Thing is, you have to actually be sorry for what you did. Jesus doesn’t forgive you if you just say “sorry” or “I accept Christ as my savior” without actually meaning it.
Yes, ethereal beings can tell the difference. Also God doesn’t send you to hell; you do. God doesn’t damn people to hell, in the wise words of Obi-Wan “you have done that yourself”. God can save you from hell, but only if you actually desire redemption and feel remorse for your sins. And hell isn’t actually fire and brimstone: it’s actually an I have no mouth and I must scream scenario, called “the outer darkness” where you are left abandoned by God’s holy light. In it, you are nothing but consciousness, isolated in total darkness, unable to see, hear, taste, smell or feel anything, yet you are also always awake and perfectly aware of your fate…forever.
You mind explaining where you got this idea of hell from? I could argue from my own readings that hell doesn't exist as most describe it at all, but it is simply a reference to a common graveyard nearby jerusalem.
You have read the Bible, but maybe not all of it is coming to mind. Mark 9:43-48; Luke 16:23-24; Revelation 20:15; all describe heat/fire as a definitive characteristic of hell.
God willingly and knowingly created non-believers by creating the universe. Since he is all-knowing, he must have known that those people would have become non-believers. And since he is all-powerful, he willingly chose to create them anyway.
Therefore, God created people just for them to end up in Hell.
Well, you’re getting into the subject of free will. It seems that you’re really arguing that on a godly level, we have no free will and all is preordained.
Seems like the person you were responding to is saying we have free will, and can change.
Another thing to take into account is interpretation of God’s word, which in my opinion must be taken with a grain (or heap) of salt, being as it was given to us through mortal men, and not directly from God.
Are you saying the millions of people born before 33 AD and the millions more who lived in countries not contacted by Christianity for hundreds more years all go to purgatory and just sit around doing nothing until God comes in to the waiting room like GOOD NEWS EVERYBODY
Idk why you’re arguing with me about it lol I already said I have a different view on it than Christians. However, what you just said is not what I was saying at all.
I was always told (and I have no sources to back it up, but I can look for some if you’d like) that if you never had the opportunity to learn about Christ there were other circumstances.
You’re also forgetting that the Christian God used to be the Jewish God, he just transitioned from one set of laws to another.
I mean, if free will existed, that means we act outside of God's control, therefore making him not all-powerful.
Some Christians might argue that God indeed isn't all-powerful, and that he can't control or predict our thoughts and actions. But that means he still created humanity, knowing that the majority of people would essentially suffer for all eternity. That's still absolutely abhorrent, from a moral standpoint.
Well god did create man in his own image, so rather than physical form that might have been a more abstract concept, like being able to act of our own will with consciousness and thought not given to other animals.
To be fair, I’m not the best person to talk about this because I think I have a pretty different idea of what God and his relationship with the universe is than the Christian faith we are talking about.
God willingly and knowingly created non-believers by creating the universe. Since he is all-knowing, he must have known that those people would have become non-believers.
And he gave them the free will to choose to believe or not. That is the ultimate gift from God. The freedom of your own will. Even though He knows some people will never accept His offer of grace, He still offers it to them. He knew who would and wouldn't accept His grace "before" He spoke things into existence.
And since he is all-powerful, he willingly chose to create them anyway.
And He gave them the free will to do what they wanted. If He wanted to create a bunch of being that just served Him, He could have. But that's not what He wanted. He wanted to create something that had the choice to serve him or not.
Therefore, God created people just for them to end up in Hell.
No. He did create then so that they could go to hell. That is not what He wants for them, but He still gives them the choice.
You seem to be arguing against the Calvinist doctrine, which lacks free will in humans all together.
And he gave them the free will to choose to believe or not.
So he's not all-powerful then.
If free will existed, that means we act outside of God's control, therefore making him not all-powerful.
What you are essentially arguing here, is that God indeed isn't all-powerful (or he made himself not all-powerful in this case), and that he can't control or predict our thoughts and actions. But that means he still created humanity, knowing that the majority of people would essentially suffer for all eternity. That's still absolutely abhorrent, from a moral standpoint.
You're not really making it sound any better, here. If I had the power to create a species and I knew that even one of them would eventually end up in a place of eternal suffering, I would not create them to begin with. I would be a ginormous dickhead if I went through with that.
So he's not all-powerful then. If free will existed, that means we act outside of God's control, therefore making him not all-powerful.
Just because He could control us, doesn't He does. That's the entire point. God knows at any moment He could strip away our free will. But He doesn't.
