Ah, so now you recognize that many Christians do not think of hell as a place of never-ending torture. See, just a little while ago you said there was no other way to think of hell, and even as an atheist I had a problem with that because I know many Christians do not believe in a god that intentionally inflicts pain upon nonbelievers in the afterlife.
Of course, some Christians do believe that, but just because Svt4Him thinks hell is a horrible place doesn’t mean that he thinks of hell as being as described by Ben. It isn’t reasonable to expect him to defend that particular view of hell. If Ben had taken his description from Svt4Him’s own words or the Bible then that would be one thing, but it isn’t reasonable to build a straw hell and then expect fundies to defend the idea that their god created that specific hell. He didn’t. Ben just made it up.
Now, perhaps the details of the suffering that goes on in hell are not important, perhaps all that matters is that some people believe that hell is a place of torture. But if that’s the case, why bother describing the hypothetical torments of hell at all? Ben could simply have described the nice Jewish lady and then said “Do you think it’s right that a woman like this would go to a horrible place and suffer forever?” That way his point wouldn’t have been lost among other distracting elements.
Gehenna is the Valley of Hinnon southwest of Jerusalem. It was used as a garbage dump and as a disposal site for animal carcasses in ancient times. The bodies of some criminals were also thrown into Gehenna. Fires burned in the valley pretty much constantly to try to destroy the rotting corpses.
In pre-Israelite times Gehenna was also believed to have been a site of Canaanite human sacrifice. It was therefore believed to be a valley forsaken by God.
Taken all together, then, Gehenna was literally a smoking, stench-ridden, fiery pit, hated by God, where the fires never stopped and the “worm never died” (the carcasses crawled with worms). Since criminals were cast into Gehenna it was also a place of punishment.
In Jewish tradition, there would be a resurrecttion of all people on the last day. They would be judged and the good would receive eternal life. The bad people would be annihilated in fire (not tortured, just destroyed). Sometmes Gehenna was used as a symbol of this final destruction. That’s how Jesus used it.
Hades was the Greek underworld where all people went. Jesus uses that term in his parable of Lazarus and the rich man. IThe term may just be a translation from the Hebrew Sheol which was pretty much the Jewish equivilent of Hades. Everybody went there and sort of hung out as ghosts until judgement day. In the Greek underworld, some people recieved various punishments and rewards and there was probably some influence from Hellenized Palestine on Jewish conceptions of Sheol in that hey may have believed in some temporary punishments in Sheol, but this punishment was not eternal.
Nowhere in the gospels does Jesus speak of anything like the Christian concept of eternal Hell.
The terminology is sloppy enough that confusion is understandable.
Prior to the eighteenth century, the word race meant any group of people descended from a single common ancestor, (real or legendary), so the Jews were known as the race of Abraham, the Romans the Race of Romulus, and the Irish were known as the Milesian race (from the Sons of Mil).
When the eighteenth century naturalists began creating scientific categories for all the living things on earth, they borrowed the word race to apply to the very large categories of people that they grouped together.
So the Jewish Race is actually an older term (that is still used, from time to time), but it does not have the same meaning as Caucasian race (itself a term that scientists have begun to avoid because the evidence indicates that such handy categories are misleading).
Thanks for all the backup, guys. Yep, the Messianics are basically a front, coopting somebody else’s religion to further their own. (At one bar mitzvah my ex was at a few years ago, the local Messianics came by and left tracts on all the cars in the parking lot! I hear the rabbi was FURIOUS!) Personally I have no problem with people of Jewish descent becoming Christians – more power to 'em, if they feel that’s their path. But it irritates me no end to see people who are obviously Christians saying they’re Jews. THEY’RE NOT.
Don’t feel bad, smalltowngirl; there’s a lot of confusion on that issue. Keep fighting that ignorance!
[end continuing hijack]
I’m waiting to see if Svt comes back into this thread. I only spoke up because of that one point. I didn’t mean to hijack the whole thing. I have no respect for a concept of a cruel God that tosses the vast majority of humanity into hell because they don’t buy into one version of one religion.
I’m impressed as well, smalltown. A lot of people are here for years, it seems, and have achieved less increased awareness than you did in just a few short hours. Heck, some people seem to have regressed in the short time I’ve been here.
Thanks once more Dio, you fount of knowledge. I’m always hungry to learn specifically why I don’t believe what I DO believe. Now I’ve got two posts from this thread copied and pasted for further perusal. Yay!!
