Our? How many Christians are you speaking for? For the vast majority, eternal salvation trumps love and forgiveness.
Cite? “Majority” might be correct, but “vast majority”? For many American Christians, the emphasis seems to be on God giving us wealth and guns in this life, not the next.
Reminds me of an old joke:
“Do you believe in infant baptism?”
“Believe it? Why, I’ve seen it!”
(Didn’t say it was a good joke. ;))
I’m pretty sure I don’t understand the OP. Christians don’t really believe what they believe, because if it was the opposite of what they believe, they wouldn’t believe it. That doesn’t follow AFAICT.
Regards,
Shodan
In one sense, the question “Would you still believe if the reward was Hell?” makes no sense at all. If the Lord of the Universe, the Alpha and the Omega, the Ground of our Being, etc., takes up residence in your heart, then Heaven is in you, because what is Heaven anyway, but the presence of the Lord? You are too strongly connected to Heaven to fit into Hell. It just doesn’t work.
But in another sense, it makes complete sense. You grow up Southern Baptist (or some other form of evangelical), you know all along that someday you’ll commit your life to Christ, and so when you’re ten or twelve, you walk up to the altar, make your commitment, your family gathers around with beaming smiles, a short time later you get dunked in a tank of water, and when you dry off, nothing inside you has changed.
What need of change was there, after all? You were already a Southern Baptist, doing all the right things, living the right way, believing the right things. Nobody around you is even suggesting that anything’s wrong with continuing on the same path you’ve been on for all your life.
What should have been a life-changing experience has been institutionalized, tamed, reduced to getting your card punched.
And if something on the meaningfulness level of getting your card punched were to cost you an eternity in hell, I’d skip that trip too.
We were never to make it on our own but always one with God and with God part
Of us. One in spirit with the Father. In this there is perfection. The parent teaches the child in this is the parent is perfect then the teaching is perfect and thus the child is perfect as the teaching will succeed and that child though it is human is a god.
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Same here but I would say it’s deeper as the focus is on eternal things and along with friends and family you get many more and incredible help and insight.
. Not mine either.
My God goes where he pleases and will
Continue as needed. Needs no permission to do so and will use who he sees fit for the task. Really that’s a upper management decision
FLAw in your logic, would require one to be able to save themselves from themselves.
The whole Jesus dying thing is so we could be saved. It’s a hopeful message. If Jesus dying and believing in him means going to hell, the whole point to Christianity unravels, so of course people wouldn’t believe.
Saying that you’re not a “true believer” if you didn’t believe under different rules is absolutely absurd. Believing in Christ is not an intrinsically human trait. If that was true, the whole world would be Christian. You’re taught Christianity, and no, it wouldn’t have caught on if it didn’t have a hopeful message.
AFAIK there are religions that teach of no afterlife, or meh afterlifes, but I don’t think there are any that teach that you will be “punished” for believing.
P.S. I’m an atheist, FWIW.
Maybe my scenario is too extreme as some of you seem to be missing the point. Or maybe I just can’t explain it very well, or maybe it’s just a terrible thought experiment. But I’ll give it another go:
My argument is that Christians believe that 100% of the Bible is true because it explains how to achieve eternal bliss. That they are convinced by the reward that the rest of the Bible is authentic too. But I believe changing the reward to something that is a punishment (or having no reward at all), the rest of the Bible would be dismissed. That believer’s faith hinges on the reward or fear of punishment, not “God’s Word” as most claim. That this sort of faith is inauthentic and only those that would still believe in the absence of a reward, or even presence of a punishment, are True Believers.
Heaven or hell is a pretty abstract reward/punishment. I’m not sure many people make religious decisions on that basis. I think a lot of people believe what they believe because that’s what the people around them believe.
And then there’s those times when one’s ‘born-again’ experience lives up to its name, when it changes everything and suddenly the world’s amazing. It happens. 
Why would anyone in this thread be interested in a lame porn webcomic’s made up religion unless they already followed said lame comic?
The answer to the OP is obvious, of course no one would follow Christian codes if the reward was torture. Have you met humans? The inly way it would work is if there was something even more horrible for not following. The Aztecs and the ancient Egyptians had some scary afterlife mythos but even they gave you a fighting chance of missing the torture.
Pre-christian religions which did have filters for the quality of the afterlife (and many did not) pretty much used individual actions. Christianity had the marketing message that you could be a rotten person and still get into heaven, and that your enemies might wind up in Hell. (See Dante.) So if buying Jesus made you wind up in hell, there would not be many buyers. After all, what product advertises that using it will leave you outcast and lonely.