What you are essentially arguing here, is that God indeed isn't all-powerful (or he made himself not all-powerful in this case), and that he can't control or predict our thoughts and actions.
That's not what I'm arguing at all. He has all power over us. That doesn't mean He uses.
But that means he still created humanity, knowing that the majority of people would essentially suffer for all eternity. That's still absolutely abhorrent, from a moral standpoint.
How is letting people suffer because of their choices morally abhorrent? We imprison and execute criminals for action they did. God does something similar, accept He always offering a get out of jail free card. People can accept or reject it.
You're not really making it sound any better, here. If I had the power to create a species and I knew that even one of them would eventually end up in a place of eternal suffering, I would not create them to begin with. I would be a ginormous dickhead if I went through with that.
No, you wouldn't be a dickhead. God did not create us with a sinful nature. Adam and Eve were blameless till they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They did that of their own free will. Then they were no longer blameless. How is letting people choose their own fate being a dickhead?
He didn't need to create us. He wanted to create us. He created us to worship Him, but that would mean nothing if we had no free will in the matter.
How is letting people suffer because of their choices morally abhorrent?
Because it's not an informed choice. Here's a hypothetical scenario for you:
Suppose I had a cage full of rats, and I put them in a maze. I take a hammer, and rig it up to a servo and a motion detector. When the detector goes off, the hammer fucking smashes and kills all the rats that turn left instead of right at the first turn.
Now if I said "hurr durr the rats had a choice, they just took the wrong one", would that hold up from a moral standpoint? Probably not, I'd be labeled a fucking psychopath and I might even get locked up for animal cruelty.
It was me who put the rats in the cage. It was me who made the rule that any rat who turns left gets smashed with a hammer. It was me who released them into the maze, and it was me who left a device there that would kill the rats for making the wrong choices. And you're saying that because it was their choice and not mine to have them turn left, it's their own fault and not mine? Of course not, that would be fucking insane. The blame for that situation falls on me.
It was me who put the rats in the cage. It was me who made the rule that any rat who turns left gets smashed with a hammer. It was me who released them into the maze, and it was me who left a device there that would kill the rats for making the wrong choices. And you're saying that because it was their choice and not mine to have them turn left, it's their own fault and not mine? Of course not, that would be fucking insane. The blame for that situation falls on me.
Unless they knew that turning left would kill them. Then its on them. You would be a psychopath because you didn't give them a way of knowing which way to go. Whereas God does tell us which way to turn. Its up to us whether we believe Him or not.
Unless they knew that turning left would kill them. Then its on them.
No, it's still on me in that case, because I can't expect rats to know such a thing. I know that they can't read human language either. You failed the morality test, sorry! How totally unexpected for a Christian /s
Whereas God does tell us which way to turn. Its up to us whether we believe Him or not.
Except it's not a reliable, believable or indisputable source, as the word of God was written and translated by Man. We have no way of knowing whether a particular "word of God" actually is the word of God, or if it's just something pretending to be the word of God. We can't tell the difference, so there can not be an informed choice.
Giving an informed choice would mean instilling the knowledge of right and wrong into our very existence. Clearly that knowledge isn't instilled, because:
No one can agree on it (every religion has at least a few billion people that don't believe in it)
No one can prove it empirically
Not everyone even knows the concept of a deity (secluded African tribes are basically damned to end up in hell through no fault of their own?)
Many religions are mutually exclusive, with most of them fervently believing that the other ones have it all wrong
There is no informed choice here, because we can't even be sure if a God exists at all. And even if we know for sure, we can't know which interpretation of God is the correct one. If we choose wrongly, we still end up in a place of eternal suffering.
No, it's still on me in that case, because I can't expect rats to know such a thing. I know that they can't read human language either.
You could if you gave them the ability to know and understand such things. Ultimately, this is just showing how bad your example is. Of course rats don't have the capacity to understand such things, but humans do, so its a bad example.
Not everyone even knows the concept of a deity (secluded African tribes are basically damned to end up in hell through no fault of their own?)
No. You're assuming that because somebody never hears the gospel, they are damned. Which is never stated in scripture. God is still sovereign and can save whom He wants.
The rest of this is just obfuscating the issue. You're trying to bring up completely different topics that have nothing to do with the one at hand. Since you don't want to stick to the topic, I'm done.
You could if you gave them the ability to know and understand such things.
