Heaven and Hell

[SonicBOOM]

To use your analogy, how can a blind man "look" for something higher? If there is a higher moral system, how are we, as flawed beings, sble to know and recognize that it is a higher moral law?

lets say that there is a higher being by chance. Than that being would find a way to get past our blindness and enable to us to see pure and true right and wrong.

Even if there is a higher being that can execute higher justice in the afterlife, He tends not to intervene with things here on Earth anymore. Heavenly justice for Earthly actions is like buying a hairbrush for someone who just shaved their head. Once you leave the Earth, will the justice on Earth really matter anymore? e.g. Does getting justice for being robbed of possessions matter to you if you are in heaven?

the fact that God doesn't destory whole cities anymore has alot to do with grace. There's a parable Jesus speaks about this.

matthew 13 24-29 "Jesus told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared. 27"The owner's servants came to him and said, 'Sir, didn't you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?'
28" 'An enemy did this,' he replied.
"The servants asked him, 'Do you want us to go and pull them up?'
29" 'No,' he answered, 'because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. 30Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.' "



Jesus died to set us free.... if he kills every wicked person afterwards that would completely destroy the chance humanity has in order change their ways.



judgement at death makes perfect sense if you consider the after-life as a sort of "joined-to-the life-on-earth" kind of life. In revelation we see a picture of the New Jerusalem coming DOWN from heaven to the earth. The earth has been and always will be our home. John Donne describes heaven as simply "the next chapter in a book".

It's true that things can never be perfect on Earth, but without morality, things would be worse.

that's true... but we would have no knowledge that they were indeed worse. Morality can be a huge suffering is there's alot of injustice in the world. Morality is like the hunger while justice is the food. If you have a morel hunger but you see no justice in the world? It's not easy to live. Perhaps this is why God didn't want us eating from the tree of "knowledge of good and evil".

 

[Rosencrantz]

I don't buy it. I just don't buy it.

I do not think that people are so wicked that eternal damnation is a justifiable punishment, just like I don't think the death penalty is justifiable in the world we currently live in. Plus, the eternal bliss of heaven, as I have already said, is just a boring idea. I don't want it. I want our flawed, messed up, sinning world. I will take it over any world any time.

 

[elcapitan]

Also burning in Hell has nothing to do with a loving God. God loves you no matter what you do.He allows us to have free will because he doesnt want to control us. So therefore we chose to sin, when we sin it has consequences in this life or thereafter. God doesnt send people to hell, so many people misunderstand that. You send yourself to hell. God doesnt want anyone in hell, in fact in the bible it states he wants all his children with him in heaven for eternity. But we chose to go against God and thats when you are turned away from him. He will not save you if you have not obeyed him. Its your own fault, leave God out of it.

This is still inconsistent with the notion of an all loving and all-powerful God. Either:

1. God has the ability to end eternal suffering but chooses not to. (God is all powerful but not all loving)

2. God wants to end eternal suffering but cannot do so.
(God is all-loving but not all powerful.)

First you say that God has the ability to end suffering by taking away free will, but doesn't want to. Then you say that God doesn't want us to suffer, but He can't stop us from suffering because we have free will!

You can't have it both ways.

 

[LovesEnduringPromise]

God gave us free will, he wont take it away because he loves us so much and wants us to be free to chose to love him. Eternal suffering is there whether you believe it or not. People are wicked, there hearts are wicked, but whoever turns to Christ is saved. There is punishment in eternal life like there is in this life if we do something wrong...sorry

 

[SonicBOOM]

I don't buy it. I just don't buy it.

I do not think that people are so wicked that eternal damnation is a justifiable punishment, just like I don't think the death penalty is justifiable in the world we currently live in. Plus, the eternal bliss of heaven, as I have already said, is just a boring idea. I don't want it. I want our flawed, messed up, sinning world. I will take it over any world any time.

I recommend "the great divorce" by C. S. Lewis . I don't think eternal suffering is justified really either... but C.S. Lewis has a rather interesting view in this allegory that really boggles my mind. He doesn't define hell as a place of permanent suffering... he describes it more as a place where our hate and self-reliance and stubbornness "get their way". I dunno how to explain it... you'll just have to read it. It's really interesting.

