The OP was stating heaven or hell varies by different religions view points so what is right and what is wrong. Same thing when you through in the bible.
Not to say interpretation and meaning of the bible.
Some religion do not subscribe to hell or even hell and heaven.
There’s a thread on this in the IMHO forum; there is a view held there, which I share, that, yes, if someone really wants, he can influence his own beliefs. I do acknowledge the other viewpoint, held by many, that no one can “choose” what to believe or disbelieve. But my opinion is that, if I seriously wanted to, I could believe just about anything I set my mind to.
Obviously, this isn’t something very often practiced…
The self-contradiction comes when the word “infinite” is used as if it were an actual number. God can “lift an infinite weight,” for example. This is functional nonsense, as there is no “infinite weight.”
A massively powerful God might be able to juggle 10^800 galaxies. He might be able to juggle 10^10^800 galaxies (although where he would find such a collection, no one can know.) But he cannot juggle an “infinite” number of galaxies, as the term is meaningless.
“God is infinite” is, as Max the Immortal pointed out, a childish and empty boast, a schoolyard slogan, having no meaning and an example of serious ignorance of the real mathematical definition of infinity. The same is true for omniscience.
A number of theologians have backed away from claims of literal omniscience, and have invented a category called “inherent omniscience.” This is, of course, typical angel-counting, and a sign that theology is a wholly empty field of discourse, in which anyone can make up any old shit they want and call it divine truth.
As I understand it, this is close but not 100% correct.
A good friend of mine was raised Methodist, and when I asked him what was different about the Methodist church from other Christian sects, he said that part of it was their belief that as long as you had accepted Jesus as your saviour and lord, you went to heaven. Didn’t matter if it was Pol Pot or Stalin or your grandmother, as long as they accepted Jesus as their lord and saviour, they were going to heaven.
ETA: Another friend of mine was Baptist, specifically Southern Baptist. When I asked her the same question, she said 1) they don’t dance and 2) they believe in a just god, not a loving god.
Reread what I wrote. I believe I said that sin, in itself, does not cause one to go to Hell. If it did, everyone would be on the first train to Hell when they die, given everyone sins.
Yup.
Please, show me where this is in Christian doctrine.
That’s nice and all, but it doesn’t contradict anything I said.
Uh huh…
Just for the record, the above is a rather blatant straw man.
Anywho… So you’re just going to gloss over the part where I pointed out to you that everyone is responsible for their own actions? I also guess you’re going to gloss over the parts of the Bible which clearly sys that if you lead someone astray, you will be judged for your actions?
Show me the parts of the Bible which commands one to beat a dead horse and continue prosetylizing to one who doesn’t wish to hear it. I can easily show you the latter.
The latter.
But I’ll play your game. Let’s say I talk to someone and they decide they don’t want to hear it. Should I try a second time? Obviously, you’d say yes. How about a third? Or fourth? Or fifth? For whatever number you can throw out, there is always one number greater, which you’re well aware of. So, apparently, unless I’m going to attempt to try to change someone’s mind an infinite number of times, then somehow I don’t really believe my faith.
Needless to say, that’s asinine.
I like how you throw out random percentages. It really strengthens your argument.
Since you looooooooove to throw out random percentages, what if you had exactly a zero percent chance to save them?
(See! I can do it, too!)
Yes, you have.
Cite the post.
That I did.
I’m going to need a cite for this one as well.
And this is why I called the original post is a straw man. By your own admission, you don’t know Christian doctrine, yet feel compelled to write a thesis on Hell and lecture others for doing less than the absolute maximum. Then to cover yourself you turn around and claim that the Christian doctrine is “internally inconsistent” for not requiring Christians to do whatever you feel we should do, even though we’ve never been commanded to do so, and the Bible is replete with examples of people gong elsewhere when it becomes evident that others will not listen?
…Yeah. Makes sense.
Oh, and, it doesn’t matter how many times you ignore this, but everyone has free will and/or choice. I know is an inconvenient truth, but it’s a truth nonetheless. As everyone has free will, it’s your choice whether or not you end up in Hell.
Your extrapolation leaves much to be desired.