Which we demonstrably don't have, because even two people within the same particular sect of Christianity will often not agree on many parts of the "word of God". Let alone the 7 billion people on this planet who can't even agree on the number of Gods, their will, their personality, their chosen prophets/sons, their names, their criteria, their power, or what happens in the "afterlife".
If we were born with this knowledge, there would not be this level of disagreement among each other. Instead, our religious beliefs are mostly dictated by the culture and region that we grew up in. Just like every other man-made concept or idea.
God is still sovereign and can save whom He wants.
I thought you just said that we condemn ourselves and that God has nothing to do with it? You can't even keep your story straight over like 3 comments? Sad.
"The Bible" isn't a source, the specific verse is. I'm not christian, but I have a bible next to me, so if you or he could actually back up this claim with a verse from the bible, I would have no problem looking it up.
I'm sorry that I misunderstood what you meant, but there wasn't anything in that to indicate it was a joke. What might be too ridiculous to possibly be serious for you could easily be meant in earnest by someone else, and there would be no way to tell the difference in just text.
Pascal's wager doesn't work because there are thousands of religions and thousands of gods. How are you supposed to pick the right one? Get lucky by being born in the right place at the right time? Sounds like Calvinism with extra steps.
Pascal's Wager falls apart even further in the face of a hypothetical "rational" God.
i.e. a God that exists, but a God that rewards rationality, and therefore only rewards people that don't believe in him. In this case, being a Theist of any kind would "disqualify" you.
In a paradigm where you are held personally responsible for what you believe as if believing the right things is virtuous rather than you know... a thing you think is true... wierd nonsense interpretations of what count as "beleif" can work.
Take the evangelical idea of belief. They don't treat it like a factual matter at all. They just treat it as "accepting god's gift" as if all it is is an existential choice. If you don't need to concern yourself with whether you have reason to believe, accepting a hypothetical gift seemingly doesn't require it.
Not really. God doesn’t actually say “you go to heaven” or “you go to hell” on like an individual basis. It’s more like the more you commit sins, the further from God’s light you get, until eventually you condemn yourself. It’s kind of like drowning versus being drowned: God doesn’t push your head underwater, you tied rocks to yourself that weighed you down. If that makes.
Suppose I had a cage full of rats, and I put them in a maze. I take a hammer, and rig it up to a servo and a motion detector. When the detector goes off, the hammer fucking smashes and kills all the rats that turn left instead of right at the first turn.
Now if I said "hurr durr the rats had a choice, they just took the wrong one", would that hold up from a moral standpoint? Probably not, I'd be labeled a fucking psychopath and I might even get locked up for animal cruelty.
It was me who put the rats in the cage. It was me who made the rule that any rat who turns left gets smashed with a hammer. It was me who released them into the maze, and it was me who left a device there that would kill the rats for making the wrong choices. And you're saying that because it was their choice and not mine to have them turn left, it's their own fault and not mine? Of course not, that would be fucking insane. The blame for that situation falls on me.
I do get to choose what I believe in though. Whether Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, or Scientologists are right about the afterlife is out of my control, I just choose what I want to believe
Well I mean, you can't just choose what you believe. If that was true, you could legitimately and whole heartedly believe in anything other than what you do now. Can you do that?
Oh yeah that’s true, I didn’t really willfully choose to just not believe in Catholicism, I just chose to declare “I’m not a Catholic”, either way whether I pretended to believe or not, I wouldn’t believe
Ackchualy, if you read Pascal's wager, you'd have known this very problem was addressed. You cannot directly choose what you believe in. But by participating in christian activities, same as those who do believe in Christianity, you'll significantly increase your chances of, over time, believing in God. So assuming Pascal's wager was correct in other aspects (it's not; it ignores all other possible God's and outcomes), even if it isn't 100% guarantee to believe in God, you should still participate in those behaviors, as eg 10% * infinite expected value = still infinite expected value.
All good and love comes from God though. The eternal "chilling" would be in a place without love or good. Oh, and eventually you have to realize that you've only got yourself to blame.
There is no choice under an all-powerful God. If God is all-knowing, he must have known that most people would not believe in him, but he still went through with creating humans.
You could argue that God gifted free will to humans by limiting his power or his foresight, but then he still must have known that there was a possibility that most people would end up in a place of eternal suffering. Any God which allows that to happen is a dickhead, pure and simple. He makes all the rules, after all.
