Hello Coffe4u,
I'd just like to start by saying that your reply has been quite courteous, something of a rarity around here, where conversations tend to range from formal to abrupt to downright nasty. So thank you for that.
I'm about to disagree with quite a lot of what you just said, but I hope I won't cause offence by doing so.
Well sure, only I thought being an atheist meant you were very sure that God, heaven and hell were made up. If you think there is a possibility doesn't that make you an agnostic? That is how is use to be anyway.
In fact, most atheists are agnostic atheists. Briefly, gnosticism concerns knowledge and theism concerns belief. The two are not on a spectrum. So being an agnostic atheist means you lack evidence for God (gnosis, knowledge) and so you lack belief (a-theism).
It's just a fancy way of saying I can't say for certain that God doesn't exist, but since I lack evidence that He does, I can't make myself believe in Him or see any reason to. This is also my stance with the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and the Loch Ness Monster, any of whom could just conceivably exist, but I don't seriously think they do.
All I meant earlier was that
if Heaven exists, of course I would want to go there. But I don't believe it does.
Oy. I forget now. Perhaps it wasn't important.
I know there are rules. I wasn't ask you to break them so we will leave that here.
Thank you. I've been caught out by them before, saying things I thought were fine, but turned out not to be.
I am not a debater. I drop in here every now and then to answer questions as honestly as I can. Not good enough? Oh well.
Well, sure, you and I aren't having a formal debate. Still, you tell me things that you believe about God, and if I point out what I think of as mistakes in your reasoning, it might be worth thinking about them.
I trust and know that God is Holy, just and loving.
And yet God works in mysterious ways. Therefore, believers cannot
know that He is good. When He does things that require you to say "I don't know why He did that" - well, maybe the reason is because He
isn't good.
If you never experienced free will you would not know what you were missing is true
Well, that is what we were talking about, wasn't it? How God could have created humans differently.
but if God came down right now and removed your free will I doubt you would like it.
God gave us free will because he wanted following him to be a choice. It means something when somebody chooses a thing rather than robotically doing as programed.
And the angels who didn't rebel against Him made a choice to...obey Him? As do humans who go to heaven? They made a choice, and that means they will never again disobey, never sin?
That sounds horrible. Think about it. You are telling me that no human or angel in heaven will ever disobey God. That sounds
exactly like they had their wills removed. If they still have their wills, it doesn't matter what choice they make. You must admit that they are still
capable of choosing evil. It happened once before, it can happen again. Given that they'll be in heaven
forever it's statistically certain to happen again. You follow me?
The alternative, of course, is that God is somehow able to create/transform beings into individuals that
do have free will
and will never use it to sin.
Which begs the question: why didn't He do that in the first place?
The human soul and spirit go to heaven not the body. The soul cannot sin anymore. This is what life is for, it is our time to make the choice. There is no changing the choice after death.
Quite simply - why not? The soul is still alive. It can still (I think, perhaps you can clarify) choose. Why would it sin no more? What's to stop it?
Sin cannot dwell in heaven. Once in heaven there is no wanting to sin because the body is no longer there.
You said that twice now. I'm curious. How do you know? And why does that work?
After all, the angels sinned, and presumably they did not have bodies. And why would not having a body stop you from sinning anyway? I mean, I suppose hormones and so on, lust, anger, etc., yes - but a disembodied soul can still think and choose, can't it? So why couldn't it choose to do evil?
In heaven we will know and understand it all.
The thing is, if you can't explain something, then you can't assert it.
You tell me quite a lot of things, but then you say you just don't know. You know?
But me admiring I don't know all the nitty gritty details or why God did this thing or that thing does not affect my trust in God. Faith is having trust even when you don't have all the details. If you are with someone you really trust and they yell stop! You stop. Maybe they saw a snake and you didn't. If you carry on walking asking why as you go you will probably be sorry that you did.
No doubt they thought soon meant soon by their time, but Jesus meant soon by God's time. The full number of gentiles has to come in and then the Jewish nation before the end.
That just sounds silly, honestly. Come on. Let's be straight. Jesus had been alive in a human body for over thirty years at this point. He should have known how to speak clearly.
The thing is, if Jesus
did mean He was going to come back soon, and He didn't, then you and Peter and the whole of Christianity are wrong.
Well,
perhaps you are wrong.
I can make guesses, but those could be wrong. I assume different people have different reasons.
I'm here because it's interesting to debate, you can learn a lot, and you can help a lot of people to understand their religion better. I can't speak for all nonbelievers on here, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had similar motives.
All people need to do is repent for God to withhold judgment. He isn't asking us to toss our first born into a volcano.
Jonah 3
10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.
God won't ask us to sacrifice our children? But that's exactly what He did do, in a famous story. Yes, apparently God relented, although I hope Abraham had the money to pay for Isaac's therapy for the rest of his life. But that's not the point. The point is, yes, God did tell a believer to kill their own child.
Also, you still have to deal with the fact that God drowned the whole world. Getting a preacher - one man - to tell people the world would be destroyed, I don't think is a mitigating factor. Honestly, it sounds more like an excuse.