You know, your conclusion does not follow from your premise, correct? For example, a parent might love their child, but decide that if their child is content to live a dangerous life, that they have to let that child learn the hard way. Does that make them love their child any less than someone who spends every waking moment of every day trying to get that child to change?
Of course not.
Do you know the difference between letting a child learn the hard way, and letting a child suffer for all eternity?
Any parent who would let their child “learn the hard way” when it comes to hell is a monster.
If you believe in Heaven and Hell, please tell me how it works when you are in Heaven and your loved one is in Hell?
It’s been a long time since I believed in a conscious, continuous, immortal soul.
Looking back at it, I now think eternal hellfire is a silly idea. But it bugged me a lot when I was a kid.
Though eternal suffering has become the “traditional” Christian view, it is not necessarily Biblical sound. There is a movie about the evangelical Edward Fudge who studied the idea of hell for a year and found about 80 related verses and wrote some books: http://www.hellandmrfudge.org/
This is a related site:
As far as the pro-traditionalist view goes, here is excerpts of a sermon that I made into a video:
Ok well this is from my sisters pastor: (I added the pic and sound effects)
To clarify this, “learn the hard way” implies a lesson will be taught.
Well guess what.
Once you’re in hell, there’s no more lesson. It’s game over. Anything you might have learned is irrelevant and pointless. You’re stuck there, being tortured, forever. You could learn anything you want, and it would be meaningless. It’s like saying “Well, I tried to convince him not to jump off buildings, but he wouldn’t listen. Guess he’ll learn the hard way”. Learn what? He’ll have the microseconds between the front of his head hitting the pavement and his brain going “splat” to process that lesson. Similarly, once someone is in hell, undergoing unimaginable torture forever, it’s too late for them to learn anything that would matter.
I’ll say it again. If you believed that people were doing things that would send them to hell, it would be immoralto do anything other than everything. EVERYTHING within your power to stop that from happening. After all, you know how to spend an eternity in heaven; why should you even remotely care what happens to you here on earth? Why should it matter? Why should anything we do here matter more than our eternal souls?
Christianity as practised by many adherents, particularly the evangelicals in the USA, is a horrifying death cult.
Put into mortal, human terms this would be like a parent trying to teach a toddler the value of looking both ways when crossing the street by nodding in wise approval as their kid runs across a six lane freeway.
I think that most Christians and Muslims who believe in Hell also believe it is bad and something to avoid. However, what hell is actually like, as an eternal state, is something beyond our grasp. As I said, to the extent where words like “bad”, “worse than,” “punishment” etc. are finite, analogical and ultimately inadequate. What this means is not that we cannot look at the analogical descriptions and tell anything about hell, or that we cannot criticize or reject the concepts of hell that we hear. But I question whether we can say for sure what is the logical reaction to an infinite concept that we can only know by finite analogy, and where those analogies have traditionally carried complicating connotations of “free will”, “justice”, etc.
This thread could just as easily be about why Christians, who ostensibly believe in the love and grace of God, are not super-happy all the time. St. Peter exhorts Christians to live happier, which seems to imply that he thought they needed to be told. These were people who had sacrificed a lot to become Christians, faced persecution (from society if not the state), and still they weren’t joyful about God’s love? Rather than think that they actually underwent all that for something they didn’t ‘really’ believe in, it leads me to conclusions about people’s natures in general.
Definitely, a lot of people don’t think too much about what they believe, because their beliefs function as tools to make sense of the world they inhabit. Someone who believes in hell might not think about it too much, the way someone who drives a car might not think about how the car works or the effects of smog. I personally would prefer it if more people thought about these things, but I’m not sure that they would all reach the conclusions that you do, even after thinking about it.
Your analogy of the pain ray made me think that yeah, it would hurt for a year or a century, but after 50 trillion years, I’d get used to it, then it’s smooth sailing for the next infinity 
And what’s 50 trillion years to eternity? That’s why the game changes. All of the punishments that we experience in this world are only undesirable because of our nature as finite beings. Actually there are lots of very ‘charming’ explanations religious people have thought up over the years to get around this by explaining how you never get used to the punishments of hell, but as terrible and sadistic as those arguments can be, I tend to see their function as more like culturally-situated artistic flourishes emphasizing a general understanding that hell is something we should want to avoid, that it is contrary to something fundamental about our human-ness, even if what we really know about it is finite compared to its infiniteness.