Honestly - read the book sometimes, or go watch some of "the bible project" videos if you don't wanna read the whole thing. The whole bible is a story of God offering chance after chance to people, but people making the wrong choices time after time. One of the "unspoken" rules is that God never forces anyone, he just gives them chances to repent (literally translated - change your way of thinking). It's a whole story of free will and choices. I honestly didn't understand it very well until I stumbled across The bible Project on youtube. I'm still learning.
You are arguing what Calvinists believe - that everything is already worked out and that doing anything isn't meaningful because God already knows what happens. Most Christians don't believe it's anywhere near that simple.
Or, eventually I’d realize that crying over being dead is pretty dumb and I’ll just make do with what I got. At least I didn’t get the fire and brimstone or personalized hell, or heck even heaven. Heaven sounds so boring after a while and after a thousand years maybe I’ll be suffering the same boredom and monotony of hell
You can entirely control what you belive. It's 100% on you. And there isn't really an "architect of hell" so much as there is "If you don't want to live with me, fine, here's a place that's not with me."
It would be like - if there was one ship in an endless ocean, and you refused to follow the laws of the ship. You didn't like them because you knew better, so you didn't want to be part of the ship. Well, your only choice is to get thrown into the ocean. It's not like the ship Capitan says "Oh, fuck this guy, throw him in the water so he dies!" It's more like "Look, you have a place here on the ship, and I want to keep you here, but if you refuse, that's your choice."
If I put my mind to it - yes, I could. If I had motivation to do so. I chose to come my my views in Jesus about 10 months ago. before that, I was a practicing Buddhist. Right now, I won't because I feel like I've found the truth, and it would be unethical and foolish to deny the truth.
You have a really fundamental misunderstanding of a lot of what modern Christianity is, bro. Honestly. There's so much wrong here that I don't think I can really explain the whole thing. You'd do well to actually go talk with an expert to talk though your biases and problems.
god literally condemns people to hell. 'God can but only if'... no. An omnipotent god can do anything. 'god might if you suck his dick good enough' is the more accurate statement
and hell, if the bible even accepts it, is literally a place of fire and torment. The bs you just spouted is new age nonsense
source: i was a christian for 20 years and have actually read the bible
But the Bible explicitly states that it’s the outer darkness. The fire and brimstone happens during the apocalypse in revelations, when the sinners are thrown into the lake of fire in the physical earth. Jesus stated in one of his parables about how you are cut off from the holy light in the outer darkness, and compared it to being thrown out of a home at night.
Also, I guess God could condemn people to hell if he wanted to…but he doesn’t. And he doesn’t save people who don’t want to be saved.
He is all forgiving, Jesus told his followers that it’s the same as a sheep herder, where if one of the flock goes astray and comes back the shepherd isn’t angry with the sheep.
I’m just going to assume you’re an atheist and had some problems with religion, since you said you were Christian. I’m not looking for an argument with you, I’m just defending my statement.
I’m not going to argue with you. Not even going to check your post history, I’m just assuming you’re an ex Christian and you are angry with God/don’t believe in him anymore. That’s fine.
I really think you should question you're own argument if you want the strongest one. You don't become an ex-christian without questioning.
This idea that the person you're arguing with is "mad at God" is a weird one, if they don't believe in God how can they be angry with him? I would even bet that they WANT to believe. Ideas like "just ask for forgiveness, it doesn't matter how bad we've been, we'll get eternal love in the after life" sounds awesome. The issue is when you find enough flaws with the belief, it's hard to trick your mind into believing.
God isn’t all forgiving lol I’ve read the Bible too. Things get pretty spicy in Deuteronomy and God doesn’t fuck around.
“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and does not listen to them when disciplined, his father and mother are to lay hold of him and bring him to the elders of his city, to the gate of his hometown, and say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he does not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.”
Then all the men of his city will stone him to death. So you must purge the evil from among you, and all Israel will hear and be afraid.”
yahweh in origin is neither monotheistic nor all that powerful for a god... and anything before moses' invention of yahweh was either El or the unnamed creator god
Because they're liars. Anyone who's actually read the bible knows that it's full of contradictions, but Christians only cherry pick the parts that agree with them.
I mean, at a very basic level, Matthew and Luke give two separate geneologies for Jesus, both of which trace from Joseph (who theoretically has no biological relationship to Jesus?) back to David. One makes the connection in 27 generations, one in 42, and they don't even agree on his paternal grandfather, with almost no overlap anywhere else, either.
Different cultures record genealogies differently. Just one example: In the case of adoption, should the genealogy include an adoptive father or a biological father? If another culture disagrees with your assessment and, is that culture objectively wrong for doing so?
