Heaven and Hell are the same place...

[Greg J.]

... you simply state a belief that the Bible is infallible and inerrant, and abandon reason altogether. This does not strike me as a method by which humanity can possibly make any theological progress.

I did not abandon reason. If you don't want to believe what I say and you are not willing to do the work to look into the evidence yourself, then anything I say, truth or not, is worthless to you. You are looking for affirmation, not the truth. Discussion can only bring intellectual assent. Truth does not come by intellectual assent, it comes by faith.

Reason, in my opinion, is fundamental to understanding God; we know the universe is amenable to rational enquiry, because of the progress science has made. Indeed, the God-made universe yields its secrets only to rational enquiry. There is no reason why theology should be any different.

Best wishes, Strivax.

I agree about understanding God, but understanding God is not what saves someone. Theology is the study of God, which is not enough to save someone. There's been plenty of good theologians who did not believe and stood condemned. If you wait for understanding to choose to turn control of all areas of your life over to Jesus, you will die in your sins (John 8:24). It is through entrusting oneself to God before we have proof that we receive true knowledge of God—and there is no other way to find the truth. It is by faith that you are saved, not from knowledge or understanding. Salvation is through acceptance, not through resistance or through critical analysis. Evidence is all that can be acquired through careful examination. In the end, the choice will still be the same: Do I accept God based on what I know already or do I not? As the Holy Spirit said, there is enough evidence in nature to know enough to yield to God (Romans 1:19-20)—to those who want to see it, but not for those that don't.

The search to see if God is who he claims to be is important and real, but all it can do is provide evidence. Obedience, on the other hand, requires at least a little faith (or it is the useless, empty "obedience" of going through the motions), and God responds to that by working in the person's heart for salvation.

 

[Strivax]

I did not abandon reason. If you don't want to believe what I say...

So, I assume that all the good people who post here are saved. Or about to become so. But here is how one atheist sees the God of the Bible*, and not without due cause:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

I think it less than likely that an individual with such a view will turn to Jesus for redemption. Thus, I am looking for a picture of God that might appeal to reasonable, rational people who reject the primitive sectarianism of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, given that the image of God they all present is so unreasonable, and so irrational. And I have started with a theory of Heaven and Hell, which is the central question of human existence: what must I do to be saved?

You want to say; believe what I believe. I merely want to say; be good. And I think this exhortation to be good is better for the individual and the world than a mere insistence on some ideological belief system. And I think, if that exhortation were to be followed, then so does that individual's salvation, and a better world for us all to inhabit. Don't worry too much about the right sort of beliefs; they will follow, if they are true.

Best wishes, Strivax.

*Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2007, Random House, London.