Ben’s GD thread is a bit colourful for my tastes, but it is a perfectly valid question.
gobear mentioned Dante’s Inferno. Well, in Canto XV, there’s this disturbing scene where Dante is talking to Brunetto Latini. Latini is apparently “guilty” of nothing besides homosexuality. Dante laments his beloved mentor’s tortures, and I almost got the impression he doesn’t think Latini should be there.
Reading it, I certainly didn’t think Latini should be there. And maybe it’s out of place for a non-Christian to say it, but it’s inexplicable to me how anyone could subscribe to a system of beliefs that so grotesquely violated even the most basic sense of justice or compassion. I could not apply the labels “just” or “good” to a diety who would have put Latini in hell – or at least not for the few qualities we know about him.
It’s impossible not to ask, why? I mean, arguments about an afterlife are pretty pointless, especially with someone of a different religion, but something that shocking leaves me groping for answers.
Do they become Gentile then, when they become Christian (or any other religious persuasion)? (This isn’t a rhetorical question, I honestly don’t know what the protocol is.)
I think the rabbi you mention has every right to take issue with the attempted proselitization of his congregation. But I dislike the “unless you’re the same kind of [religious persuasion of your choice] I am, you aren’t a real [religious persuasion of your choice]” attitude, no matter what falls into the brackets. And I do like to see two sides of an argument. For what it’s worth, the JFJ take on the subject appears to be the non-religious definition "We believe that Jewishness is a birthright. It is inherited from our parents. According to the website: “In the Jewish worldview, non-Jews are referred to as “Gentiles.” “Gentile” is the non-Jewish ethnic category. Yet not all Gentiles are Christians. The term “Christian” refers to anyone, of any ethnicity, who believes in Jesus Christ.”
One may find that a legitimately debateable stance, but it seems unfair to characterize it as “a front,” when people who were born Jewish don’t want to feel forced to deny what they see as their genaeological heritage because of their beliefs.
On preview: Guin, I like “kosher Christians.”;j (Not sure if they keep kosher or not; I do think they celebrate Passover and other Jewish holidays.)
SparrowHawk, my problem (and I am NOT Jewish) is when people worship Jesus and call themselves Jews. It just IS. NOT. RIGHT. You DO know why Christianity broke off from Judaism in the first place, don’t you? THEY BELIEVED JESUS WAS THE SON OF GOD. JEWS DON’T. THAT IS THE MAJOR THEOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE RELIGIONS.
How hard IS this to understand???
They take ancient Jewish ceremonies and reinterpret them with an evangelical Christian spin. They try to convince people like me, with some Jewish background but who are not Jewish, that they can be BOTH Jewish and Christian at ONCE.
Messianic Jews are Jews who have looked on Christianity and decided, (under delusion or inspiration) to accept the Christian teachings regarding Jesus. I think they would be considered “non observing” Jews–religious apostates who would be considered Jewish if they gave up their strange beliefs. They are certainly not practicing or observing Judaism (no matter how closely they observe dietary laws) if they are regarding Jesus as God or the one God as Three, but they do not lose their Jewishness.
I do not believe that (from a Jewish perspective) you can stop being a Jew, but you can certainly be a religious apostate. (Catholics have the same view: any Catholic who quits the church is, in the RCC view, simply a Catholic who is not practicing. Even a person who has been excommunicated is simply a Catholic who is barred from participation in the Sacraments and who would, in theory, be welcomed back if they renounced their error(s).)
The Jews for Jesus are Baptists who have established an “outreach” program of proselytization by pretending that they are, in fact, Messianic Jews. (Obviously, some of them are probably Jews who have been recruited, but the movement was created, organized, and funded by a Baptist preacher and most of his claose associates are also born Baptist.)
The Messianic Jews are generally looked upon, in the Jewish community, with attitudes ranging from shock and anger to profound sadness. Jews for Jesus are loathed.
There’s a difference between being ethnically Jewish and being religiously Jewish. The “No True Scotsman” argument doesn’t apply to the religious side of this. Jewish religious doctrine specifically excludes the worship of Jesus as God. It violates the most basic tenets of their theology of a singular god. Even if some Jews wanted to believe that Jesus was the Messiah (which violates Jewish doctrine already because Jesus did not fulfill any of the Jewish expectations for the Messiah) it would still be wrong to worship him because, according to Jewish tradition and doctrine, the Messiah is not God. He is a human king. He is not divine. To worship him is idolotry.