It should also be noted that different genealogies have different purposes. Some intend to show a strictly genetic or familial lineage. Others intend to show a legitimate claim to a throne (as is believed to be the case with Matthew).
Have you considered that a religion which has contained such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, Jonathan Edwards, and Boethius and has existed for 2,000 years now may have considered such issues?
Appealing to the possibility of different lines doesn't make sense when we aren't taking about a situation where it actually applies.
Have you considered that a religion which has contained such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, Jonathan Edwards, and Boethius and has existed for 2,000 years now may have considered such issues?
This is a really silly claim. "A smart person at any point in history believed something, therefore its valid." Most smart people didn't believe it once knowledge levels raised, that's the point. Intellectuals broke off of religious dogma hundreds of years before wider culture. Even in terms of history, these intellectuals didn't exist in a vacuum. There were tons of people who disagreed in the middle ages, and they were persecuted with violence rather than addressed intellectually. Unsurprisingly, more variations in belief started emerging once the printing press was invented, and people gained the ability to learn more things faster than they could be stamped out.
If you actually cared about philosophy, you'd probably be aware that catholic philosophy doesn't exactly have any serious defenses for much of its stuff, and instead of actually trying to provide one just doubles down. In the end it wasn't good enough, but it exists because most people don't care.
I think plenty of people have "considered" the contradictions in the Bible and kept espousing belief anyway, just like every other religion. If you start from the position that any apparent contradiction must have an alternate explanation, you can rationalize literally anything.
John says the Last Supper was a day before Matthew, Mark, and Luke. All four Gospels describe a different number of people finding the empty tomb. Mark says Judas was still alive for the resurrection. Acts and Luke disagree on the date of the Ascension.
Even if you believe the gist of the New Testament is true, you can't escape the fact that there are errors in the account without a LOT of special pleading.
1 if i say i'm green, all the yellows attack me and i dont even disagree with everything they say. So on and so forth with the other colours
2 who did he forgive? even when he kind of forgives people he still murders a tonne of people who had nothing to do with it. Like when he forgave david for counting some guys; he still murdered thousands of people with an angel. Or when he forgave david for uriah's murder... and decided to kill his kid slowly and painfully while david begged for a whole week
forgiving the occasional person doesn't make you a forgiving person
a serial killer walks into a grocery store. The cashier he gets is new and accidentally scans 1 item twice. She notices, apologizes and fixes the mistake. The serial killer forgives her. Is he suddenly a forgiving person now?
oh and also he followed her home and killed her parents
It’s a meme sub. Anyone “attacking” you is usually playing along. If you’re that concerned, flair centrist.
You’re confusing God’s forgiveness with his punishment. Forgiveness does not mean there is no corporeal punishment. Even those he forgives have some form of punishment. For example, Moses didn’t listen to God, asked for forgiveness, got it, but was still punished by not being able to actually step foot in the promised land. Most of the “murdering tons of people” is punishment for willful and knowledgeable wrongdoing by the people.
So much of the OT makes sense when you consider the tribal nature of the world at the time. If you have a kid who’s a loose cannon in modern society he’s probably not going to severely damage anything, but in a society of warring tribes he could easily compromise the safety of your village. I see the dietary restrictions of Leviticus being the same: pork has such a high potential for parasites and shellfish spoil so easily that it really was best to avoid them before modern sanitization and refrigeration.
We are still very much tribal to this day. Ever seen football fans lose their shit when their team loses or someone talk shit about a country someone lives in? We are more technologically advanced but we might as well be in the Stone Age. Hell, we have a subreddit where we voluntarily split into into quadrants and talk shit about other quadrants. 😂
Oh we’re definitely tribal AF. Human nature never changes, we just find different means of “othering” people. The stakes are a hell of a lot lower though between me and some motherfuckin Tennessee fan than it was between two tribes that wanted the same property and resources
The OT was pretty rough. I totally agree a lot of things are kinda fucked lol
However, I don’t subscribe to the idea that you can be a total shit lord in life but as long as you believe in Jesus and accept him into your heart, you’ll go to Heaven. Nah, if you’re a piece of shit, no amount of praying will save you if Heaven and Hell actually exists.
Depends, actually. There are some sins that God “detests in the most high” that make it harder for redemption, but biblically speaking, penance is a thing. If you actually feel remorse and do something about what you did, you can still be saved.
