sending souls to heaven

Great Debates
1

was reading a old science fiction story. made me go “woah” so want to hear anyone else’s thoughts. thought to put it in great debates as it is about the nature of heaven and possibly a flame war on abortion. and not really about the book (which I can’t remember the name of)

as set up by the book. its the future and the christian religion is widely accepted as correct. (I don’t know. the proved it or something, not important)

crazy guy… decides that its man’s job to send souls to heaven. but everyone is already converted.

so he takes over a big ship, with some sort of high tech lab.

he uses the biological type stuff to make a machine.

the machine that makes human embryos. cloneing or something. it makes them at billions per second… baptises them and directly kills them after they form.

so that he is sending more than the whole population of the earth in all of history to heaven every minute. he runs it for years before he is stopped.

first thought on this was just “woah” I don’t really have any question or comment… just… was such a woah thing to read… wanted to hear if anyone thinks anything about it.

does heaven have a limit on people? if someone did something like that… what would it do to heaven? if his people outweighed ‘real’ people.

would god say “thats silly, your cheating… I won’t give them souls” (if you don’t think they have souls anyway… change it to a baby makeing machine… debate on abortion is not my goal)

just wondering what other people think about that? what if someone did set something up to send a trillion times more souls to heaven than ever lived naturally in all of history.

is the guy a saint for doing that? did he do the greatest act of anyone ever? almost as good as jesus? is he a monster worse than satan? would he go to heaven or hell for that?

all sorts of weird questions raised. I can imagin a real interesting discussion comeing from this… if no one hijacks this thread… as I know they will (I can think of 3 subjects for hijacks right now… “abortion”, “is religion real” and “can you prove a religion right”)
mabey I am the only one that thinking about that makes such a “woah” to me. (and if anyone knows the book… shhh… I am aware I did not tell it just right)

2

Putting the old religious hat on: The answer is NO:
We’ve discovered 10 galaxies for every person on earth, each with 50 - 100 billion stars! And now we know a good deal of them have planets. Chances are many are similar to our own.

Before I left religion behind, I thought that if there is a heaven it doesn’t need to be in this world. Realizing how small and limiting (both in time and space) is the place were we are, it makes no sense on limiting heaven to this planet alone.

Incidentally, I still do not see why a possible afterlife forces us to believe in a god.

Maybe Shiva was right:
http://hubblesite.org/news_.and._views/pr.cgi.1999%2B41 :wink:

3

Yeah, I’m sure attempting to overpopulate heaven would be a move that God could never have anticipated, he’d have to be, like, omniscient or something.

4

In The Seventh Sign, a movie with Demi Moore, one of the apocryphal Judeo-Christian legends is mentioned–that the Guff, the wellspring of all souls, has only a finite number, and when it’s empty, the second coming will start. Thus, the machine builder in your story was hastening the universe towards the apocalypse.

5

“Guf” is apparently a very appropriate term, at least according to this guy.

A synopsis for the lazy: the author states that the concept of a “treasury of souls” resulted from early attempts to reconcile Greek philosophy with Christianity. It does not appear in Scripture, according to the author.

I can’t tell you whether or not the concept is still officially accepted by the Catholic Church.

6

GIGObuster wrote:

Remember when the first extra-solar planet, 51 Pegasi b (now called “Bellerophon”) was discovered?

At the time, some Catholic bishop or archbishop issued a statement saying that if there was life on this planet, their souls would need saving.

Now, of course, the [arch]bishop’s statement was unnecessary because we knew right from the beginning that 51 Pegasi b was not the kind of planet that could support life. I mean, it was as big as Saturn and as close to its parent star as Mercury is to our sun. Try living on that without refrigerated high-pressure suits. Hah. But, nevertheless, a Catholic cardinal above said [arch]bishop quickly issued a retraction, saying that even if life did exist on 51 Pegasi b, original sin might not have happened on that planet.

If original sin never took place anywhere but Earth, there would be a whole cosmos full of creatures with souls that were immortal. They would never die. Their souls wouldn’t go to Heaven (or Hell) when they died because they wouldn’t die in the first place. Of course, if they ever built space ships and flew out to conquer Earth, we’d be in big trouble because they would be unkillable. But I digress.

