Not for nothing, Fuel, but you should really see the message some of the less successful witnessers on this MB have put forth.
(Please excuse if this posts twice, I’m getting timeouts.)
I’ve tried Christianity.
It doesn’t work for me.
As a pagan I am a better Christian than I was as a Christian; better centred in myself, better able to appreciate the world, better able to give and receive love, better able to express, create, and live to the fullest of my potential.
A god who would insist that I should be Christian is a god who wants me to cripple myself morally to suit his whimsies, to be less than I can be, to be in more pain and to bring about less joy. Likewise, a god who condemns love, condemns pleasure, condemns taking joy in its supposed creation is a god I can do without; such is the god I see spoken of by many who seek to proselytise.
If your god cannot handle this, then separation from that god is no more loss than separation from any other abusive parent; if your god can handle this – which I believe He can – then I believe that your god is larger than many of His followers do. I do not limit devotion to the divine by allegiance to petty symbols.
Poly, based on the usually high level of intelligence you display, I can only assume that you are being intentionally obtuse in this thread. Here’s my problem:
The definition of Hell I’ve been working with is “a place where certain people will be tortured for eternity (or at least where they will spend eternity) after they die.” What you seem to be describing is more of a “hell on earth” concept where someone’s bad choices causes bad things to happen while the person is still alive. Which are you talking about?
Assuming that you are talking about the first Hell (i.e., a bad place one goes after death): In your last post you describe Hell as the inevitable consequence of a series of bad choices. But the point that I am trying to make is that God created Hell in the first place, so God created Hell as the “inevitable consequence,” and the consequence wasn’t inevitable before God created it. Therefore, God wants to save people from the peril that God himself created for them.
This is weird to me. If God didn’t want anyone to go to Hell, then he wouldn’t have created Hell in the first place. One therefore cannot view God as a benevolent force that only wants to save us from the inevitable consequences of our bad actions because God himself created hat inevitable consequence.
Aren’t you willing to conform to His whimsies for a short period on Earth in order to gain his gift of heaven for eternity?
Also, maybe those petty symbols are not so petty… maybe they are God’s message? I am assuming by symbols you mean the words in the Bible…
Hell is not torture, it’s separation. Torture may follow, but that’s only a reaction to the environment of Hell, which is simply separation from God. To define it any other way is non-foundational.
God created Hell so that he could give humans a free will. It’s an important piece of the free will/justice puzzle. Now, to question why God did it this way is beyond me… but it’s his just plan and apprently this was the best way to acheive justice on Earth.
So what’s so bad about being in Hell, then, if it’s just a place to hang out without God?
It’s torture anyway you cut it and it’s unjustified torture.
**Fuel[/b[, do you believe that all the Jews who died in the holocaust went to Hell? Did they deserve to?
(Just to save time; assume that all of them had consiously rejected Jesus as their saviour. Other than that they were like any other group of 6 million people-- some good, some bad, none perfect.
Game, set, match, TaxGuy. IMHO.
This is a completely irrelevant nitpcik, but…
“Kicks” was recorded by Paul Revere & The Raiders, not the Rolling Stones. You’re presumably chanelling lead singer Mark Lindsay.
You’re mistaking my point. I’m rejecting the concept of Hell as eternal punishment for fleeting sins. To be sure, there’s some Scriptural evidence of this, and it is ultimately up to God to dispose of us as He wishes, but ‘shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?’ (His words, not mine.) It would be easy for me, believing as I do in a compassionate and loving Father, to reject the idea of Hell altogether.
But I understand Him as being more subtle than that. While there is a chance for you to turn to Him, He will not give up on you. But when you have reduced yourself to something with no volition and no interior spirit, you are incapable of turning to Him. That’s not a moral or judicial concept; it’s a statement of impossibility, just as “trees cannot walk” or “elephants cannot fly by flapping their ears” is. Hell is the suffering that we reduce ourselves to when we’ve exhausted every possibility of doing it for ourselves. And it’s neither on Earth nor in the afterlife, but the state of being without God and being physically and volitionally unable to turn to Him.
If we sit down to play a game which you can win, you take the chance that you may lose. It’s impossible to devise a two-or-more-person game in which there is one winner without there being a loser.
For moral choices to have consequences, there must be an “out” – a means whereby those consequences have effect. Any decent human being, much less a compassionate God, is going to make it possible to repent and eschew those consequences, and have them expunged. But for any of that to have meaning, the consequences must be present, and real.
