Who gets to define “good” in each of those cases?
I expect that Johar meant “according to what your religion defines as good, which is good enough for Johar”. But your question is valid even within that.
*"If you are a Branch Davidian, be a GOOD Branch Davidian.
If you are a People’s Temple Disciple of Christ, be a GOOD People’s Temple Disciple of Christ
If you are a Scientologist, be a GOOD Scientologist…"*
I don’t know.
From an atheistic point of view, I think it’s easier to control people if they think they’re going to be punished for not following the rules.
I also think some people ABSOLUTELY need to believe in hell. If you’ve ever asked the question “If there’s no God, why be good?” you NEED to believe in hell. i encourage that wholeheartedly.
If you are ISIS…
Exactly.
Is there a term for supposedly inspirational phrases that fall apart if you examine them for more than two seconds?
This is the internet. There’s a term for everything.
Heck, I’ll go farther than that and ask, “Why aren’t more Christians CHRISTIAN?!”
People tend to use religion for their own agendas. If you read the Gospels, you will see that Jesus had a major bone to pick with hypocrites in general and the Pharisees in particular.
It’s reconciled by “All will be offered salvation but not all will take it,” as mentioned.
Finally, if there are some verses that say all will be saved, and some that say that some people will go to Hell, surely it’s better to err on the side of caution, isn’t it? If one airplane mechanic tells you that your airplane is perfectly fine, and another mechanic tells you there is a serious malfunction that will potentially lead to the airplane crashing mid-flight, wouldn’t it be safer to heed the latter than the former, or, at least, not dismiss the latter’s words just because the former says all is well?
A pastor once said “The Bible is an equal opportunity offender.” There is something in it to offend, upset or challenge everyone.
And on the topic of Universalism, I get the impression that many Universalists are motivated by a logic that is akin to the appealing-to-consequences fallacy:
They feel that it is too horrible to believe that some people - in fact, most people - will be burning in torment in Hell for eternity (and yes, it is indeed an awful thing to contemplate.) Their revulsion against this leads them to promote the argument that surely this cannot be true - surely this is too awful to be true - and therefore *cannot *be true.
Of course, there is also a rhetorical/logical/theological component to their arguments as well. But I strongly suspect that their main underlying motive is that they do not *want *things such as Hell, or people burning in Hell, to be real.
The “problem” is that they buy into the “Loving God” thing, which is 180 degrees from “eternal punishment”. No crime deserves eternal punishment.
Lots of liberal Christians are universalists. It’s not an uncommon position among mainline Protestants. About a third of mainline Protestants don’t believe in Hell and those that do believe in Hell may not think that it’s a permanent situation. Of course, about 10% of mainlines don’t believe in an afterlife at all, so there’s that. I’m a United Methodist Universalist. I’m not the only one.
Not even Hitler?
The Church I belonged to was a universalist church. Anyone could be saved. Yes, accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and repentance of your sins was more or less a Fastpass (some issue on whether or not the truly sinful, repentant or not would have to spend time in Purgatory or even Hell contemplating their sins for a time).
Good people of other religions or even those without faith could go to heaven (some disagreement over whether everyone went to the same heaven- different areas or different heavens or whether they might have to spend some time in the nicer areas of Hell or Purgatory first).
Evil people went to Hell until they *truly *repented. The thing about some really evil people is that they would never repent. Hitler perhaps being one of them. Thus, them being in Hell forever was their fault & decision.
I’m going to elaborate on the above. Christianity is immense. Extremely immense. It’s 1/3 of the world. Christians don’t ‘believe’ or ‘disbelieve’ in anything en masse. There are a few very basic beliefs, but besides those, we are an incredibly diverse group of people. In the US, we use Christian to mean shorthand for ‘white, lower and middle class, Evangelical, Republican-leaning, Conservative Protestants’ and that’s a great short-hand, and there are a lot of those people, but they aren’t representative of Christianity as a whole. Their beliefs come from very particular, emotion-driven movements from the turn of the 20th century and the crucible of the culture war. My church is a suburban, Protestant church that leans liberal and Democrat and 10% of the congregation is gay and half are pro-choice and there are at least a few universalists and not a few pluralists and we have had imams give our Sunday morning sermons and had an entire year where every Wednesday a non-Christian religious (or anti-religious) leader would give a talk. We’re just as ‘typical’ of Christianity as rural Pentecostal congregations who MAGA. This is something that culture and media have missed in their quest to make things easy to digest. There are at least 100 million Christians in the US alone. There is no typical Christian. We have a Korean, a Chinese and Spanish language congregations in my town of 30 thousand. I’ve met people from all of these congregations and some of them like the way that my church does things and some of them don’t. African congregations think that the US church is a haven of liberalism and European congregations think the US church is the land of conservative bigots. The reality is that we’re all over the board, so to get back to your question, some Christians do believe in universalism and some don’t. There are millions of reasons that each particular Christian believes exactly the way they do and it would be pretty difficult to list them all.
God as Oliver Hardy-“Now look what you made me do!”
They guy who creates the punishment and decides who gets the punishment isn’t responsible for the punishment?
Depends. Are you distorting and mocking the statement like the people before you in this thread, or are you considering it in a better light?
Because seriously, anyone can distort things and carry “logic” to its ultimate illogical conclusion.
Possibly. Take the following example.
Mary doesn’t want to be friends with people who rape her so Mary refuses to associate with them. Bob rapes Mary. Mary ‘punishes’ Bob by refusing to associate with him. Is Mary somehow responsible for this? I guess that you could say that Mary is responsible, but I think that many people would say that Bob is the one with the problem. I think that when you’re taking the stance that Hitler doesn’t belong in Hell because God isn’t forgiving enough, you might be alienating your audience regardless of what logic you may be trying to put into the argument.
I am considering the phrase itself, and the fact that it is indeed “deepity” in nature, no distortion necessary…especially if “good” is defined as “acting as I think the god/goddess/godthing I worship would want me to act”. It makes the assumption that all g/g/g entities want the same thing from their worshipers and/or that all g/g/g entities are really the same entity under various guises.
No, it’s more like Bob rapes Mary, and Mary tortures Bob for the rest of eternity.
edited to add: Please note the word “eternity”.