Isaiah 64:6
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags
But some are not only dirtier than others, but are deliberately kept dirty by God, according to Calvinists.
It’s been a while since I studied this but usually (most often) the greek word used for destruction when it applies to people means ‘come to ruin’ which is much in line with other places where the wicked eventually get what they deserve which is often taken as something that happens in this life. This is apposed to another greek word that means more like we think of destruction as implied in the Calvinists view you point out.
Some Christian writers, like C.S. Lewis, avoid this by reconceptualizing Hell from a place to a state of mind - the willful rejection of God. In Lewis’ soteriology (from what I can remember reading The Great Divorce thirty-some years ago), at death, the soul beholds the full majesty, glory, and love of God, truly comprehending the vast gulf between the Supreme Being of the Universe and their own insignificance. (The Total Perspective Vortex from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is Douglas Adams’ secularized take on the same idea). If the soul has practiced humility in its life, grasping at some notion of the abyss between God and itself, the vision is paradisiacal. If the soul is still clings to its sense of its own importance, or to its vices and habits of mind - what Lewis described as the sin of Pride - the vision is intolerable, and the soul can be described as being in Hell. But it’s not sent to Hell by God; its torment is an unavoidable consequence of the inherent qualities of the Deity.
This argument seems to be a retcon, specifically to avoid the whole “benevolent God sends millions to suffer for eternity” problem, and has just as much evidence for it as Dante’s Inferno; but at least it’s more consistent than the traditional pitchforks, devils, and brimstone conception of Hell.
Yes, definitely. Obviously, Lewis was troubled by the implications of the actual texts.
So ignore all the other problems that arise from the usual conceptions of the Christian God, you can relax because God isn’t really sending anyone into eternal torment, and that makes everything ok.
Yeah, right.
That does bring up an important point. People don’t believe in God because of the non-exigent evidence; they do it because they find the idea emotionally appealing. So to convince someone like the OP says you’d want arguments that appeal to the target’s fears, hates and desires, not a logical or fact-based argument.
Telling a known bigot that God wants them to oppress or kill the object of their hatred is neither a moral, logical nor fact-based argument for God, but it’s an effective one. Demagoguery is effective at persuasion, however bad it is for its targets or society at large.
I’ve heard from many former Christians who deconverted who still wake up scared of being wrong and being destined for hell. Since I grew up in a religion without any kind of hell, I had no such problem.
Hell was a great marketing tool. The pagans thought you wound up in the same place no matter what, so they had nothing to lose by listening to Christians who said it mattered.
Everyone has their own god. An omnipotent and omnibenevolent god would have plenty of time to reduce needless pain and suffering.
Neither you nor I could kill innocent babies or innocent anyones, and our free will is fine. Why didn’t god make everyone like that? It would save him a lot of time and be efficient and decrease evil in the world.
The idea of an immortal soul was a pagan idea to begin with, and I have this theory that one of the reasons for the development of heaven and hell after Jesus’ death was to make it more palatable to pagans.
As I understand it, the idea of bodily resurrection, as ancient Jews and Jesus conceived the life of the righteous after death, was a really hard sell to Gentiles, because it makes no damned sense. It raises questions like: What age is your body when resurrected? Do you still have wounds? If someone eats your dead body, is that part returned to you or part of the other person’s body? No, let’s just say it’s an ethereal non-corporal sort of existence and put those skeptics to bed.
Well, sure. But if God is looking to prove his existence, one efficient way would be to show up at the beginning of a genocide and put a stop to it, while the cameras are rolling, so to speak. That might move the needle on getting more people to believe He exists.
Yeah, it’s a great motivator to get people into the pews, so to speak. I’m a Methodist (UMC). Methodists don’t preach much about it really. We’re more about the Love of Jesus, and less about the Fear of God. But we do acknowledge Hell as something that exists, as a place that would really suck in the afterlife.
My cite that I know this is that I saw Hadestown last month. As I understand it, pagans went to the underworld (not as nice as the above ground, but not torment) and that only a few heroes got put into the sky - very rarely in heaven. I think Ganymede was an exception.
Well the resurrection was supposed to happen far in the future. A lot of Jewish practice today is based around your questions - no tattoos, rapid burial, no autopsies. Yeah, it makes no sense. But does any of it? I never have gotten if wife 1 dies and man marries wife 2 (perfectly legal, right) which one he winds up with in heaven.
Ok, flipside. I grew up believing in God, Jesus, etc. I was fairly smart, but undiagnosed ADHD, with emotional control issues. I wasn’t promoted, but became a social misfit. I was bullied - they particularly liked to provoke a strong emotional reaction. I had the occasional friend, but few and far between.
I thought Junior High would be better because of school districting I would be around a lot more new people than people from elem. But my situation didn’t improve, still an outcast and often bullied and teased.
Shift to High School, same situation.
I had my religious revelation, when I started really investigating the Bible and the source of my beliefs. And instead of “finding God”, I lost him.
It took therapy in high school to start attacking some of my self defeating attitudes. I ended up with a few people I got along with, and one decent friend.
So I’m expecting great things in college. Nope, basically the same pattern.
It took getting into adulthood, having my emotional maturity develop, and learning social interaction that could be teasing without malice broke before I figured out how to make friends.
And a lifelong course of introspection, followed by therapy that helped me start seeing my depression and anxiety amplified by my low self- esteem. I’m still working thrift through those issues.
But I’ve had good friendships over the years, and I have a good group now. I just recognize that a lot of the source of my lack of friendships was my own standoffishness.
No miracles, no sudden transformation, just a lot of self growth.
I’m not sure what your story is supposed to prove. You say something miraculous occurred, but there’s nothing there to dissect and say “here is the miracle”. Any difference in your own attitude and perception need not be tied to any intervention by a deity or an alien.