But I agree with you about current Christianity. If you are convinced that accepting the Bible as 100% true (for whatever definition of 100% you use) you are not going to put in lots of efferot looking at evidence that the Bible is no where close to 100% true.
The same works for politics too.
The vast number of people who change beliefs would seem to indicate that this is not true. Examining evidence and belief systems outside your current one can lead you to changing a belief which no longer makes sense.
It happened to me. I believed in God (Jewish version) until I discovered when the Bible was actually written, which was when the whole thing fell apart and non-belief became much more logical.
Some beliefs seem to be immune from outside evidence, but that is personal and not a universal.
Well, first of all, very few people believe 100% of the Bible is “true”. Only a small subset of Christians believe there is no metaphor in the Bible.
Second, some sects of Judaism have a very meh view of the afterlife (IMO). And you don’t even need to be a Jew to enjoy it (which is one of the reasons they don’t proselytize). Judaism and Christianity are closely related, so I reject your notion that there has to be awesomeness rewards for belief.
Also, there are Christian sects that believe there is a helluva lot more to going to heaven than just saying you believe in Jesus, and they still believe, so there’s that.
Most Christians that grew up Christian believe because that’s what they were taught. Kids don’t disbelieve in Santa Claus because Santa didn’t come one year or handed out coal. They believe because their parents taught them. They disbelieve because Santa Claus is easily disprovable.
Most Christians that did not grow up Christian believe because they had a “religious experience” that led them believe.
Your “no goodies/no belief” position is erroneous. I am an atheist, who has believed, and no longer does. My path to disbelief had NOTHING to do with heavenly rewards or lack of.
So if I’m understanding this correctly, the thesis of this thread is that there’s two reasons to “believe” in god stuff:
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It’s promising nifty rewards and you don’t care what it says, you’ll ‘believe’ it if you get rewards.
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It presents a cosmology that you consider factually correct and you believe it because you think it’s factually correct.
For an example of the latter, consider the fact that many children raised theist go through a period of existential terror because they have been quite explicitly told they will go to hell (because they’re no perfect), and it hasn’t crossed their minds that the entire thing is a big scam.
The OP seems critical of people who hold the first type of belief, and I’m sort of on his side - that kind of mentality seems silly. However I’m not convinced that many theists, particularly ones who attend a formal religion, think that way. Most religions make it clear that their cosmologies are supposed to be factual - and many religions make it clear that some people are gonna go to hell, even some believers! And every person whose religion required more for salvation than just walking through the door would seem to achieve the OP’s desired state of believing in a religion despite the fact that they’re believing in the possibility of their own damnation.
On a separate and unrelated note, in my view the OP has painted his hypothetical into a corner, because he said this:
The answer to this that of course the religion would have believers - he straight-up said that the existence of God, the biblical stories, and the fact all believers will go to hell has been absolutely proven. This means that to not believe it, you quite literally have to be deluded.
Honestly when something is proven this hard, it feels wrong to call it a religion - it’s not a ‘religion’ to think that gravity exists and 1+1=2, and everyone’s damnation would be similarly factual.
But if anyone was going to try and deliberately dodge damnation through carefully cultivated ignorance/delusion, I’d say the ones with the best chance of pulling it off would be those who are currently devoutly religious. The kind that deny evolution. If you can deny evolution, you can deny reality, and if damnation was reality then denying it would be right up their alley.
That belief can change doesn’t make it a choice. The premise of this thread is exactly opposite to an examination of evidence and belief systems leading to a change in your belief.
Possibly, but it changes my philosophical justification for belief. Part of the reason i believe is that I perceive God as a being that cares for creation. If the reward for belief was suffering, i would have a hard time reconciling that with a being that cares. ( Full disclosure, I’m a universalist, so don’t believe in an eternal Hell at all.) This would force me to either say God doesn’t care, there is some sort of caring reason for punishing believers or he is malevolent. Currently, those claims don’t fit into my worldview. I can neither deduce nor observe those claims to be true, but I am open to exploring the possibility if you have a good argument behind it.
Different thread, but I’d argue the Bible doesn’t require repentance for salvation either (although repentance is strongly encouraged). I Timothy 4:10 says Jesus is the savior of all people; especially those who believe. Which seems to indicate that even those who don’t believe are saved.
I wasn’t commenting on the premise of the thread, but on Chronos’s assertion about choice of belief. Did I have to choose to believe and then have to choose not to believe? The evidence that motivated my change is not exactly arcane. Does one have to ignore evidence against a belief?
I’m assuming we can choose anything, or else the point is moot. Let’s please not have a free will argument here, okay?
This is not a free will argument. Not everything is a choice. You can’t choose to fall in love. You can’t choose to like rotted meat. Nothing in your original reply describes making a choice not to believe.