Why would God send someone to hell over suicide?

[Amaris]

Well, it's not "washing our hands" of it. It's recognizing that each person is responsible for themselves. Perhaps that's why a many Christians are conservatives. We believe in self-determination.

It is washing your hands of it. It's an easy way to continue believing God is a loving god by deciding that the people who are condemned to hell affronted God in some way. They made their choice by not believing. The Salem witch trials worked the same way. If the accused would only admit to repentance and deny their evil, wicked ways, they would be saved. If, instead, they chose to maintain their innocence in the face of God's judgment, then they would be put to death. The accusers washed their hands of it by saying it was God's will, and that the witch had a choice, and they chose to deny God's will and were justly punished.

J.

 

[TheLonelySquire]

Well, it's not "washing our hands" of it. It's recognizing that each person is responsible for themselves. Perhaps that's why a many Christians are conservatives. We believe in self-determination.

It is washing your hands of it. It's an easy way to continue believing God is a loving god by deciding that the people who are condemned to hell affronted God in some way. They made their choice by not believing. The Salem witch trials worked the same way. If the accused would only admit to repentance and deny their evil, wicked ways, they would be saved. If, instead, they chose to maintain their innocence in the face of God's judgment, then they would be put to death. The accusers washed their hands of it by saying it was God's will, and that the witch had a choice, and they chose to deny God's will and were justly punished.

J.

I disagree. God gave us brains and free will. If we choose not to reject Him that is our choice. Again, I don't have all the answers and don't pretend to, but this one seems pretty simple. No one is entitled to a free ride in this world or the next. There's a price to pay for our actions.

 

[Amaris]

I disagree. God gave us brains and free will. If we choose not to reject Him that is our choice. Again, I don't have all the answers and don't pretend to, but this one seems pretty simple. No one is entitled to a free ride in this world or the next. There's a price to pay for our actions.

Who is the arbiter of that price?
God? How do you know?

Why God? Why not Brahma? Why not Zeus?
Which rules do we follow? There are a million gods to choose from, and not one of them has spoken up to give any indication that they're the genuine article. So what you're saying is that it is reliant upon men to tell other men that their God has given them a choice. You say God has given us brains and free will.

A million gods, a million choices, only one is right and none are telling.

Do you consider that fair?

It seems to me that any God who wanted someone to worship them and obey them would establish their authority immediately and unwaveringly.
Such is not the case, as we have seen and continue to see. If there is such a God, then they are stacking the deck against you.

J.

 

[TheLonelySquire]

I disagree. God gave us brains and free will. If we choose not to reject Him that is our choice. Again, I don't have all the answers and don't pretend to, but this one seems pretty simple. No one is entitled to a free ride in this world or the next. There's a price to pay for our actions.

Who is the arbiter of that price?
God? How do you know?

Why God? Why not Brahma? Why not Zeus?
Which rules do we follow? There are a million gods to choose from, and not one of them has spoken up to give any indication that they're the genuine article. So what you're saying is that it is reliant upon men to tell other men that their God has given them a choice. You say God has given us brains and free will.

A million gods, a million choices, only one is right and none are telling.

Do you consider that fair?

It seems to me that any God who wanted someone to worship them and obey them would establish their authority immediately and unwaveringly.
Such is not the case, as we have seen and continue to see. If there is such a God, then they are stacking the deck against you.

J.

J, I have seen you vehemently convinced of your faith and then abandon it on numerous occasions. If this was a one time event I'd give you points for it, but it's not. I fully expect you to be back here in a couple of months stating you're a Christian or a mystic or something.

Why am I saying this? Because with all due respect, I believe you were never a believer in Christ to begin with. Had you been you wouldn't be asking the questions you just asked above.

And somehow I think Christ stacks the deck in my favor, not against me.

 

[Amaris]

J, I have seen you vehemently convinced of your faith and then abandon it on numerous occasions. If this was a one time event I'd give you points for it, but it's not. I fully expect you to be back here in a couple of months stating you're a Christian or a mystic or something.

Why am I saying this? Because with all due respect, I believe you were never a believer in Christ to begin with. Had you been you wouldn't be asking the questions you just asked above.

Personal opinion irrelevant to our current discussion.

