And if God stopped every natural Disaster by a miracle, would you really have Free Will? God didn’t make that Tidal wave, he didn’t force the parents to live in a tidal wave zone, etc.
That’s not what all Universalists believe. You may be so certain your evil actions were justified that you refuse to repent.
I honestly don’t think Stalin or Hitler would repent. They were *sure *they were 100% in the right.
The child didn’t choose to live there.
So? Did God force him to live there?
Explain how free will follows from suffering, DrDeth. And don’t give me what Scripture says. I want you to explain how it works.
Adam and Eve had free will before they were cast out of the Garden of Eden, where their every need was taken care of. And I have been told that people will take their free wills with them to heaven, where presumably suffering is impossible.
Free will is bullshit anyway. But even if we accept it is a real thing, there is no good reason to think an individual must suffer to have it. That is just something people say to rationalize why God allows us to suffer. God did not want us to suffer in the first place but humans messed everything up. Or so I have been told. However, he did want us to have free will from day one, because he didn’t want to be worshipped by a bunch of robots. He gave us free will for his benefit. Not ours.
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No, the child chose his parents and the place the parents would raise her/him, of course. :rolleyes:
I have no idea what point you are trying to make with this line of “reasoning”, but you are failing miserably.
Alright, alright, your position is that God is powerless to prevent any kind of suffering at all because humans have free will. Virus mutates; an epidemic starts - humanity’s fault!
So why didn’t this apply in the time of the bible? God did miracles left and right (including ‘miracles’ that straight up killed people), and Jesus went around curing people of things all the time. Why didn’t those acts break free will?
Oh, and will we have free will in the afterlife?
Yeah, maybe, I honestly don’t know what Stalin and Hitler would do. As an agnostic, if I died and discovered there was an afterlife, and incontrovertible proof that everything in the Bible was true, and there was a very bad place I would go to if I didn’t do x, y, and z, I’d do whatever it took to get to the good place. I think most people would, and maybe even Hitler. The afterlife would have to be a very nebulous, non-directive place (kind of like Earth), before I wouldn’t do whatever it takes.
God talked directly to Moses and performed all kinds of amazing miracles through him.
But Moses still chose to ignore him.
From my niece’s vantage point, adults are gods. They can do anything. They are all-powerful and all-knowing. But guess what? She still knowingly disobeys them. She looks cute while she is doing it, but still. She don’t curr.
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Okay, look, this debate has gotten way off track from my original post. Not that there haven’t been some good comments, but I want to clarify a few things:
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I specifically asked, “Why aren’t more Christians universalists?” Most of the objections, at least on the last page and a half, have been from atheists or agnostics wanting to disprove or poke wholes in the concept of God or heaven or the afterlife or whatever. That’s a fine debate but not really the one I was interested in. I was more looking for people who wanted to defend Hell as eternal punishment, or the theory of substitutional atonement or something.
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I am not saying, by any means, that I know what heaven is like; and if my posts sound dogmatic about what it is like then I apologize. I am most assuredly speculating on what heaven may be like based on how I am reading the scriptures, in contrast with the idea that Jesus’ love and sacrifice was ineffectual in saving most of the world which is the standard Evangelical belief. Anything I’ve said about heaven or Hitler or parties or ice cream should be taken in this context – I’m imagining an afterlife scenario consistent with the Gospels and the rest of scripture. Hell, I could be wrong. But I think the idea that God sends people (or allows them to “choose”) eternal punishment is wrong, and unscriptural to boot.
So with that said,
Will Hitler be allowed into heaven “as he is”? Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense that he is a human being created and redeemed by God and is welcome into God’s presence despite his past actions. I assume that, being in God’s presence, he will come to recognize the error of his past ways and repent of those actions, and come to a truer belief in God. But I do not believe that repentance is necessary for him to be “saved.”