As for heaven? I have no idea where people got the idea of an "upstairs eternal bliss". It's certainly not biblical! In Revelation we see a picture of the New Jerusalem coming DOWN to the EARTH. and there's a quote that says "now God's dwelling is among men." We don't go up to God... rather it seems he comes DOWN to us in the end.

 

[MorkandMindy]

God gave us free will, he wont take it away because he loves us so much and wants us to be free to chose to love him. Eternal suffering is there whether you believe it or not. People are wicked, there hearts are wicked, but whoever turns to Christ is saved. There is punishment in eternal life like there is in this life if we do something wrong...sorry

Punishment in this life is mainly from other people doing something wrong

I'm not aware of anyone who suffered as a result of sexually assaulting themselves, or bullying themselves.
I don't remember telling myself either how much better it would be to study a subject at college that I wasn't interested in
I don't remember giving myself a 30% pay cut because England is now in the EU and lots of Polish people can come work in our factory
I don't remember deciding I should work alternately early shift then late shift each week until I left because the new German owners won't pay redundancy
I don't remember telling myself to get out of the house because I'm fed up with being disturbed by leaving early in the morning and government single mother's support is now more than I bring home in pay.
I do my best to help my children.
I doubt if I will remember choosing to get a terminal disease

 

[ArchaicTruth]

I don't quite have time to read the entire topic, but here's my two cents

We must really look at heaven, hell, eternity, and God from a bit more of a logical standpoint. If God could be defined logically, he would have to exist outside of time, and so would heaven. "Eternity" is a product of time, and since we will be judged at the end of time, obviously time does not really exist anymore in heaven, so your definition of eternity will have to be scrapped and rethought. It's hard to explain, but if you want to hear my definition on the "absence of time", I'd be happy to type it up for you.

 

[Stinker]

It is interesting how the saved inherit eternal life and the unsaved will be rewarded with eternal destruction or eternal punishment.

I agree with many who understand this to mean that the saved will inherit eternal life and the unsaved will not iherit eternal life. They will inherit eternal death. This 'death' will be their eternal punishment. It will be their eternal destruction. When something is 'destroyed' it is gone.





2 Thessalonians 1:7-9 (King James Version)


7And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels,

8In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: 9Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power;

 

[MorkandMindy]

I recommend "the great divorce" by C. S. Lewis . I don't think eternal suffering is justified really either... but C.S. Lewis has a rather interesting view in this allegory that really boggles my mind. He doesn't define hell as a place of permanent suffering... he describes it more as a place where our hate and self-reliance and stubbornness "get their way". I dunno how to explain it... you'll just have to read it. It's really interesting.

C. S. Lewis mainly presents apologetics; they are arguments that defend Christianity

Lewis provides the appearance of a reasonable case for each point but each case he makes is profoundly flawed and incorrect. Even when I read them as a new convert and young and uneducated person I saw the flaws, he must have been aware the arguments were no good, but why did he go ahead and publish them? Here are the only two I still recall

1. He states that the universe could be very much younger than it appears to be without God deliberately deceiving anyone. If you made a tree you would most likely give it rings so it would appear to have an age going back before you made it and similarly God would put beams of light from distant stars to Earth which would other wise take millions of years to reach us.

The flaw here is that trees throughout a region usually have the same patterns of growth due to rain fall and sunlight, and other regions have other patterns; it really is a lot more detail than creation requires. This also goes for ice core samples going back 740 000 years and fossils and lots of things going way back.


2. Morality must come from God otherwise the feeling of fairnesss would not be universally accepted.

The flaw with this one is survival of a community living species benefits from certain behaviours and these are the ones humans have in balance with behaviours for individual success. Evolution does a wonderful job of explaining human behaviours in exactly the way Christianity fails to provide any rationale other than x is good, y is bad, z isn't in the Bible.

 

[LovesEnduringPromise]

You can try to reason around it....but it doesnt change the fact that there is a God....that there is a heaven and hell. That we will be damned in hell if we reject God and continue in our sins.

 

[MorkandMindy]

You can try to reason around it...

The arguments C S Lewis presents are faulty, if anyone has any that work I'd be pleased to see them, I can't see the point in directing someone to read a book of faulty reasoning.