I recognize, though, that I am very lucky to be in a situation where I can view ideas like this and not be particularly affected by them. I’ve met far too many people for whom ideas of hell, in particular, affected them deeply and were traumatizing. If you ask whether I’m going to stand with a pastor who uses violent visions of hell as one of his artistic flourishes, or a young kid who is hearing that and suffering, my loyalties are with the latter.
Sorry for my late and rambling reply, I hope you are enjoying the holidays
Hell is quite possibly the most immature of the major concepts associated with Christianity (a title for which it has a lot of competition). “Jesus says I have to forgive you, but he won’t, so you’ll burn forever and ever and ever. Heh-heh-heh. Neener neener neener…”
That’s not how intractable, extreme pain works. You’d never get used to it.
And given that the whole point is to torture you to please an omnipotent being, you probably wouldn’t even be allowed to go insane.
Do you have a cite for how intractable, extreme pain works that explains why I wouldn’t get used to it after 50 trillion years? It isn’t actually meaningful either way for the larger point I was making, but I’d be interested to read it.
Like I said, I’ve heard of the ways that some believers in an eternal hell try to get around the problems of eternity (from regenerating nerves to more metaphysical discussions about states of anguished being that are outside of time) but I don’t find them very intellectually satisfying. Big surprise, huh
Hope you enjoy the holidays!
Concur - a sort of self-brainwashing probably is technically possible, but I don’t think that’s what people really mean when they talk about ‘choosing to believe’. I think in fact the exasperation of the faithful in the ‘choice to not-believe’ of others is in fact something like a failure of empathy - an inability or unwillingness to see or understand another point of view.
Eternal punishment, schmeternal schmunishment. Eternal reward presents the same problems. The sticking point is actually the concept of eternity, as pointed out by Learjeff.
If people had any understanding of what is implied by “eternity” itself, they’d be less likely to talk such rot.
Torquemada beat you to it.
You are missing options. Like the fact that people have a really tough time grasping statistical likelihoods. Or the fact that people can grasp an immediate danger, but have more trouble holding onto a long term danger in their minds. That people tend to focus on what’s in front of them, that they are biologically driven to put things out of their minds in part so they can continue to function in the here and now. That the conscious brain is a construct stuffed on top of a less thoughtful and reflective undercarriage, the “reptile brain” that runs basic needs and desires, not contemplative reverie.
Their belief in this version of hell and God doesn’t make it true, but it should make them feel like it’s true and act accordingly. But humans are complex creatures driven by weird biochemistry, so they don’t function logically.
Isn’t it also a fundamental belief for Catholics? That’s why they do that baby baptismal, the “christening”, so if the baby dies it is saved.
Protestants tend to believe no baptismal like that could ever be valid, that the choice must be conscious.
I don’t think that’s strictly limited to Methodists. It’s the breakdown of “faith” versus “works”. Many protestants don’t believe that works matter in whether you are saved, the only qualification is your faith. Do you accept Jesus and God at the time of your death or not? If so, you’re in despite any works you’ve ever done, if not, you are out despite any works you have done. Growing up Southern Baptist, that was what I experienced.
The dance thing wasn’t strictly true - we never had a problem with it in the church I grew up. It was a longstanding joke, but nothing serious. I visited another big mega Southern Baptist church and they seemed to be the same way. Now we didn’t dance during the service, but that’s different.
As far as the just versus loving God, I can only comment that there were factions within the church that held different ideas, and church politics could be bitter at times. What was stressed to me was the person’s individual relationship to God. Or something like that.
Hell implies that either God is a moron or that the people who believe in such a god are morons.
Eternal suffering would accomplish WHAT? How can anything be learned form that?
What would you think of parents who shot their teenage son for not cleaning up his room? He didn’t do what he was told now he won’t do it right forever. 
As religious beliefs go reincarnation makes more sense but who cares? Maybe God is really dumb.
:smack:
psik