So Adam and Eve weren’t responsible for their decision in The Garden?
An accurate reading of the Bible has never stopped fringe Christianity. There are at least some hard-core Universalists.
(Also, there’s annihilationism, which says that the wicked are put to death – their souls are totally destroyed. There is no “burning in hell forever” according to them.)
I can only guess that such hard-core Universalists would argue that last possibility, that the Revelation was misinterpreted.
It might be symbolic. That’s pretty mainstream today: people don’t expect a literal dragon with ten heads, but try to interpret it to mean a group of nations, or a group of churches, or whatever.
Alas, the latter bit seems to be rather a failure. The angels are unable or unwilling to communicate with the great majority of mankind. (And they refuse to communicate even with their truest believers, in terms that can be tested objectively.) It’s very messy.
(I have a couple of friends who hold conversations with Jesus. However, Jesus never says anything concrete to them. Not even “Watch out for that parked car.”)
But, anyway, yes, if I were in communication with a demon, I’d try to reform him. I suspect the effort would be futile…but lots of the good things we do in this life (nuclear disarmament!) seem to be futile.
“George, George, George of the Jungle,
Friend to You and Me,
Gearge, George, George of the Jungle,”
[Jesus] Watch Out for That Tree! [/Jesus]
THUNK!!
At this point in time…yes, although the best AI routines are already starting to push at the boundaries. In the abstract, human minds are “machines” and could be emulated, in the worst case by brute-force mimicry.
(Also, people keep moving the boundaries! It was very firmly declared, not so very long ago – within my memory! – that computers could never play chess.)
Yes they were, they had free will and had been given clear instructions on “this is how things work”. The apple doesn’t represent knowledge in the sense in which you and I would use the word, it doesn’t represent understanding; it represents the power to define. At that point in the allegory of the garden, Adam and Eve are in a situation in which they consider that a rose isn’t a rose until they name it a rose. The apple represents the notion that “good” and “bad” aren’t whatever they happen to be, but whatever I want them to be; the ultimate hubris. The idea that if I say it enough times and believe it enough, I’ll be able to fly without prosthetics, because it is I who defines the world.
It is not, as that smack against the floor will demonstrate.
I guess I I must have gotten an abridged edition of the Bible, because mine didn’t have all those details in it.
Haven’t we already tried this with “God”? I expect similar results.
Have you spoken to any medical professionals or religious leaders about this and, if not, are you open to doing so? As far as I know there have been no confirmed cases of past lives or demon possession, nor has anyone ever been confirmed to have psychic abilities(a claim in your second post), so I have to ask if you would be willing to consider a more mundane explanation for your experiences. Although you claim not to follow any particular religion, your additional extraordinary claim to have talked to Archangel Michael hints that you have followed some religion in the past-would you mind expanding on this?
Yours didn’t have the bit about naming the animals and all that jazz?
I’m sorry-what are you talking about?
Genesis 2, 19-20 (New International Version, taken from biblehub):
19Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.
Ghosts and faerie are just a lower, weaker form of fictional beings. So when it comes to being totally imaginary, they are not as competent as the higher… um… whatever things?
Which paradoxically means they are more real then the Super-Demons et al. I’m reminded of trying to wrap my head around a negative times a negative is a positive.
I don’t see how Adam’s (Eve wasn’t created yet!) zoological nomenclature has the slightest bearing on the question.
“Saint” is the noun form of what really should be an adjective (which is how you get names like Santa Fe, “Holy Faith”). ‘Sanctus’ just means ‘holy’, and as an adjective can refer to angels as well as people. What is normally meant by it means canonized dead people, but in theory calling an Angel “saint” or “sanctus” is supposed to mean that they’re holy.
N.B. I’m not a universalist (I’m a hopeful universalist as comes to people, and a very doubtful universalist as regards the demons, and I guess not a universalist at all as regards the devil). Christian universalists (which were probably more common prior to the fifth century than afterwards) have dealt with those sorts of passages in a few different way.
One of them is to argue over translation. The references to eternal punishment typically use phrases that means something close to “unto the age of ages” or “ageless” punishment, which could mean genuinely eternal, but might not. The strongest argument in favour of “age of ages” meaning ‘eternal’ here is that similar expressions are used to describe eternal happiness in heaven, and nobody denies that those expressions really mean ‘eternal’. But then, orthodox Christianity generally doesn’t consider good and evil to be symmetrical, so maybe it’s incorrect to treat the descriptions of hell and heaven symmetrically either.
It’s also, obviously, possible that a condemnation to eternal punishment doesn’t necessarily mean that the victim will actually suffer ‘eternally’, any more than a court giving someone a life sentence means they will actually stay in prison for the rest of their life. God can exempt people (and who knows, maybe demons too) from his own decrees, in the interest of mercy.
The real interesting question here is whether the damned are able to repent, or if they are eternally fixed in their sin. People have made interesting arguments both ways, going back to the very beginnings of Christianity. One of the earliest is a text called the Apocalypse of Peter, IIRC dating from around 100-125 AD or so, which was actually used in some early versions of the Bible and accepted by some church fathers (and was later dropped from the orthodox Christian canon, on grounds of late dating). It’s a vision of heaven and hell, mostly focusing on hell with descriptions of the punishments doled out to various categories of evildoer. At the end of the document (in some versions) Jesus takes the narrator aside and confides in him as a sort of ‘secret’, that the end of time God will have mercy on all these people and reduce them from their torment, but that the world isn’t ready to know about that yet.
Well some ghosts and faerie can be VERY powerful but they tend to be less interested in humans than most.
The most powerful faerie reside almost entirely in Thelanis or the Feywild while the most powerful of ghosts have set up court in Shadowfell or the Land of Undeath and have little to no interest in the comings and going in the prime material plane.
Well, this is consistent with the concept of a merciful God and I always thought that eternal damnation was a harsh result for run of the mill sinners.
Yes, that’s what I meant; did the cult of Mary in some way inoculate Catholic counrtries against the gynophobia that in part underlay witchcraft hysteria? Like I said, idle speculation.
Um, cite?
D&D references, but if you believe it, it can be true!
And boss of 7th Heaven, meaning he gets first dibs on Catherine Hicks, the bastard. :mad:
It was, in Zugarramurdi. 
Nope. They made that decision before eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
I can’t imagine hiring a Protestant lawyer. Jew or Catholic? Yeah. Splitting hairs is what we do. 