As I said above, for God to allow a person to turn from Him is the natural corollary to His having made it possible to choose to turn to Him, rather than making goodness compulsory. And I think He did this for a good reason, closely akin to what growing up is for a child.
Please note that I am not necessarily proclaiming a “repent and join my church, or you’re going to Hell” bit of evangelism here. I don’t know how He works, or what He has in mind for the moral atheist or the good Hindu – but I guarantee it’s not Dante’s Inferno. Both Purgatory and reincarnation seem plausible answers, though that’s His business, not mine.
I reiterate – Hell is not the sentence of God’s Court of Judgment, but the inevitable consequence of a life lived totally without Him, in much the sense that water inevitably flows downhill. For Him to have created a universe without Hell would be tantamount to taking away our free will to make choices and have them matter. But He is sufficiently loving that He will do anything He can to enable us to avoid that fate.
OK, so you two don’t believe that non-Christians go to a place of eternal suffering after they die, and Polycarp has indicated that he doesn’t know where non-Christians go when they die.
My question to you both now is as follows: can you provide Biblical support for the notion that “non-Christians do not burn forever in a lake of fire after they die”?
My position is that your beliefs on this are actually your own and are not part of Christianity as traditionally understood. If you accept my position as correct, then why do you feel that it’s OK for you to believe certain parts of the Bible and not believe other parts? How do you choose which parts you will believe and which parts you won’t?
Absolutely. Check the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37. At the beginning, the guy asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus tells the parable and ends with, “Go and do likewise.” Also, there’s the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46, which says that those condemned to Hell are those who didn’t do good things for their fellow humans in life. Neither one says anything about believing that Jesus is divine, or in His resurrection. It would have been pretty strange if some guy asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” and He replied, “Well, you have to believe that in a few years, I’ll be crucified and resurrected. It hasn’t happened yet, but you have to believe it will, or you’re toast.” 
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Jews and Muslims want eternal separation from God?
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Atheists are all spitting in God’s face?
And boy is He pissed.
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Who said anything about the Bible? I’m talking about what many (if not most) fundies believe.
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Are you really that naive?
If they loved people, they wouldn’t find it acceptable to worship a demon who sends people to hell for making a simple mistake.
You seem to be a bigot, too. You seem to think that people who don’t believe the way you do are spitting in God’s face- but you love them despite their mistakes. It’s like the people who say they love homosexuals, but hate the vile perversion of two men or two women who love each other getting married.
Fuel, have you seen The Rapture?
This is a laughable response to Lilairen’s thoughtful and careful explanation of her beliefs.
Lilairen: By using a different method than Christianity, I am able to be a better, happier person and live my life more consistently in line with the goals and teachings of Jesus. Thus, I have to believe that God would value these things more than the specific rules and rituals I followed to get there.
Fuel: No, it’s safer if you follow these specific rules and rituals. Otherwise, you’ll go to hell.
Got it. I think I’d rather live in Lilairen’s world than yours.
Why should I make a worse life for myself and everyone I know on the suspicion that your god is more real than the ones that I actually deal with and give me a cookie after I’m dead?
Show me how following your god makes the world actually better rather than attempting to offer me cookies when I’m dead, and you may convince me. I’m not interested in taking the selfish route; a belief that it’ll be all okay to have been less than the best and most moral person I can be because I get cookies is not sufficient to comfort myself or the people that I would fail.
The seperation argument just makes me laugh. I’m already “seperated” by God. I do not feel his prescence, I do not see any evidence of his will or his works or even his exsistence in any facet of my life. And you know what? It ain’t all that bad. Considering that, as an atheist, I’ve already accepted the idea that when I die I’ll simply cease to exsist, being told that I get an afterlife no matter what is a definite step up. Even if I don’t get the “backstage pass” afterlife where I get to hang with Yahweh behind the velvet ropes.
Now this I have a big problem with. I understand that you’re not trying to force anyone to be a Christian, but you’d honestly prefer that Lilairen be miserable in the only exsistence we know we have, on the off-hand chance that your particular religious delusions, out of all the religious delusions in the world, have some basis in fact, despite there being absolutely no evidence that this is case? That’s sick. The difference between that outlook and someone like Fred Phelps or Jack Chick is merely a matter of degree. You’re asking someone to sacrifice the only shot at happiness we know we have to conform to the way you hope the universe works.
The fact is, no matter how hard we believe or disbelieve, none of can know for sure what happens after we die. We only know that we’re here right now. And the highest purpose any of us can work towards is making this world the best possible world that we can. The theology can sort itself out after we’re dead.
