What are your hopes?

I can just see Adam and Eve complaining that their judgement was too harsh; but I can see how those words of judgement reaches to the 21st century.

People are placed in diffiicult situations but even so, each one of us can make the right decision as pertaining to a life and death situation. That was just the case with the pharisee priests that condemned the Lord to death. Obviously, the Lord was innocent and the priest not, and yet the priest fulfilled his role essentially sacrificing the lamb of passover.

That is also the case with middle-eastern muslims ready to pounce on israel. Each muslim has a decision to make but they as a whole will fulfill their role and G*d will fulfill His.

Is G*d good? Most definitely; at the renewal.

What is your question, exactly?

Atheists do not believe there is a deity to pass judgment to begin with, so they'll hardly attach any hopes to something that - to them - is as fictitious as the ancient Egyptian underworld.
Ask yourself, when was the last time you hoped to have your heart turn out to be lighter than the feather of truth, lest a monster that's part crocodile, part lion and part hippopotamus devours it? Or (for a change of mythology) when did you last attach any hopes to dying valiantly and being admitted to Valhalla, to feast with other fallen heroes until the Ice Giants attack?

And Non-Christians will naturally believe in their respective afterlife conceptions, whether they involve a divine court trial or not - and your deity does not feature there, either.

Or do you mean to ask: "what would you hope for if Christianity (and not Islam, Buddhism, Asatru, Kemetic Reconstructionism, Wicca or what-have-you) turned out to be true, and you found yourself faced with divine judgment?"

Well, although *very* much depends here on what version of Christianity we're talking about, in general I'd hope for a godly judgment for all of us - it's not about me, after all.
If it turned out that the God of the Calvinists was real, however, most of us would be toast anyway - and His heaven might not be such a desirable place, either, at least as long as your moral compass is somewhat intact.

I agreed with Jane up until I read her post. I used to not have any particular hope pertaining to an afterlife because I don't believe in divine judgement. However, now I hope there crocodile/hippo/lion monster because that would be pretty cool to see.

Possibility No. 3: you're enquiring about our afterlife beliefs.

Here goes:
as our personalities (or "selves") are malleable, fragile constructs that can even disintegrate or disappear while we're still alive, and so much of what makes us who we are depends upon our brains, I consider it highly unlikely that we "survive death" - at least as far as linear space-time is concerned.
It's a bit like expecting the files on an utterly destroyed hard drive to somehow continue existing - and not based on a backup, but as disembodied super-files.

Now, time is a curious oddity, and so is information. Anything beyond this point is mere speculation, but I do consider it possible that a part of us that's not our personality construct as such can persist on an archetypal level, even after we're gone. I also consider it possible that space-time as such is somewhat illusory, and there is no such thing as past or future outside of our experience of reality, meaning that the departed have never left - they're just on another page of the book of space-time, so to speak - "elsewhere" in the same sense that San Francisco is not in the same location as New York, except temporally rather than spatially.

awitch said:

I agreed with Jane up until I read her post. I used to not have any particular hope pertaining to an afterlife because I don't believe in divine judgement. However, now I hope there crocodile/hippo/lion monster because that would be pretty cool to see.

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Now that's disappointing.

I think we (the believers) are judged for our sins and for what we did and did not do. <(speaking of the past-tense of course)>

razeontherock said:

Agree with awitch it would be cool to see, but this pic is anti-climactic.

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I was hoping for something like Wavy from the Craig Ferguson Show ("What-a-do?") or Axl Gator from Taz-Mania.

I think we've all encountered someone or something that simply needed to be stopped, this is what Judgment is all about, and while I can't say I envision it all as "good," there's a lot to it that I look forward to.

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Isn't having hopes about the afterlife a little morbid? Especially if there is anything you are looking forward to?

"What are your hopes?"

That someday we can bring the light of love to the world, in the here and now, rather then waiting for it in the next. That is, in my view, the ultimate goal of humanity.

Love wins, and it always will.

razeontherock said:

Some people here have been honest enough to admit that they oppose God in His Judgment. Some have openly declared Him to be evil, because He will Judge anyone, at all, ever.

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Who has? Not me.

For a Christian, you can't say God is good or even profess to know Him if you don't recognize His Judgment, and embrace it as a good thing. How much of the difficulty we see, between the two basic world views of theism and atheism, come down to this one point?

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Neither theism nor atheism is a worldview. There are many theistic and atheistic worldviews. For instance, not all theisms have a doctrine of a divine Judge. And some atheists hope that a God does exist, even though they are not convinced that one does.

And perhaps more precisely, what we hope for, as it pertains to Divine Judgment?

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If a God should exist, then: Wisdom. Benevolence. Respect. Justice.


eudaimonia,

Mark

razeontherock said:

I knew I liked that guy. Now, how does this relate to Divine Judgment?

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Perhaps it'd help if you gave us your take on what Divine Judgment means, and what it entails.

If I end up discussing Reformed Theology, and you mean something else entirely, that's just very, VERY unproductive.

See, I said before that I'd feel morally obliged to oppose any deity who acted like a cosmic Stalin or Hitler, but that was in reference to a very specific conception of deity, and a very specific conception of Judgment Day.

razeontherock said:

For a Christian, you can't say God is good or even profess to know Him if you don't recognize His Judgment, and embrace it as a good thing. How much of the difficulty we see, between the two basic world views of theism and atheism, come down to this one point? And perhaps more precisely, what we hope for, as it pertains to Divine Judgment?

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You're looking at categories that are far too broad. Everyone has different views, even within religions, and it is the sum of all these differences that makes "difficulty" (I'm not entirely sure what you're specifically referring to) between worldviews exist. The only difference between theism and atheism is the (absence of) belief in the existence of a god - questions pertaining to judgement will differ between all sorts of groups. The vast majority of atheism, for example, has no concept of divine judgement and so has no hopes regarding it.

My hope is found in Jesus! I am a God fearing believer who knows His judgement is real and I know however that God is a just God and that sometimes you have to go through the low of lows to come back to Him which is EXACTLY what happened to me! So my hope is found in Him!

Jane_the_Bane said:

Atheists do not believe there is a deity to pass judgment to begin with,

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Thats a non-issue. Materialists don't even have a def. for matter.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you hoped to have your heart turn out to be lighter than the feather of truth,

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Or receive a severe beating (Luke 12:47 NIV - The servant who knows the masters will - Bible Gateway).