I used to be very fond of his books, I have all of them, I enjoyed That Hideous Strength and the Narnia books and Screwtape and a bunch of others. I've seen the St udio where Sheldon van Auken lived and Lewis visited, but I can't believe some of his main points, wish I could.

 

[MorkandMindy]

You can try to reason around it....but it doesnt change the fact that there is a God....that there is a heaven and hell. That we will be damned in hell if we reject God and continue in our sins.

which is it:
B rejecting god or
Acontinuing in our sins
that puts us in hell?

A
Christians do a brilliant job of continuing in their sins and are well aware of that too. In 'The Lie That You Believe' here in Philosophy a person claims that Christians won't be perfect, nothing like it, until they are in heaven and free from physical desire and genetic influence and experiences and emotions and have access to complete knowledge.

Confronted with this the Christian response is often: 'not perfect but forgiven', the key being faith in Jesus.

B
Asked if faith in Jesus saves and therefore those of us who were unable to believe the nonsense explained to us about how the World is really under 10,000 years old and Jesus saves us from the sin Adam committed and numerical analysis has proven the Bible to be word perfect correct, the King James Version that is,

that salvation is based on how good the presentation was, Christians say, 'no, failing to believe doesn't justify eternal roasting, that is due to your sins'. Back to the point above.

 

[R3quiem]

Also burning in Hell has nothing to do with a loving God. God loves you no matter what you do.He allows us to have free will because he doesnt want to control us. So therefore we chose to sin, when we sin it has consequences in this life or thereafter. God doesnt send people to hell, so many people misunderstand that. You send yourself to hell. God doesnt want anyone in hell, in fact in the bible it states he wants all his children with him in heaven for eternity. But we chose to go against God and thats when you are turned away from him. He will not save you if you have not obeyed him. Its your own fault, leave God out of it.

If God is both loving and omnipotent, he can and would destroy Hell.

What does he get out of the eternal suffering of his little children? Pleasure? At the very least, if he was loving, he could give them the sweet mercy of death.

If you knew someone who was really nice and good to people, but found out he had a torture chamber in his basement, and that he has been holding people there and torturing them ever since you knew him, would you still think he was a good guy? No, you'd say he was evil and sadistic.

Does that change if the being in question is God?

 

[ArchaicTruth]

If God was truly even just omnipotent, he's either just screwing with us, or he has a grand scheme to topple all grand schemes, and chances are we're walking right into it.

 

[jamiel]

2. Morality must come from God otherwise the feeling of fairnesss would not be universally accepted.

The flaw with this one is survival of a community living species benefits from certain behaviours and these are the ones humans have in balance with behaviours for individual success. Evolution does a wonderful job of explaining human behaviours in exactly the way Christianity fails to provide any rationale other than x is good, y is bad, z isn't in the Bible.

My take on this is that while yes, "survival of the community" is benefited from certain behaviors that humans have evolved over time, but to what degree?

On top of that, would it necessarily reach the level of moral behavior without God? This kind of thinking doesn't take into account the positive effects from a higher moral code that may not always be reached, but is nevertheless an ideal or community goal to be aimed for (even if it's more in your head than in actual, widespread practice by absolutely every individual).

I know the crimes Christians have committed in the name of their faith/God over the centuries for example, but it's still a "what if" that if you take this away everybody is automatically going be just as "nice" and decent or even better. Oh they won't do what they did in the name of "religion", etc. -- they may very well find another excuse since there's something in them to start with -- but either way they'll come up with something else or discover that other unforseen situations will arise. My point being, no human "community", etc. is perfect. Everything earthly (from humans) is doomed to be flawed in some way, it's just a matter of degree.

I think it has much more to do with human nature itself that affects people rather than the fault of Christianity. I can see your viewpoint, it seems to make sense, even shared your opinion for a time, but considering it further have come to another conclusion.

I think I know people well enough. I know the mistakes and evil they do, and yes I believe it is inherent (sin). But I've also seen people go beyond "survival of the community" to downright, truly selfless acts. Where is this coming from? It doesn't really benefit them to go to that length . . . that extra mile? Where is this higher calling in them coming from?

But, I'm probably digressing from the topic at hand here . . .

 

[MorkandMindy]

...

