Evidence for this please.
Evidence that life has an overarching destiny beyond the subjective meaning we give our own lives please?
Please evidence that Hell exists outside of the human imagination.
It’s orientate, and well is an entirely subjective term here.
For Protestants generally, that’s probably a fair statement (not just Lutherans). There are of course some exceptions.
For most Christians though, eternal perdition is for those who do not believe, regardless of the views on the topic of how redemption and sanctification work for those who do believe, and regardless of the variations in teachings about whether there is, e.g., literal fire and agony and choking and screaming or not.
I didn’t mean to suggest that there necessarily was; people can of course not think things through. But if you believe that at least one sin (the sin of unbelief) can offer no rehabilitation, then at least for that special case, you believe in punishment as the only option, and not just any punishment, but infinite punishment for a finite offense which need not be anything more than a thought crime. And you must see it as fixing or satisfying something. I’d say, your god’s fragile ego. Maybe you have something else in mind.
Only for Brits AFAIK. For 'Muricans, or those who learned 'Murican English, it’s orient. Here we would consider the extra syllable to be a pointless flourish.
@mordant First, I am grateful for your thoughtful and articulate messages, and for taking the time to explain things, and not rushing into confrontational exchanges (aka trolling?).
I would make a distinction. Any number of sin can, in my own belief and understanding as Catholic Christian, merit hell. We call these mortal sins. Lustful use of pornography is one example. Defrauding someone in business is another. But any sin can be forgiven, and thus any sinner can be rehabilitated, as long as he lives.
As I see things, belief in hell is not so much tied to the idea that certain sins are beyond rehabilitation, but rather that life is a very serious affair, and that if you persist in missing the mark, choice after choice, then your final choice, and thereby the whole of your life, will miss the mark, and be a failure.
Belief and love are not pure acts of will. Belief has to have a basis in reality and for me at least it has to be grounded in something other than bare assertion.
Love is a potential, but not inevitable, response to the actual actions and character of an actually existing person, and it definitionally must be totally voluntary, reciprocal and unconditional. Any one (deity or not) who demands love as its due on pain of eternal perdition or any other sort of punishment really, is not actually itself loving, and cannot expect its “love” to be reciprocated.
Indeed, a truly selfless love sets the beloved free to be themselves, not to be possessed for their own ends. In the words of I Corinthians 13, it does not “seek its own”.
Yes. Exactly! I agree 
This is a foundational conviction for me, and one that I insist on a lot. For example, I despise the dismissive expression “that’s your opinion.” If I am making a claim, I should have justifications for it! And if asked from a genuine interest, I should be able to give an account. And if “you” don’t agree, then there too, some kind of reason should be given.
Belief must not be blind…
Two questions:
So you think that an eternal punishment is appropriate for a non-eternal act?
Do you consider your god to be both just and merciful?
I’m glad we agree … for some given value of “reality” and “grounded” anyway. I suspect that we have different concepts of what those things mean, at least in some contexts.
But I have no problem understanding that beliefs I can’t agree with or share can still be held with good intentions. If you can credit me in the same way then we have a basis for respectful, yet authentic, interaction. Or put another way, our beliefs don’t have to so define us that to have them challenged equates to personal annihilation and must be occasion for pearl-clutching.
If you have no experience with it, you might be surprised at how often in the US with its disproportionate number of authoritarian / fundamentalist Christians, we unbelievers often understand Christianity better than they do, and have to endure them telling us what we (dis)believe and why, rather than asking us and then believing our answers. We are often in a contrived box of their making (rebellious, libertine, hateful, angry, and just generally gross, immoral and fattening). Also they forget that many, if not most of us, were once Christians or at least from Christian backgrounds and either left it or rejected it for reasons that we consider good and sufficient.
Those of us who are Americans often have experienced various levels of abuse from an evangelical past, and often it’s fairly fresh. In my case it wasn’t very bad and is 30+ years in my rear-view mirror. I would not therefore dismiss some rather, er, frank and/or harsh responses you can expect here as the product of trolls. Also keep in mind that we here in America are enduring the degenerate fruits of Christian nationalism that is the ultimate result of the kind of Christianity we were once enmeshed in.
And here of course Catholicism has had its share of terrible scandals, arguably to an even worse degree than in the rest of the world; I have Catholic friends who really have to hold their noses to stay in the Church.
So understand that you appear to us in one sense as just another theist who believes they are “doing it right” and are a better representative of Jesus than the rest and has things to say we haven’t heard or thought of before. Oddly, every Christian claims to have it right. It does get old sometimes.
That said, welcome to Atheist Republic, lol.