Tax Guy, let me start with an apology for how this post may end up reading. I was quite recently driven away from a ministry I loved by a couple of people with the theory that the Bible is the verbatim word of God, and any disagreement with the conclusions that they think are “obvious” is “proclaiming a false Gospel” (getting called a traitor and then told I was too thin-skinned for finding it offensive for not accepting the words of Ann Coulter as the next thing to Holy Writ helped the process along and was the proximate cause of my departure, but the preceding was most of the build-up). So, my friend, I just deleted a major flame directed at you for accusing me of cherry-picking the Bible; it doesn’t fit your honest question, but you unintentionally scratched the scab off an open wound, and if I seem a touch feisty, that’s why.
In classic Elizabethan language, the Articles of Relgion of the Anglican Communion hold that “The Holy Scriptures contain all things that are necessary for men’s salvation.” Note the wording – “contain”, not “equal.” I have a great deal of love, reverence, and respect for the Bible. I do not deem it , as a document, the verbatim Word of God. It itself passes that title to Another, and Diogenes may have more patience than I in explaining the complex natures and origins of the various scrolls and codices that were put togther tom compose the book we call the Bible.
My allegiance, rather, is to a Person, Jesus Christ, and through Him to the Triune God. I believe myself sometimes guided by the Holy Spirit (and suspect that He’s constantly noodging but sometimes I don’t listen). Within the bounds of modern Biblical criticism, I accept the teachings of Jesus as they are set forth in the Gospels. I understand an underlying message consonant with what He said in passages of the Old Testament, where the prophets had a grasp of God’s purpose that varied from dim to clear.
And, just in passing, Jesus is using the classic carrot-and-stick technique His Father used in times past (“Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse…”) in parables – haggadah, stories with a spiritual point. If I were to tell Eve in mock anger, “If you don’t stop posting all those obituaries, I’ll throw you, still living, into Fresh Kills,” she would (a) appreciate the multilayered pun but (b) take the mock threat as humor, not as serious. Jesus uses the concepts of His time, including Ge Hinnom, the wadi that was the Jerusalem City Dump (and place of disposal of criminals’ corpses) and the two-part division of Sheol, along with current events (the men killed when a tower fell) and homely stories (absentee landlords and the stewards who cheat them and get their comeuppance, a widow and the judge too lazy to do right by her, etc.). He never once mentions the Christian Hell by name, and his few allusions to it or something like it are in the context of someone, usually Himself, as angry.
I read the Bible as what it is – a collection of literature spanning over a thousand years, in a variety of genres, which conveys something of the truth about God in its words – along with a bunch of buck-passing, ethnic snobbery, cultural traditions given the divine imprimatur, and a slew of other stuff.
Given that, though, I take what I read seriously, and consider that what Christ expects me to do is a Hell of a lot tougher than snipping out a convenient set of rules as the “Bible-believing Christians” do. So I’m quite pissed at being accused of “picking only the stuff I like.”
Fair warning – the next person who accuses me of that will get a nice neat Pit thread devoted to him.
I hope that wan’t too hostile, Tax Guy – if it was, please forgive, and let me know.
Miller, you raise a good point. For Christians and Jews, as for atheists, the natural destiny of man is death – permanent, all-over cessation of existence, no different from a bacterium or a planarian. The most we suggest is that there is a hysteresis of the “spirit” – the self-aware entity – which remains present after the cessation of the body’s life in a state of impotent regret and despair (i.e., Hell/Sheol), much as a poorly-tuned car will “diesel” when shut off or an image of a program be burnt into an old monochrome monitor. It is a gift of God, by His grace (according to us Christians), that we are permitted to survive bodily death and be given a new and more abundant everlasting life – compare a backup of a program on floppy disk or CD that is preserved after the computer it was loaded on suffers a permanent fatal crash. The “soulware” is preserved when the “wetware” burns out.
We’re not given to understand what Heaven is about. The images in Scripture are metaphors – pearly gates, foursquare city, streets paved with gold, glassy sea, etc. We’re told that it will be what is most fulfilling and joy-making for us. If that’s eternal praise or “hanging with Yahweh,” then that’s what it will be for you. On the other hand, for some of us it’ll be constantly making new discoveries about His creation, always encountering “eureka” moments and always wth something new to learn. For people who have been lonely, it will be the most fulfilling rapport and communion imaginable. One of the mystic saints compared it to a permanent orgasm. I hope, my tone-deafness cured, to join with a few million others in the chorale movement from Beethoven’s Ninth. Take it from there.