If my sibling was on my heels at every chance about some fake sense of heaven or hell. I could disengage in about 15 min. That’s a hell I won’t accommodate.
If they believe their crap and keep it to themselves, I’d be fine. I believe stuff I’d never tell anyone.
If I can do it, so can they.
Puking garbage beliefs at me and I’m out.
I have real things to believe.
My oldest sister has 4 daughters. One of the went full out Jesus freak for awhile. She told her Mother she put her on the prayer list at her church prayer group.
My sister went ballistic. She told her, “I don’t know who you gotta call or what you gotta do but you get my name off that crap! And, I want to see it in writing.”
Big Sister don’t play. She told me, those people are nuts at that church, I don’t want one of them to know my name or why my nutty daughter thinks I need anyone praying for me.
For my self,
No Walmart employee I don’t need for you to tell me to have a “blessed day”. Shit, I hate that.
Screaming your beliefs and notions help no one. Not your family, friends or random strangers. And it makes you look crazy.
Keep it to yourself.
Theological tangent: chapter 25 of Matthew covers last judgment, a popular topic among early Christians after the crucifixion, though the chapter has no parallel among the remaining 3 gospels. Matthew 8:12 does have a parallel in Luke 13:28-29.
Click for biblical tangent: Luke 13:24-30
He said to them, 24 “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to. 25 Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, ‘Sir, open the door for us.’
“But he will answer, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from.’
26 “Then you will say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’
27 “But he will reply, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers!’
28 “There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out. 29 People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God. 30 Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.”
The Luke version has a righteous acts flavor (as well as an allegorical one), with less emphasis on get-out-of-jail free cards. But this is tangential to the OP, who is inquiring about the behavior of Baptist-leaning Christians who emphasize being saved over virtuous behavior.
As an atheist, I’m precisely as hedonistic as I want to be. Which isn’t very hedonistic at all. I don’t need imaginary torture threats to avoid abusing myself or other people, I figured out that’s not a great way to live all on my own.
I appreciate that’s harder for some other, so I guess it’s a good thing they have some guardrails in place, although it’s a shame they don’t appear to work great, basedi on the aggregate behavior of theists.
The fact that it takes an all-knowing dude with the power to create whole universes to stop some people from doing evil is not as reassuring as some might think.
Humans are great at self-rationalization and terrible at risk analysis. You wouldn’t have to argue to convince someone that jail and debt collectors are real but people still blissfully break the law or live far beyond their means, not truly considering that it’ll catch up with them until it does. Replace those two examples with a million other examples of people acting contrary to their self interests, especially to satisfy a short-term desire. Why would fear of an afterlife be any different?
I suppose it depends upon what we mean by believe. If belief implies accepting the truth-value of something, then I we need only observe the subject’s stated beliefs. But such a definition doesn’t allow for deception. Ok, then modify the definition: belief implies accepting the truth-value of a proposition without deception. Evidence for deception would exist if at a minimum there is an incentive to deceive others. But without that incentive (which non-professionals won’t have by and large) we can take a person’s word at face value, by this definition. Of course there are social reasons to profess faith - it’s reasonable to set aside the claims of those dependent upon an insistent religious member. But there also lots of people who could leave the church and do not. Their continued worship and payment to the church is evidence for their faith.
As Roderick_Femm noted in post 3, we can’t observe people’s hearts directly. But surely indirect means shouldn’t be limited to whether people’s actions are in accordance with the the religious claims that they accept. There is other evidence that can be gathered.
So what definition of belief is in use? Is is attested-belief? Attested-without-deception belief? Or act-belief? A definitive answer to this is available: we consult with the dictionary: lexicographers after all are acknowledged experts in everything. The 2nd definition listed in Webster’s New World College dictionary defines believe as, “to have religious faith”. Baptists have this and the OP is thereby refuted. QED.
Space considerations prevent more detailed investigation of bad faith, self deception, or the act of lying to oneself. Discussion here will be limited to sophestry and red herrings.
I don’t think for most people the thought of eternal damnation is the issue. The fact is, most people have no grasp of how truly LONG eternity is. So when some true believer thinks someone is going to hell forever, they think in terms of lifetimes. They don’t have the basis to grasp the concept.
Look at the Twilight Zone where the guy makes a pact with the devil for immortality, commits murder, and gets life in prison. Oh noes! the person (and the audience) goes. So he asks the devil for early release, as it were. But if you have true immortality, you’re going to outlast the jailers, the prison, the country and probably humanity itself (which is a whole 'nuther thing). You just don’t realize your mistake for a hundred thousand years or more.
You can only burn in boiling blood for so long before you either go insane or stop caring. It can’t last a million years.
The “you” in your sentence is implicitly a consciousness just like current alive you.
There’s zero reason to make that assumption, even working within the confines of typical takes on the vsrious Abrahamic religious doctrines.
Once we consider that the entire concept of any religion whatsoever is rampant nonsense from end to end, your assumption makes even less than zero sense.
You’d think you could only live blissfully in heaven for so long before it got boring and repetitive, but apparently you’re blissful for eternity. I don’t see why that can’t work the other way.
Whereas i can’t see how it could possibly work either way. We are fundamentally finite, and an infinity of either punishment or reward just doesn’t work.
I’m trying to stay within the canon, as I understand it.
In the Good Place, when they finally got there, they found people bored out of their gourd and losing it, and arranged for them to decide to no longer exist when they got tired of living in the Good Place.
That seemed like a reasonable solution to me, because I’m with you. Any version of “me” that could stare blissfully at God all the time or whatever is not “me” in any real sense.
I’m with puzzlegal on this. Infinity praising God is just as unbearable as infinity in boiling pitch.
As a kid, I imagined heaven a doing anything you wanted. I could play with my dog all…er, day, I could build models and never run out of paint and glue. I thought heaven was the reward for surviving God’s hell on earth of disease, pain, suffering, and death.
That was my fundamental religious epiphany in 8th grade. I was miserable and depressed and spent a lot of time studying a variety of religions. And i realized that all the eternal anything’s didn’t work. That i am finite. That I’m going to end some day. I also realized that i didn’t want to end just then, which I’d certainly been thinking about.
I kinda liked the Hindu idea that our soul is absorbed into God, sort of like how our body is absorbed into the earth. (Apologies to Hindus if i got that wrong, but that was my interpretation at the time.) And i could imagine reincarnation with a clean slate. But not living forever, heaven, hell, limbo, it the mundane world.