Well people often tell themselves they believe based on evidence, so it can be effective to show the flaws in such evidence / arguments.
Eg there’s a lot of misconceptions about evolution, and a lot of people don’t know how to reason skeptically. And so in turn a lot of people genuinely think that the complexity and diversity of life is evidence for a creator God.
Unless you want it to be. I don’t mean to be dismissive, but there are many paths out of emotional difficulties, some more valid than others, and those paths include the religious one.
Let’s look at a different situation, an example from when I was in college. I had a conversation with a young woman who wanted to convince me … well maybe just explain her belief. She said her miracle was that she attempted suicide. She lived in a farm and there was a knife kept razor sharp, and one night she grabbed it and tried to slit her throat, but it didn’t leave a mark. How do I explain that?
Well, I mean I can’t. But let’s look where that leaves me.
First, there is no evidence this happened. I only have her word that it happened and how. But even saying that is taken as accusing her of lying. Now maybe she’s lying, or had a hallucination, or dreamed it. But saying any of those just makes the other person angry.
And it’s not really amenable to investigation because it happed elsewhere in the past, so who knows where the knife is or what has happened with it. And there’s no way to study her medically and try to discern if she’s prone to waking dreams, etc.
But let’s assume for a moment that somehow there is a way to convince her that her miracle is either a mistaken dream /hallucination, or otherwise didn’t actually happen. Great.
Except that incident sparked a significant change for her such that she no longer wants to commit suicide. Does breaking her belief send her back to where she was?
Basically it’s a no- win scenario where I’m an asshole for not taking her word, I’m an asshole for not changing my belief based on something that happened - if it did - only to her. And I’m an asshole if I convince her or wasn’t a miracle.
The only way I’m not an asshole is if I agree what happened to her is proof of God.
I feel the same way about Zen. We call it awakening. I’m not a deist but I’ve definitely started to see glimpses of something I have never seen before, the way the universe fits together, and it’s astonishing. I have lived behind a glass wall called social anxiety for so much of my life I couldn’t imagine being anything but scared of other people’s judgement.
The intensity of the experience and how it makes me feel is impossible to describe but roughly comparable to my strong religious experiences as a devout Christian. So much so that I started having flashbacks from my religious trauma which were dormant for my twenty years as an atheist.
The difference between Christianity and Zen is that Zen discourages becoming attached to any particular mental state up to and including happy feelings about Zen.
Part of my practice has been correcting what didn’t work for me in Christianity, which also means disinvesting myself in the beliefs of others. As a Christian I took the threat of hell very seriously and worked tirelessly to change others’ mind about Jesus. I wasn’t crawling on broken glass but I was taking my Bible to class and prostyletizing to people who were trying to beat me up (I was a weird kid.)
So my point here is not to convince anyone that what I have experienced is true. Just to say I think there is some part of the brain that is primed for powerful religious experiences in general. I think some people have an innate capacity for religious experiences and some people don’t. It’s probably like a spectrum.
I very obviously have that capacity because I’ve only been practicing zazen seriously for three months. When I became born again at eleven or twelve years old it was like a bolt of lightning straightaway.
I don’t think Zen or Christianity are anything alike but having experienced both I think they operate using a similar capacity. Prayer and worship roughly approximates certain meditative states. The only difference is how we as individuals interpret those states.
One possibility is that she had the knife backwards and put the flat end of the blade against her neck.
With religious debates, I sometimes feel bad criticizing someone’s religious beliefs if it gives them a sense of peace, security, safety, calm, etc. Or maybe their religious beliefs keeps them from committing suicide. In some ways, I envy having that kind of belief. It seems like it would be nice to have the feeling that god is always giving you a hug and is there to support you no matter what. But for whatever reason, the ability to have that kind of belief is not part of who I am. So while I like having religious debates, I don’t necessarily feel that someone has to give up their religious beliefs. The world is a scary place. If their belief in god is what keeps them going, I don’t want to take that away.
With too many religionists I have encountered the hardest part is convincing them that “We don’t the answer to that question” isn’t a synonym for “God did it”.
I was listening to an episode of 10% Happier which is a podcast by a Buddhist guy who interviews people kind of broadly about wellness topics. So it’s not all strictly Buddhist stuff but maybe talks with researchers about self-compassion or success at work or whatever. I loved the podcast at first, but it’s getting increasingly woo.
We were listening to an episode where the guy interviews his own brother about his brother’s meditation experiences. At one point he starts talking about the interconnected nature of all things which is par for the course in Buddhism, but he jumped straight from emptiness to this idea that consciousness is shared by this thing he called Awareness. So he’s been asking this Awareness what it wants from him.
We’re getting pretty woo now.
Then he says he was having this glorious bike ride and it suddenly struck him that, among other things, this Awareness wanted him to have as many peak experiences as possible.
It reminded me so much of people who find God wants them to have things they happen to themselves want. “God put it on my heart to move to California.” You mean, like, you wanted to move to California?
Now this Awareness wants him to have what he wants.
Hmmm.
I wanted to clarify from my earlier post I’m not saying the capacity for religious experiences means those experiences have the cause people think they do.
I think about this a lot, having recently had profound experiences I can’t explain, but I’m content to think it’s just a different brain state or something (which is the part that’s demonstrably true.) Yet I’m no longer sure if I would describe myself as an atheist. I think I’ve moved much further into agnostic territory.
But I’m trying not to get too attached to what other people believe or even what I myself believe. When you talk about the conclusion “This must be God” I’m really trying to not force any kind of conclusion but to learn to live with the uncertainty. The question of Who or What then starts to become irrelevant.