Immortal souls, a benevolent god, and hell. Even conceptually, only two of this three things together make any sense.
Really, what could a human do to deserve eternal punishment? I never understood that. Even more, people seemed to enjoy thinking about others suffering in hell. I don’t know, I wouldn’t even say hitler deserves hell (and I hope I dont goodwinize the thread). I mean, eternal punishment? That is sick.
So comparing anything to hell will only make any sense to people who believe in it. I would even go further, any god who creates a conscious, feeling being with the ability to suffer and places it in a world like ours in with it will suffer must be considered evil. And if religion claims god to be good, well, then something’s off. The argumentation in the OP only makes sense if you are on his/her side already.
And lightning struck once, and lightning struck twice
And I said “If there’s a God, He sure ain’t nice”
And Chuck said “God is an Indian giver
I don’t trust nothing but the Mississippi River”
Luke 16: 19-31: In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man goes to hell, because as Abraham explains, he had a good life on earth and so now he will be tormented. Whereas Lazarus, who was miserable on earth, is now in heaven. This seems fair to Jesus.
All the sources we have on the subject imply that basically, God tosses you out. There is a very good reason why Lewis* among many others, as he was hardly the first to do so but the clearest expositor, though of Hell as being something very unlike a prison. The parables of the Bible, in fact, specifically talk about people being exiled away from their true home or cast outside the warm and inviting home of their true friend or master. Meanwhile, it look at redemption in terms of returning home (the Prodigal Son, etc.) or being invited inside.
However, God does not in any of them go about burning people. In fact, He essentially implies that he forever leaves them alone exactly as they demanded.
Those unfamiliar with Christian theology may wonder why this is, as Hell and Damnation tend to loom rather large as being associated with Christianity in the popular mind today. This is actually a bit odd and a bit American. A considerable interest in Hell was more a Protestant or populist thing (Dante’s Inferno, after all, is a work of fiction which loosely uses popular theology of his day as background). Most serious theologians don’t really consider it all too much, as it isn’t really their business to deal in Hell, so to speak. In America particularly, early Protestant thinkers had a strong emphasis in sin and damnation and redemption, and it certainly characterd American popular ideas about religion. In Catholic or Orthodox churches, at least, it’s not something which gets casually mentioned very often.
I blame the old Jonathan Edwards. Not the new one, who is a really crappy magician.
This is a ridiculous attempt to distort the definition of witnessing. This is also the third thread I’ve seen you pull this same tactic. Witnessing in a religious context has a specific meaning. Using logic and evidence to argue against a religious position is not witnessing, and trying to say that it is fails for the exact same reason that the old and lame ‘atheism is a religion’ claim fails. It’s not.
This still sounds like passive-aggressive, victim blaming horseshit to me. Who’s “demanding” anything? You can’t make demands from an entity you have no idea exists. This explanation doesn’t let God off the hook for anything. He’s still eternally punishing people for basically nothing. Trying to cast it as an informed, conscious choice on the part of the victims does not pass the smell test, especially the “informed” part. God has no right to make any demands or set any conditions as long as he refuses to prove his own existence.
The problem of evil, or suffering in general, don’t argue against the existence of an impersonal god. But they’re fairly convincing arguments against any kind of compassionate and just god - and if they weren’t, people wouldn’t have been struggling with these issues for millennia. And when people point this out, the response usually takes one of two forms: “keep saying that and you’ll go to hell,” or “you can’t understand what god is doing.” The OP has chosen the former. One’s a threat and the other is thoroughly unsatisfying for many people.
The existence of evil proves that God is not all-powerful, all-knowing, AND purely good. But He might be any two of the three:
[ul]
[li]Maybe God is all-powerful and all-knowing, but a complete dick. He sees people suffering and has the power to prevent it, but he doesn’t care or actually enjoys it.[/li]
[li]Maybe God is loving and kind and aware of human suffering, but has limited powers. He does His best, but there are some things He just can’t fix.[/li]
[li]Maybe God is loving and kind and has the power to fix everything, but He isn’t aware of all the suffering that’s going on. When someone calls His attention to a problem (by praying a lot, for example) He may step in and fix it, but lots of things just slip through the cracks.[/li][/ul]One of the big holes in Christian theology is its inability to reconcile the notion of an omnipotent, omnisicent, omni-good God with the existence of evil.
Not to mention paradoxical : saying that you can’t know God implies that the person making that statement does know him, or at least an aspect of him : his convenient unknowability.
Similarly, if one can’t understand what God is doing, what would the purpose of an organized cult be ? It’s not like you have any idea whether what you’re doing is pleasing him, or pissing him off, or the Bible was just a joke, or a test to see who’d believe that contradictory jumble etc…
So it’s not only unsatisfying : it’s a self-defeating argument.
I think this is the essence of the question in the OP - that atheist apologia often focusses on the problem of evil and the contradictions that arise when God is assumed to have the omni* trifecta.
Reframing the question slightly to find out something I have always wondered…
…where does that assumption come from?
Is there support in scripture for an omimax God? Or was that something tacked on later? Does Judaism assume omnimax? Does Islam?
Oh, I see. Are we really going to selectively quote from the bible to prove a point despite the fact it goes against the central tenets of the faith? Oh wait, yes, we should as that is the only ideal to which all religious folks actually adhere.