A million gods, a million choices, only one is right and none are telling.
Do you consider that fair?

And somehow I think Christ stacks the deck in my favor, not against me.

So what is the "somehow"?
"Somehow" is not a viable answer.

J.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

And somehow I think Christ stacks the deck in my favor, not against me.

I don't mean this as a personal attack, but that is a pretty arrogant statement, and it goes along with how religion is inherently built on arrogance: the fact that religion causes certain people to become closer to something they cannot define, particularly when that somehting just so happens be the creator of the entire universe, yet these people think that God stacks the cards in their favor.

How arrogant and presumptuous is that?

Please.....

 

[Kegg]

Don't see why many are too surprised at God taking a dim view of atheists. God can be pretty stern towards unbelievers and sinners in the Old Testament. That thunder and lightning stuff is pretty par for the course. God can be pretty big on forgiveness, also, but even in the nicest New Testament senses it's fairly dependent on one accepting the guy.

I don't think it's a card. I just think if you were touched by Christ you'd know it. At least that's been my experience.

Very curious perspective, considering many Christians are typically born as such.

But for the non-religious (and for the conservative religious too), what do you make of people like Dorothy Day, Leo Tolstoy, MLK Jr., Oscar Romero, Gustavo Guttierez, Desmond Tutu, Shane Claiborne, and the Evangelical Left?

No room for conservative atheists, eh? I guess it'd be their place to rail at them with the fire of a thousand suns (religious and liberal! Double ungood!), but one disgresses.

Let me ask you guys something...honest answers, please.

When you guys have these arguments, and I am asking both the Christians and the non-Christians here, what are your motivations for getting involved? Are you doing it to share an opinion or in hopes of destroying the other person's beliefs? Is it love or contempt that motivates you guys?

I enjoy a good argument and bloviating about stuff. I'm also fascinated by the responses they generate, though it mostly in my case seems to have been J. Allen using them as springboards for essentially unrelated issues. I don't really have many axes to grind, but it's a fun read.

 

[Amaris]

I enjoy a good argument and bloviating about stuff. I'm also fascinated by the responses they generate, though it mostly in my case seems to have been J. Allen using them as springboards for essentially unrelated issues. I don't really have many axes to grind, but it's a fun read.

Which issues and how unrelated?


J.

 

[apenpaap]

I disagree. God gave us brains and free will. If we choose not to reject Him that is our choice. Again, I don't have all the answers and don't pretend to, but this one seems pretty simple. No one is entitled to a free ride in this world or the next. There's a price to pay for our actions.

Who is the arbiter of that price?
God? How do you know?

Why God? Why not Brahma? Why not Zeus?
Which rules do we follow? There are a million gods to choose from, and not one of them has spoken up to give any indication that they're the genuine article. So what you're saying is that it is reliant upon men to tell other men that their God has given them a choice. You say God has given us brains and free will.

A million gods, a million choices, only one is right and none are telling.

Do you consider that fair?

It seems to me that any God who wanted someone to worship them and obey them would establish their authority immediately and unwaveringly.
Such is not the case, as we have seen and continue to see. If there is such a God, then they are stacking the deck against you.

J.

J, I have seen you vehemently convinced of your faith and then abandon it on numerous occasions. If this was a one time event I'd give you points for it, but it's not. I fully expect you to be back here in a couple of months stating you're a Christian or a mystic or something.

Why am I saying this? Because with all due respect, I believe you were never a believer in Christ to begin with. Had you been you wouldn't be asking the questions you just asked above.

And somehow I think Christ stacks the deck in my favor, not against me.

Why don't you answer his question instead of going ad hominem?

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

My answer would be that since God created the universe He is not bound by its physical laws.

Since matter and energy can't be created or destroyed (on the macro scale) in what we know as the Universe, obviously we exist in a larger context with different rules. So whether we were created by a god that simply is or live in a Universe that simply is, any laws of causality are local phenomena. Six of one, half a dozen of another.

The God of Abraham does in fact state outright that He is uncreated, by identifying Himself as a word that translates to "I AM"...that, to my mind, is a definite statement that He is beyond our rules of causality. I have seen religions proposing that time moves in cycles, and others that simply do not explain the first cause--but I do not believe other religion's deity(ies) ever been on record stating that they are beyond ordinary causality.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

to paraphrase youtuber TheoreticalBS, I can't imagine, or tolerate, the idea of spending an eternity in heaven alongside a being whose empathy is so easily trounced by his vanity.