What will life be “outside” God’s party? Well, again, to speculate, I imagine it to be pretty much the same as being inside. You can sit in the corner and sulk, or you can participate. You’re welcome and encouraged to join the community - after all, we were created a social beings to love and be loved by each other. My personal feeling is that that kind of love will be irresistible; but if you feel like you’re stubborn enough to not want it you can sit it out a suppose.
If there is no suffering in the next life, why does God allow us to suffer here on earth? I have no fucking idea, really. But I do know that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared the glory that will be revealed in us.” (Romans 8, I think). Of course there are people all over the world who suffer, and to paraphrase one of my old religion professors, “if I were a Christian I would do something about it.” But believing that someone endures a brutal lifetime of suffering only to die and suffer an eternity of torment because they never heard of Jesus, or weren’t convinced to believe in him, doesn’t jibe with the God I know.
So this god can only do miracles all of the time, or not at all?
Where is his free will?
Should the millionaire Christian that gets all the breaks and never suffers as much as a sprained ankle get the same after-death reward as a child that never gets to decide anything and dies of dysentery? If so, then the ties between free will and suffering seem tenuous at best.
For the record, as an atheist (and a pretty damn hard one) if I died and then awoke in an afterlife I would probably stop being an atheist pretty damn quick - pretty much as soon as I was convinced that it wasn’t a giant elaborate trick. Most Atheists would believe in God in an instant if the evidence supported it. It’s just it doesn’t, as best we can tell.
Upon finding out that God is threatening me with hell, the first thing I’d do is ask, well, what the hell? It’s pretty hard to imagine a scenario that justifies an omnipotent or near-omnipotent god torturing people forever. My snap judgement would be that any god that does so is evil, and following them would be condoning that evil. I could no more follow such a god than I could follow, well, Hitler.
(Yes, I consider myself too moral to be a theist. :D)
Universalism of course handily sidesteps the problem of an evil God, but it also raises the question of why I’d want to associate with him at all. He and his big giant love-in sound kind of culty, and to be honest I’ve never been a crowd person. Sometimes I just want to be alone.
I’d be more amenable to entering the gate if I knew I could also leave. Then I could try out both options, see what I preferred. I might keep a house in both places indefinitely, who knows.
(Note that none of this applies if God’s Love is an irresistible drug, as I mentioned earlier.)
Hey, sometimes atheists want to play too. And the question of why anybody would bother being a universalist Christian is a worthy one - the universalist position is basically that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a universalist or not.
From that standpoint, a potentially valid answer to “why aren’t more Christians universalists” might be “because if they were inclined to convert to universalism, they might find it more sensible to convert to couchpotatoism”.
Another explanation might be, “They read the same scriptures as you and got something different out of them.” My understanding of scripture, for example, is that the bible does not support the universalist position, at least not, well, universally. I was under the understanding that there was a passage that said, in essence, that the devil (or serpent or something) would writhe forever in the same garbage fire in which the unworthy souls would be annihilated. Presuming that I’m not misremembering that, that doesn’t sound very universalist to me - sinners are getting annihilated.
But then I might actually be misremembering, because I consider the bible to be a way worse book than, say, Harry Potter, so I read things like Harry Potter instead.
Can the idea of an eternal punishment hold water without the unsupported supposition that it is possible for human beings to withstand punishment and reject Heaven for eternity?
Too late to add: Unless one believes that it is possible for a finite human being to actually deserve an eternal punishment without possibility of parole, of course.
Universalist dont believe in eternal punishment unless that person wishes to continue being punished.
When you get parole in a prison here on earth you are generally expected to admit to your wrong doing and be contrite and remorseful about it.
If you tell the parole board that “he deserved it, and I am glad I did it, and it’s not wrong to do what I did” you likely wont get parole.
I think the number of people throughout history that could withstand punishment for Eternity can be counted on the fingers of one foot.
That’s my point. I think that Universalism hasn’t caught on, because any attempt to do so would ultimately result in apathetic followers. “I’m going to heaven anyway, I’d rather go golfing this Sunday”. The only *really *visible Christians are the ones that go to Church. So, maybe there are more Universalists out there, they just aren’t as visible.