you’ve read some books by liberal Christian scholars, such as Marcus Borg, you’ll see that many of your perceptions are in error.
For example, all of the liberal Christians I know accept modern scholarship as a means to inform our readings of the Bible, and feel that what Borg calls a Historical/Metaphorical reading can be far more illuminating. In that light, we see find that passages condemning homosexuality and rejecting modern science can be (and often, should be) interpreted in ways that a literal reading would not allow. Thus, very few liberal Christians I know believe in a hell in the traditional sense of the word. In fact, Diogenes’s explanation of “Gehenna” is nothing new to me- it was something I learned during Adult Christian Education classes at church. For more information on how many Christians understand “hell” nowadays, you can try reading this page by a Presbyterian minister.
Also, while there is definitely some diversity of opinion, most liberal Christians I know do not necessarily believe that God breaks the laws of physics and biology every so often to prove himself. This does not mean we believe in the clockmaker God of the Deists; rather, we believe that God is such a constant presence in this world that He does not need to break any rules to make Himself known to us. Thus, many liberal Christians don’t believe in a physical bodily resuscitation- that is, Jesus’ corpse was reanimated and brought back to life, which is an unbiblical position anyway- but that the resurrection was a spiritual event in the lives of the early followers of the Way, an event where the living Jesus was experienced even though he had died.
The point is, for liberal Christians, the Bible is indeed a lens by which we see God, but it’s not the only lens. I believe that’s where you misunderstand most liberal Christian positions. If indeed the Bible were the only way we can know God- and many fundamentalists may suggest as much- then yes, a non-literal reading may not work out very well. However, I don’t know of any liberal/mainline Christians who think this is true. Most will say that God can be known in many ways, through the Bible, through prayer, through personal discernment and conscience. After all, Jesus extols us to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind.
Faith for us is an important thing. It’s wrong of you to say we don’t have enough faith in God, and that’s why we have to go cherry picking rather than reading everything very literally and rejecting anything science or historical scholarship has to offer us. Rather, we have too much faith to invent nonsense like “Creation science” to prove to ourselves that God exists. Our concept of faith is not the very modern idea of ‘believing that God is real’ but rather about how much trust we choose to put in God and the Spirit.
Anyway, Christianity is far more diverse than you seem to think, and Polycarp, as much as I admire him, does not necessarily represent all liberal Christians.