I didn’t exist for almost 14 billion years. It’s easy.
Is work pointless because they don’t randomly take money from you?
Nonsense; we’ve all “not existed” before we were born, we know exactly what not existing is like. It’s nothing.
Which brings up back to Epicurus
It wouldn’t be a dictatorship if you knew that God was real. It would be torture to absolutely know that there was a God and you had to do every single thing that He said. That would be a completely empty life, more so than a life in hell.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree. Although if some God did exist, and it created our universe as His best effort, I’d cut Him some slack.
How do you know it was easy? You didn’t exist at the time.
You’re second point doesn’t make sense here. Money only has value because it can be lost.
Tell me what it’s like.
Much of the Bible is allegorical and not to be taken literally.
So I guess we should just take your word for it?
I already did; it’s nothing. You know exactly what is was like yourself anyway; no need to ask anyone else.
“Much of” meaning “the parts that undercut your argument”.
Because things that don’t exist can’t exert effort.
You’re struggling now.
Yes. And spending is good. But your boss doesn’t take money from you if you do a bad job. He just doesn’t pay you.
Now your boss is God. He pays you in Heaven Bucks™. If you do a good job, you get enough Heaven Bucks™ to get into Heaven. If you do a bad job, you get no HBs and can’t afford to get into Heaven. You don’t need him to send you to the Afterlife Debtor’s Prison (Hell).
The only reason for Hell is either God isn’t powerful enough to create a universe without it, or He’s evil and likes torturing people needlessly.
How do you experience nothing?
Money has value because society agrees it has value.
And I would argue that if there is an omnipotent god, there is no such thing as freedom. There is only the illusion of freedom.
From God’s eye it would be an illusion, but we can never see beyond the illusion, so it’s not really an illusion from our eyes.
I personally think our morals, behavior and purpose in life stem from evolution, and not from religion. So my perspective on these things is going to be different. Having said that, people do crave security over freedom in accordance with things like Maslow’s hierarchy or terror management theory. Present people with harm and they crave authority and conformity to keep them safe. At our core, we do crave safety over security despite what Ben Franklin said.
Being obedient to God would be less of a hell than the christian hell.
And again, Zoroastrians believe in free will just like Christians, but their hell only lasts 3 days instead of eternity. You don’t need eternity in hell to have freedom.
Meaning most of the Old Testament.
There was no you before you existed.
I draw a ninja on a napkin. That ninja didn’t exist before I drew it. Like you didn’t exist before your mother’s womb laid down your structure.
You don’t, obviously. That’s why it’s like nothing.
Then how did I figure it out? 