Regardless of ethnic heritage it is doctrinally impossible to worship Jesus and be religiously Jewish.
Svt4Him has never, not once, replied to my challenge by saying any of the following:
“I don’t believe that unbelievers go to hell.”
“I believe that Hell is a place of separation from God, but not a place of torture.”
“I believe that Hell is as bad as you describe, but I think there’s less hot metal and broken glass, and more flaming excrement.”
Instead, he has weaselled endlessly, and shamelessly, over ridiculous questions like, what kind of Jew was Miriam? Was Miriam sinless? And he’s tried to change the subject, by asking questions about whether you’d eat an M&M that had been dropped in excrement and then washed off. If my scenario is such a straw man, then why didn’t Svt4Him simply say so?
Svt4Him has made it pretty clear that he believes in the kind of scenario I describe, even if he believes that my description of hell isn’t 100% identical to how he envisions it. That’s why I find his behavior problematic. He embraces the position so long as it’s a “hell is a dreadfully awful place, old chap” presentation, and flees the moment hell is made anything other than a bloodless abstraction. Hence the title of this thread. Svt4Him, like Peter, is only willing to pony up to his beliefs when little is expected of him.
The exact details are irrelevant. Simply saying that hell is a horrible place of suffering is an abstraction that is easy for fundies to face. When you describe actual suffering and torture, things change, because they’ve never really thought about what “suffering” means beyond some glib ad copy along the lines of “Jesus loves you! Won’t you accept His wonderful gift and avoid all that awful suffering?”
If my description is just an irrelevant distraction, why do fundamentalists generally change their tone when I bring it up? To date, only Joe_Cool has said that he believes Miriam was treated justly. IIRC even His4Ever was unwilling to do that.
Ben, that was a very disturbing story for me to read, but an extremely valid point you made wrt the fundamentalist point of view regarding eternal damnation for non believers in Jesus Christ. Your story makes me consider that if I was God, would I treat Miriam in such a manner to apply justice for her “unbelief” in myself ? Hell, that would put me in the same camp as Uday and Qusay.
If all Christians would consider that God would treat people in the manner shown when He was present in human form on earth, only then could we Christians ascribe to Him the glory that He truly deserves. Remember Christians, the scriptures say that Jesus is the saviour of all men.
An analogy, whiterabbit. The eastern third of the Czech Republic is an area called Moravia. The inhabitants of that area, and their ethnic kin living elsewhere, are of course Moravians.
There is a church whose official name is Unitas Fratrum which is commonly known by both its members and the general public as “the Moravian Church” and its members, who may or may not be ethnically Moravian, as “the Moravians.” The name derives from its origins in Moravia. In a recent article on the church in our diocesan newspaper, there was a quote from a gentleman with a clearly Scottish surname who was a Moravian Church pastor.
A “Moravian” thus may either be a member of an ethnic group – an East Czech, so to speak – or a member of a particular Christian denomination.
A “Jew” is, likewise, either (a) a member of a religion founded by Moses and accepting the Tanakh as its Scriptures, or (b) a member of the ethnic group among whom that religion flourished and continues to be practiced, whether or not he or she is a practicing member of the religion.
The terms “ethnic Jew” and “practicing Jew” are sometimes used to draw the distinction when necessary. Isaac Asimov, noted skeptic and atheist, was a Jew by ancestry; Sammy Davis Jr. was a convert to Judaism, and therefore a Jew in the religious sense, though hardly a part of the ethnic group.
Ignoring the pseudo-Baptist proselytizing group that has already been discussed, there are in fact ethnic Jews who are members of a number of Christian denominations. On my own church’s calendar of saints is Samuel Joseph Isaac Schereschewsky, a former rabbi who became Episcopalian, a missionary to China who translated the Bible into one of the major Chinese languages.
Some Jews who accept Jesus as Lord and Savior and are therefore Christians also retain a fondness for the cultural practices associated with Judaism, refuse to deny their Jewish heritage, and therefore consider themselves Messianic Jews. On the theory that I have no right to deny to anyone the term they reasonably choose to adopt for themselves, I don’t see this as a problem. Obviously, an Orthodox Jew would say that acceptance of Jesus in a quasi-divine role would be a violation of a primary tenet of Judaism – but he probably eats sugar on his porridge anyway!
Now I’ve got two posts from this thread copied and pasted for further perusal. Yay!!