When I was younger: Christian leaders would play audio clips of people screaming and claim that these voices were recorded at the bottom of the well to hell (hoax). It is a scam; you are being scammed. I realize you probably can’t see it, but it is painfully obvious to those of us who don’t believe in magic. And I know you probably find the reference to magic insulting; however it IS straight up magical belief/thinking.
Sin is a myth as well. The assumption that it even exists is part of the scam you are trapped in. Notice: your religion created the problem (silly claims about sin), and the cure (divinity of Jesus/etc). IT’S A SCAM.
eta: If you want a serious spiritual adventure: try starting your religious beliefs/journey all over again, this time not accepting ancient fictional texts of unknown authorship as the word of god and see if you can find your way back to Christianity; if it is true it should not be difficult. This is what Feynman recommended to believers.
@mordant You’ve kindly taken the time to write at some length. Let me try to make that same effort.
Re: Love.
On this we agree as well. Perhaps it’s helpful to spell it out a bit more:
I think so far, we are generally in agreement?
Regarding, God, I might paraphrase what you said as follows: “A God that would threaten us with hell fire if we don’t love him, would be a very abusive lover indeed, if he even loved us at all.”
Let me candidly give you my most direct reply - though surely there is much much more to say both in terms of explaining what I mean, and in justification.
All existing things are directed to God, and love God in their own way. Human beings are invited to do so of their own free will. But if they fail to love, they miss out on the very aim of their being, an aim which was given to them by their maker, and which we feel most acutely in our desire to be happy. Hell is chiefly this: a failed, unhappy life, the fundamental desire of our being unfulfilled, by our own prideful choices.
The commandment to love God - and our neighbor - is not an arbitrary command, to chose one option among others. It’s an expression of what we fundamentally are, and were meant to be.
@Nyarlathotep Let me get on my high horse too for a bit…
I am a professional scientist and philosopher. I have given up money, relationships, my country, friendships, to travel the world and learn from the most knowledgeable physicists, engineers, theologians and philosophers in the world. I have graduate degrees in all those fields from top universities. My library is my morning gym. The laboratory my day job. The university classroom my evening socializing.
I assure you, there is nothing magical about my thinking. It’s the product of hard work, and learning from the best.
That’s hilariously horrifying. I am glad you are no longer part of those “religious” groups.
Yes. But with a caveat. A human act may not be so well characterized as a ‘non-eternal’ act. If we chose something and never come back on this choice, that’s as close to an ‘eternal’ act as humans can do.
Yes. And properly, not in a metaphorical sense. Though for ‘merciful’ especially, that’s far from obvious.
Ok . . . but I would to explore and/or reflect on some of these points.
I agree that life is a very serious affair, and that it should be put to good use.
I wish to ask an obvious question: Why even pick Christianity as a religion?
Islam makes many similar claims, and some Eastern religions (such as Buddhism) actually make a lot more sense to me than Christianity.
Here is where a Christian may hold up a Bible and inform me that " . . . this is what the Bible says."
Yet why follow the Bible? Why not the Koran, the Baghavadgita, or the Tibetian Book of the Dead?
Any one of these books seem to have the same credibility as the Bible.
Have you even read any these other books?
If I was to become very religious, I would probably choose Buddhism,as it seems to make the most sense to me.
The Bible read under the motion of the Holy Spirit (which curiously inspires different “Christians” with contradictory interpretation) is not a good rule for what to believe is true.
It’s for the same reason that I would not want to be a Jew or a Muslim or any “religion” based merely in a book.
Buddhism the philosophy? Or Buddhism the religion?
How can justice and mercy co-exist?
Hmmm….close? Something cannot be close to eternal and eternal at the same time, eh? So, you think that an act is only close to eternal yet your god considers it appropriate, in some cases, to reciprocate with an eternal punishment.
If that is the case, then imo, the god you have created is, well, a dick.
CyberLN, I know you are the boss here, but I will be blunt, the way I am with my students, and return what you are giving me. That’s just not a very intelligent comment.
What should have been obvious from my comment: An act of choice that we never go back on is a permanent choice, one that is forever, since it isn’t changed. Similarly, the punishment of hell lasts forever.
Maybe what wasn’t, but it worth recalling: Neither of those are properly speaking eternal, because both have duration. The eternal does not, because it doesn’t involve any kind of succession.
Please help me understand why you wrote this.
Oh. It was just a nod to your admin role.
I don’t believe any of this.
Yet it’s true. Feel free to DM me if you want my LinkedIn.
But it’s not meant as something very important here; I was just dancing with @Nyarlathotep. I am really just here for conversation, and what @Nyarlathotep was doing was not super conversation friendly.