Did Adam celebrate his Creation Day instead of his birthday? Did he look at his wife every day for 930 years and think, “If it wasn’t for that bitch I wouldn’t have to do all this shitty farm work?” How did he bring up kids without being able to tell them, “When I was your age?” Did his descendants get tired of hearing him tell about how he named the animals? Why doesn’t the Bible talk about cool stuff like this instead of who slew whom with the jawbone of an ass?
1.) Can God Make a Chick so Hot He Can’t Pick Her Up/
2.) If you were Muslim, and you were in a boat in the South Pacific diametrically opposite Mecca, would it make any difference which way you faced for prayers? Is the “shortest geodesic distance” really important if other directions point equally well in a straight line geodesic toward Mecca?
3.) if you were a strict Catholic during Lent and you crossed the International Date Line at midnight on Thursday and ended up in Saturday on the other side, could you eat meat?
4.) If you’re a cat in a box, and a professor has a bottle of prussic acid that he’s holding so that radioactive decay has a 50/50 probability of setting off a device to break it before he puts it in with you, is he alive or dead, or is it impossible to know until he opens the box? If he’s dead, how can he open the box so you can find out?
5.) If you’re a civilized alien with four fingers on each hand, does it bother you that 0.7777777777777… = 1.00000000000? Does it bother you that “1” shows up as the first digit of random lists of numbers (such as populations of cities, lengths of rivers, etc.) EXACTLY 1/3 of the time?
6.) Why is there air?
7.) What is the sound of No Hands Clapping? What is the Sound of a Cow unable to speak?
Why do privates eat in the general mess and generals eat in a private mess?
Yes.
I would join a religion like this.
Woosh.
Most Christians don’t believe in hell?
Why do birds suddenly appear anytime you draw near?
Which one of these beliefs are inconsistent with conventional Christian dogma?
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a heaven where “saved” souls live eternally happy in the afterlife
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a hell where “unsaved” souls live eternally tormented in the afterlife
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A compassionate God who commands us to love one another as we love ourselves.
The questions asked in Post #2 are premised on these 3 ideas.
Many Christians believe once you go to heaven, you have no memory of the unsaved, who are now being tormented eternally in hell. Because it would make you sad. And there’s no sadness in heaven. Seriously.
Others, who are a little more deep-thinking, believe we will have the same understanding of justice and mercy as God does, and the fact that the unsaved are in hell won’t bother us one bit. (even our former loved ones? seems a bit bizarre, but yeah)
Then there are those like me, who believe that a loving God and eternal suffering are totally incompatible and hell is just a cheap scare tactic.
And why do privates in general make messes?
If mean people suck, what do they mean by that?
If you record The Tomorrow People and watch it next week, are they The Last Week People?
Why do we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?
That may come from a saying that used to be pretty common, " sucks hind tit" as in a littler of pups, the weakest one supposedly sucks the hind tit.
#2 is the point that isn’t universal or even that common among traditional Christian beliefs. The concept of Hell that involves eternal torment doesn’t really appear in the Bible at all except in an indirect or oblique way from just a few passages. Satan doesn’t either for that matter at least in the way that he is presented today.
The ‘modern’ concepts of Hell and Satan are only a few hundred years old and only some churches apply any weight to them at all. Those are mainly the fundamentalist (they are anything but that in this case) and evangelical churches but those do not make up the majority of Christians even in the U.S. let alone the world.
Just for a few examples, you can go to Methodist, Episcopal, Unitarian, Quaker, Presbyterian or Lutheran churches for years and never hear much mention of Satan or Hell at all and it is never presented in the pop culture style if it ever is at all. The Catholic Church presents a more complicated set of beliefs than others (they add Purgatory for example) but Hell and Satan aren’t prominent features in that largest church of all either.
Shagnasty, do you think the majority of Christians, whatever their beliefs about hell are, would pass the test in the situation I presented?
The question doesn’t require anyone to believe in heaven or hell to answer it.
What’s actually in the Bible has nothing to do with it. If Pew did a poll tomorrow asking self-identified Christians whether they believed in a hell, one would have to be living on another planet if they predicted the vast majority wouldn’t say yes. Saving humanity from hell is supposedly the reason Jesus died on the cross.
Yeah, I think some people are missing the point (of Post #2); it’s not actually about what you think of the nature or existence of the afterlife.
FWIW, it does remind me a bit of Jesus’s parable of the Rich Man & Lazarus, and a little bit of the Biblical account of Abraham haggling with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and maybe even a little bit of the Flannery O’Connor short story “Revelation.”
And yet out of all the Christians on this board, including the ones posting in this thread, none of them have answered the question. It was a question that was posed in good faith, with no snark or “gotcha!” intended.
I guess people have to think about it some more. Fair enough.
“Heard.” True anecdote? Or, cite?