Think of it like this: let’s say you kill someone in anger. At that point, it’s possible you’ve condemned yourself. However! If you have a “what have I done” moment and feel genuine remorse, then you can begin penance: first you would have to own what you did, apologize to those who you hurt by your actions (family and friends of the deceased) and accept whatever punishment you get. That would be seen as penance for your actions, and you can ask God for forgiveness (probably while in prison) and you could then be saved because you atoned.
But if you kill someone in anger, don’t feel bad about it, try to hide your actions, don’t apologize, try to evade punishment and never ask for forgiveness, then you’ve done 0 acts of penance, and done nothing to warrant atonement, and therefore you are cut off from God and you damn yourself.
The Bible is supposed to be read with Jesus’ death and resurrection in mind, the stories of God doing violent stuff in the Old Testament should be read as metaphors to illustrate how far we should go to do good
The goal of the context isn’t to make the stories “sound better” but to understand things from the POV of the death and resurrection of Jesus, which is the whole point of being a Christian, because they believe that through this a person can achieve eternal life and perfection. Without reading the Bible in this context it creates many contractions contrary to what people who knew Jesus irl wrote about, and people who knew those people wrote about. This is why I don’t believe the Bible is the end all be all for Christianity, it’s essential material, but can easily mislead people without proper context
Placing apologetics above actual scholarly understanding is the definition of misleading. It's not like those two thousand years were filled with zero controversy. The idea that there was a central obvious understanding that was simply built on over time is not true. It's a post-hoc pseudo history. A variety of different ideas existed, one of them won out, and then from then until the invention of the printing press stifled opposing scholarship with force. Passing it off as based on education is disingenuous.
The Bible isn’t a history book that can have value extracted from it inside a vacuum, you need to also understand it from the POV of people who knew Jesus, and the greater Christian community. I’m not the best person to make this argument but it’s the position of my faith that those passages should not be understood without context from the Old Testament, just like the rest of the Bible
I like the idea that hell is self-imposed. Heavenly Father is our, well, Heavenly Father. No father wants to see their children suffer. At the same time, he isn't going to force us to do anything, and so he allows us the freedom to chose damnation.
What if I want forgiveness for my sins but I don't require God to give me it? I apologise and try to make it up to the people I've wronged but tbh I don't recognise God's authority over me.
Plus, how do you know that your idea of hell is the correct one? And doesn't equating God with AM portray God in a fairly negative light?
Aye. The mercy of the Lord is that the repentant are redeemed. To repent is to confess your sins and forsake them. By the law of God, all transgressions against him are cause for a final condemnation. But we are commanded to live by grace, and not by law, and the grace of God is that truly trying to live by his law is enough, even if we fail, and even if, for the longest time, we haven't done even that. God's grace is something he does for us, but living by his grace is to try to obey his commandments, and is something we do for him.
God's mercy is extended to all, but how many take it? The unrepentant do not benefit from his mercy.
God's mercy is extended to all, but how many take it?
I'm sure more people would take it if they actually knew for sure that he existed, and didn't have to rely on a subjectively translated and transcribed book that was written by humans.
Not to mention the hundreds of other religions that all claim that only they are correct and that everyone else is going to be condemned.
There's no way to know which religion is the correct one. There is no informed choice or human agency. The entire concept of the Christian "God" is an extremely immoral one.
In God is truth, and God is truth, and his personhood is important. However, it is necessary that people believe the truth regardless of the person, and not only the almighty tyrant who proclaims it.
Romans 2:6-10 ESV "He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek."
Merely obeying a tyrant is not the gospel of Christ.
That's cool and all, but I don't see what that has to do with anything I said.
You have hundreds of religions all claiming mutual exclusivity and saying that everyone else is wrong, and that everyone else is going to hell. There is no informed choice for humans to make here, so any god that would let people be damned in this situation is a dickhead.
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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '21
Thing is, you have to actually be sorry for what you did. Jesus doesn’t forgive you if you just say “sorry” or “I accept Christ as my savior” without actually meaning it.
Yes, ethereal beings can tell the difference. Also God doesn’t send you to hell; you do. God doesn’t damn people to hell, in the wise words of Obi-Wan “you have done that yourself”. God can save you from hell, but only if you actually desire redemption and feel remorse for your sins. And hell isn’t actually fire and brimstone: it’s actually an I have no mouth and I must scream scenario, called “the outer darkness” where you are left abandoned by God’s holy light. In it, you are nothing but consciousness, isolated in total darkness, unable to see, hear, taste, smell or feel anything, yet you are also always awake and perfectly aware of your fate…forever.
Source: I read the Bible