I know the crimes Christians have committed in the name of their faith/God over the centuries for example, but it's still a "what if" that if you take this away everybody is automatically going be just as "nice" and decent or even better. . .

My present opinion is that this is basically correct, that the weapons of war wear whatever the ideology is in vogue, so if Christianity didn't exist they would use something else, and the overall behaviour of the human race is what game theory would predict.

Against this I see the collapse of the Roman Empire when Christianity took charge and had spread into neighbouring tribes.
And quite simply the Christians were more barbaric than the pagans had been and this continued through the dark ages.

But maybe the basic power struggles would have been much the same, as with Julius Caesar fighting Pompey etc., just with Christian involvement it all seemed a lot nastier:

Before Christianity someone's neighbours to get their land might have clubbed together and killed someone, but after Christianity had arrived they would report the person for turning into a cat and get the person tortured to death and then take the land.

I'd agree that overall the arrival of Christianity may have made less difference than the critics like to claim.

 

[Emmy]

Dear Rosencrantz. May I start by saying: Heaven is God`s Kingdom, and Hell is reserved for Satan and his followers, his minions. If any of us, men or women, decide to go their own way, NOT follow Jesus back to God, they will end in Outer Darkness, where there will be heard loud wailing and gnashing of teeth. ( Jesus` description of the place for those who do not want to follow Him,) and for those who DO follow Him, Christians, it will be God`s House with many mansions. ( Heaven) Jesus Christ gave us 2 Commandments, which contqin all 10 Commandments which God gave us. 1) Love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. 2) Love each other, as you love yourselves. Love is the Key back to God, Repentance, a complete change from selfishness to loving care and kindness. Which means treat all around you, all you meet and know, as you would like to be treated. Christians have Jesus as Guide and Teacher, a most loving and patient Teacher. We also have scores of years, to learn the right meaning of Agape, the Love God has for us. I say this humbly and kindly, Rosencrantz, and send greetings. Emmy, sister in Christ.

 

[LovesEnduringPromise]

Mmm you say God has a torture chamber in his basement??? Mmmm no, you sir have the ability to stay away from hell. God doesnt send us there. He gave us free will, we just choose to go our own ways and think we can get through thsi life. But if there is no God why do you then have any morals and values...whats the use of not just killing someone that makes u mad then if there is no punishment for it in eternity...if we all just rot in the dirt then why there be any morals...we should just do what we want....why would u ever get mad if someone aborted a child anyways...or murdered ur best friend....i mean there is no consequenes.....there are consequences here...so that must mean its bad....and therefore there will be consequences later...for eternity....we put ourselves in a personal hell...we choose to be separated from God....if we dont want him we dont get him....he doesnt want us to go there....but he has no choice b/c u have rejected him and u cant be with him b/c u dont want too.

 

[ChemicalKali]

Unfortunately my dear, one doesn't choose what they believe and nor can they reject that which they don't believe exists in the first place.

You so-called free will is an illusion due to the omni-max nature of you god. It's akin to a mugger demanding you give them your wallet or be shot in the face, you clearly have both options available to you but do you not see the underlying unfairness of the two choices?

In advance, spare me your appeals to god's authority.

 

[ChemicalKali]

Dear Rosencrantz. May I start by saying: Heaven is God`s Kingdom, and Hell is reserved for Satan and his followers, his minions. If any of us, men or women, decide to go their own way, NOT follow Jesus back to God, they will end in Outer Darkness, where there will be heard loud wailing and gnashing of teeth. ( Jesus` description of the place for those who do not want to follow Him,) and for those who DO follow Him, Christians, it will be God`s House with many mansions. ( Heaven) Jesus Christ gave us 2 Commandments, which contqin all 10 Commandments which God gave us. 1) Love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. 2) Love each other, as you love yourselves. Love is the Key back to God, Repentance, a complete change from selfishness to loving care and kindness. Which means treat all around you, all you meet and know, as you would like to be treated. Christians have Jesus as Guide and Teacher, a most loving and patient Teacher. We also have scores of years, to learn the right meaning of Agape, the Love God has for us. I say this humbly and kindly, Rosencrantz, and send greetings. Emmy, sister in Christ.

Dear Emmy, try to discuss the issues rather than regurgitate biblical rhetoric. Cheers.