 

[Kegg]

Which issues and how unrelated?

Religious conservatism. I was making the point that religious conservatism is distinct from political conservatism in that there are differing theological agendas for Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals and so on who may be politically united against abortion and homosexuality, making a Bible in the religious right tradition rather futile unless parsed to just include a protestant variety of conservatism. Try to make a Bible that flatters all and you'll be damned to know what to do with the Deuterocanonical/Apocryphal books, or the Mormon prologue to the Bible, and so on.

I believe the response was railing on the evils of religious inovlvement in politics, which, while all well and good, wasn't at all what I was talking about.

 

[Amaris]

Which issues and how unrelated?

Religious conservatism. I was making the point that religious conservatism is distinct from political conservatism in that there are differing theological agendas for Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals and so on who may be politically united against abortion and homosexuality, making a Bible in the religious right tradition rather futile unless parsed to just include a protestant variety of conservatism. Try to make a Bible that flatters all and you'll be damned to know what to do with the Deuterocanonical/Apocryphal books, or the Mormon prologue to the Bible, and so on.

I believe the response was railing on the evils of religious inovlvement in politics, which, while all well and good, wasn't at all what I was talking about.

My response is that the Bible, indeed the faith itself, has always been political, and how that political process engendered itself deeper into the faith via acquisition by the State. Whatever you thought I was railing against, I suggest you reread the posts.

J.

 

[Kegg]

Whatever you thought I was railing against, I suggest you reread the posts.

I suggest you do that, actually. Some of your responses are essentially non sequitir. If I may intentionally invoke Godwin's Law, it'd be a little like trying to explain the mechanics of Auschwitz and being interrupted by someone loudly exclaiming the Holocaust was evil.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

I saw people giving up intelligent, reasonable thought in favor of ridiculous ideas like Young Earth Creationism, or working to inhibit scientific discovery because they felt God's arbitrary rules should be the answer to everything.

My mind was always working to understand the truth of something, the facts as they were, and for years I fought to understand and parse faith. I was chided for "thinking too much" about who and what God was supposed to be, being told "that way leads to madness", which is true, because it didn't make a damned lick of sense. So it became "God's ways are not our ways", which is just another way of saying someone has no answer for you, but refuses to consider that maybe that's because the idea of God as presented in the Bible is terribly conflicted.

Then there were the excuses about why people should go to hell or why God was angry with gay people.

But you never noticed the fact that while some Christians HAVE made the mistakes you mention, that believing does not have to come with a hostile attitude, does not have to condemn or hinder science, or discourage investigation? I realize there's much I still don't know, and am still trying to learn, and I have said as much in this thread and on multiple occasion.

The bad behavior of other Christians had a lot to do with why I almost left the church. I did consider the question of whether there was a Creator at all, but as I may have mentioned before, the design of the Universe itself spoke to me of an Artist behind it all. It was more a question to my mind of who it was that spoke for that Creator. And the behavior of fellow Christians, the condemnation I had experienced, and so on, did put me in very severe doubt. In the end, however, I came to feel--and I still feel, after many years--that a great deal of my calling is to make restitution, in a sense, to work to undo the damage that has been done by others calling themselves Christians.

I do not always succeed. And sometimes I have my own moments of being a pretty sucky example. But, rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater--ditch my core faith because of those who have twisted and misused it, I would rather confront the problem head-on and work to make the situation better.

 

[Amaris]

Whatever you thought I was railing against, I suggest you reread the posts.

I suggest you do that, actually. Some of your responses are essentially non sequitir. If I may intentionally invoke Godwin's Law, it'd be a little like trying to explain the mechanics of Auschwitz and being interrupted by someone loudly exclaiming the Holocaust was evil.

Read this:

They can agree on a common enemy.

Naturally, but are you reading my posts or not? My point was that, given the differing theologies that exist within the religious right as a movement a 'conservative' Bible does not make a lot of sense. The axes they have to grind politically are not the same as the axes to grind theologically, so it'd have to define conservative as within a specific religious tradition, presumably Protestant.