Even if original sin had taken place on other inhabited planets, though, there’s no guarantee that God would send His only begotten Son to redeem those other planets’ sins. John 3:16 only says that God so loved the world – meaning the Earth – that He gave His only begotten Son yadda yadda yadda. All those other souls might be condemned to Hell.

So, the upshot is: Extraterrestrial souls does not necessarily mean you’d have to add any expansion wings to Heaven.

7

Interesting; how about this; other intelligences exist on other planets, have fallen from grace and thus need saving; there’s no reason (God being ableby definiton to do all sorts of clever stuff) why the death and resurrection of Christ couldn’t have been a view or connection to a single universal redemptive event…

8

What I find most disturbing is that the book assumes that the souls of the embryos can be saved from sin by simply baptizing them.

In truth, this goes agents Biblical Christianity because the bible says in Hebrews 9:22 “Without the shedding of blood is no remission [forgiveness of sin]” which means that our sin can only be forgiven via the blood of Jesus. The Bible says in Romans 10:9 “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” That means that in order to be saved, a person has to admit that he or she has sinned, believe that Jesus died on the cross, and receive God’s Gift of eternal life (john 1:12)

That could defiantly mess up the premise of the book.

9

I see no reason why John 3:16 condemns all non-earthlings to hell. Couldn’t God so love multiple worlds? Couldn’t Jesus be sent to multiple worlds? Shoot, it took a while for Jesus to come to this Earth. What do you think He was doing for all that time? Sipping mint juleps?

10

Um, so what happens to the sould of embryos that die of natural causes? - they don’t get the chance to confess with their mouths either. (Assuming for the moment, as you seem to be, that embryos have souls).

11

Boy, Ya’ll just want all the answers don’t ya! Well, I figured that someone would ask that question. It is difficult for me to answer such a question, because I have never studied it before, and the Bible doesn’t outright say what happens to the souls of unborn babies, so I was force to turn to another source-- The Internet.

I stumbled on, among others, a sight called Bible Fragrances It Contains many interesting articles on many deep spiritual issues, Among them where two interesting articles entitled “AGE OF ACCOUNTABILITY” and "GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS " I read though these, and I Believe that the are in accordance with the teachings of the Bible, because the are based on the Bible.

As I do work with Children, I can tell you that I have personally seen that there is a point for all children at which the are able to understand who God is, and what his plan of salvation is. I highly encourage you to read the articles for your self, and check the scripture references as well. I have not been able to reed all the have published, so I do not necessarily agree with everything they say, but I do think they hit the nail on the head as far as the age of accountability goes.

PS A good place look at Bible passages online is: www.biblegateway.com

12

I was taught in Bible school that animals didn’t have souls the way we humans did. Other people I’ve talked with have heard this also. So why would we think that alien intelligences would necessarily have souls that need saving? Perhaps they evolved naturally like some people think we did (and me too, FTR) and are outside the realm of the whole heaven/hell routine, but not outside the realm of g0d.

Yeah, I’ve read sf stories where g0d and $atan are in a numbers race and once $atan thinks he’s got the upper hand he’ll kick off armageddon (Piers Anthony maybe?). The way I’ve read the scriptures I don’t think g0d would really care how many souls he had in heaven since he sets the rules for entry. The fact that he’s got any is probably good enough for him. The red horned dude gets the rest of the unwashed heathens. It all seems pretty silly and not a very interesting plot line for me.

As to the OP, I dunno. I s’pose he’s got the same rights as a first trimester mother over the life of fetuses (fetii?) he’s created, though since they were created by a clone machine the question comes up if you’re able to clone the soul as well. You said they were able to prove Christianity as the one true religion, did he check to make sure these embryos had souls first before he started spitting them out and committing genocide? Since killing/murder are against one of the ten commandments, I’d say g0d wouldn’t be too pleased welcoming humanity’s biggest serial murderer. And I’d guess $atan wouldn’t want him either since he “put” so many souls in heaven. He’d probably wind up working at MicroSoft since neither of the two heavies want him. :slight_smile: