*Originally posted by casdave *
**One problem for Western societies, and probably most others, is that we seem to need to have opposite poles.
Thus we have up and down, left and right, and heaven must also have its opposite.
Intuitive logic seems to say that since heaven is paradise, then its counterpart must be its unpleasant counterweight, a question of balances.
This type of thinking puts up a huge barrier in other areas such as quantum mechanics, where we have difficulty understanding how a quantity seems to exist in two or more forms at the same time and in other cases without any obvious opposite.
To me it show how simplistic Christian thinking is, and maybe the rest of us too, the world is not nice and neat black and white, nor even shades of grey, more closely, I think there are realms of related possibilities.
We think too linearly.
Hell itself has a history of evolving, it did not start out as the punishment wing of the Christian prison, I am reasonably certain the idea of hell actuallly predates Christianity and originally took a very differant form.
It is especially sick that some fundie Christians dream up various agonies for a person to suffer, its almost as if they are personally imagining how they would hurt those who have the temerity to be non-Christian.History has shown us all too horrifically and too often that those who dream up such pain are very ready to test their nightmares out on others.
Whenever we look at those religious terrorists in the Christian world, we also see others such as Poly who appear to be the epitome of reasonableness, but in fact are merely part of the spectrum of intolerance, with Jack Chick and the Inquisistion at one end, and genuine caring folk at another.
Unfortunately they all think they are caring, they all think they are helping one way or another to guide errant souls on their way, and even some of the moderates have pretty grim opinions on the sins of the blameless such as sufferers of illness, or those good and devout folk of other faiths.
We can look back on history and see major figures who actually believed in their horrific activities as a path of salvation for themselves and others, do these folk go to heaven or hell ?
Richard Coeur De Lion or Thomas De Torquemada are seen as pretty beastly repellant figures(and if you don’t then scan the net and find out more).
So will todays Christians be judged in a differant light in the distant future when times are perhaps more enlightened ?
Out standards across centuries have changed, does this mean that those past are subject to the standards of their time, ours, or a future time ?
Poly, Fuel I’m sure you do the best you can, but in that distant future, you may well apear to those generations quite differantly, and if you were, would you deserve to go to hell just because all your referances to enlightenment have been redefined ?
…and when you answer that question, then think about the referances that Jews, Muslims and all the rest have, do they deserve to go to hell for committing the ‘crime’ that you yourselves may be guilty of according to future generations ? **