I am reading your posts, which is why I answered as I did. Christianity's politics are tied directly into it's theology. The theology has changed somewhat and has been adapted to make it fit more snugly in the hands of power and authority.

J.[/quote]

My answer is tied directly into your statement. You were talking about the conservative aspect politically and theologically. I explained how the theology is and always has been tied in with politics. What the authors of the Conservative Bible Project are doing is making their theology more attuned to the conservative aspect of their politics. I am keeping right on topic with what you're saying. You would have a point if I would have declared "Christians want to kill all the liberals!" but I didn't. Again, please reread my posts.

J.

 

[Amaris]

But you never noticed the fact that while some Christians HAVE made the mistakes you mention, that believing does not have to come with a hostile attitude, does not have to condemn or hinder science, or discourage investigation? I realize there's much I still don't know, and am still trying to learn, and I have said as much in this thread and on multiple occasion.

Please understand that I did not say every Christian I saw, and would not throw every Christian into such a group.

The bad behavior of other Christians had a lot to do with why I almost left the church. I did consider the question of whether there was a Creator at all, but as I may have mentioned before, the design of the Universe itself spoke to me of an Artist behind it all. It was more a question to my mind of who it was that spoke for that Creator. And the behavior of fellow Christians, the condemnation I had experienced, and so on, did put me in very severe doubt. In the end, however, I came to feel--and I still feel, after many years--that a great deal of my calling is to make restitution, in a sense, to work to undo the damage that has been done by others calling themselves Christians.

So you deal in a bit of Christian Apologetics.

I do not always succeed. And sometimes I have my own moments of being a pretty sucky example. But, rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater--ditch my core faith because of those who have twisted and misused it, I would rather confront the problem head-on and work to make the situation better.

I used to do the same. I do wish you the best in that.

J.

 

[Kegg]

J. Allen, then, reread this:

At it's core, Christianity has always been political.

So?

So politics and religion are not a wise combination.

Again, so? This is responding to my rather long post (which I won't requote here) with a pat observation. The importance in my quoted text was differentating between the religious and political agendas of different churches, and your response was just to say hey they're political. As if I was denying or affirming that at all.

And then this:

There's a difference between conservative theology and conservative politics, though naturally they can be expected to overlap. The doctrine of papal infallibility is a requirement for one (in the Catholic sense) while believing in God isn't a requiste for the other (though it certainly doesn't hurt).

Since even America's religious right to the best of my knowledge encompasses a broad range of conservative religious groupings - Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, etc. - it's rather different from a religious movement per se. They may agree on points of ideology as to the sort of society America may be, but not the specifics of religious doctrine.

They can agree on a common enemy.

It's almost like you have no idea what the hell it is I'm saying. Isn't what you said there implicit in the text I'd provided? Obviously a political movement has specific objectives (and, as a consequence, a 'common enemy'.) It'd be like responding to a rambling inchocate text on cirrus clouds with the assertion clouds are fluffy.

Forgive my bluntness, but that sort of thing does jar me. If I'm to be broached I definitely prefer to be broached for my ineptly written screeds rather than the author's preferred topic. You could have at least used a segue here.

 

[Amaris]

It's almost like you have no idea what the hell it is I'm saying. Isn't what you said there implicit in the text I'd provided? Obviously a political movement has specific objectives (and, as a consequence, a 'common enemy'.) It'd be like responding to a rambling inchocate text on cirrus clouds with the assertion clouds are fluffy.

Forgive my bluntness, but that sort of thing does jar me. If I'm to be broached I definitely prefer to be broached for my ineptly written screeds rather than the author's preferred topic. You could have at least used a segue here.

I didn't realize we had entered a more structured debate. I assume most debate here is very casual, and little tangents, observations and inflections are a given. Apparently I was wrong. I will take that under advisement in the future when speaking with you on such a topic. That's all I can promise.

J.

 

[Kegg]

[here.

I didn't realize we had entered a more structured debate. I assume most debate here is very casual, and little tangents, observations and inflections are a given.
[/quote]
Granted, but they've got to have a logic to them. I don't think yours did, IMHO, but probably others don't see it as I do.

I wouldn't quote Ghemor above, say, and launch into a discussion of Agrippa and Acts, not at least without relating its context to the above quote.