Sending atheists to Hell is Evil

bhsmte said:

I don't doubt for a minute, that your perception of reality aligns with your faith belief. I also realize, not everyone perceives reality the way you do.

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I see reality by science. If they are not with me, they could be wrong.

juvenissun said:

I see reality by science. If they are not with me, they could be wrong.

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Is that, if science is not with you, then science could be wrong?

lesliedellow said:

1.) Aionios is an adjective, not a noun, and it does mean eternal, or everlasting.

2.) The Koine Greek word for world is kosmos.

3.) Aionion is the accusative form of aionios.

4.) Aionos (without the second 'i') is the genetive form of aion.


Oxford Concise Dictionary of New Testament Greek:
αιωνιος - long ago; eternal (of God), without end, eternal, everlasting.

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Simple logic dictates there cannot be a before eternity and there cannot be a series of them in which each ends and then the whole series ends. You cannot violate your own syntactics with semantics or else you get no workable pragmatics. It does not matter how many most recent cultural references you use that do not take into account the ancient poly-cultural milieu that the entire concept/story arises from and the referenced number of definitions that is it currently translated as.

There is either something amiss with all of those different translations, or there is something amiss with present day Churchianity dogma.


It is also in my personal esteem of God's Almighty Goodness, Justice and Compassionate Mercy that I will not believe Him to eternally torture a mortal for temporal errors.

A man can never be greater than the God he imagines to Be...so I form my concepts carefully and respectfully. Can a man imagine God to be greater than He is?

bhsmte said:

Is that, if science is not with you, then science could be wrong?

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I do science, so science is always with me.

ThinkForYourself said:

I'm an atheist, and according to the bible I am going to Hell.

Why would God torture me for all eternity for something I have no control over?

I learned what I learned. I was raised the way I was raised. When I was young, I opened my heart to God, but he couldn't be bothered showing up.

I don't believe in God. That's the way it is. I could lie and say I do, but God is all knowing, so he would know I don't believe.

In the end, God is responsible for the fact that I don't believe.

Torturing me for eternity, because of something He failed to do, is Evil.

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It sounds to me like you do believe but you're angry with God. Otherwise why worry about it?

Tree of Life said:

It sounds to me like you do believe but you're angry with God. Otherwise why worry about it?

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I'm not worried about going to hell; I'm worried about the fact that you believe that is where I am headed and you are ok with belief alone determining who suffers for all eternity and who gets paradise.

Sophrosyne said:

If the belief rejects the voluntary death of the person who took your punishment for you in your place and has you instead accepting the punishment you deserve instead... yes.

Are you saying that you don't choose to have faith in things (believe) that everything you believe in you can't choose? I say believing in God can be considered similar to believing many things you take for granted in life today.
Mark 9:23-25New American Standard Bible (NASB)

23 And Jesus said to him, “‘If You can?’ All things are possible to him who believes.” 24 Immediately the boy’s father cried out and said, “I do believe; help my unbelief.” 25 When Jesus saw that a crowd was [a]rapidly gathering, He rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You deaf and mute spirit, I [b]command you, come out of him and do not enter him [c]again.”


You can choose to believe and pray God will help you deal with unbelief just as this man did. If you truly believed God would send you to Hell and all you needed was to accept Jesus then you would make a point to do so. The fact of the matter is you don't want to believe so instead of doing so you make God into someone/something that you can't believe in... An evil tyrant that unjustly sends people to Hell and takes joy in torturing them forever. This idea pretty much throws Jesus sacrifice on the cross in the trash as irrelevant because it is the ultimate cure for torment in hell and it doesn't require anything complicated at all to be done but simply believe.

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It doesn't require anything except that one "simply believe." It requires that one accept that making salvation contingent on belief is just; that countless souls deserve to suffer eternal torment simply because they failed to "simply believe" dogmas that they did not find believable; and the presumption that, in the afterlife, one can dispassionately detach one's self from the suffering of others, thus trading compassion for immortal indifference.

Archaeopteryx said:

It doesn't require anything except that one "simply believe." It requires that one accept that making salvation contingent on belief is just; that countless souls deserve to suffer eternal torment simply because they failed to "simply believe" dogmas that they did not find believable; and the presumption that, in the afterlife, one can dispassionately detach one's self from the suffering of others, thus trading compassion for immortal indifference.

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In other words, it freaks us out that you are ok with people who lived decent lives suffering forever because they didn't believe in the "right god", and that you retain that this is moral.

Tree of Life said:

It sounds to me like you do believe but you're angry with God. Otherwise why worry about it?

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Imagine if someone expressed a really awful racist sentiment that you took exception to. When you express your offense, they respond with

"If you don't believe what I said is true, why are you getting angry about it? Why worry about it?"

It's possible to not believe that a sentiment has any truth value to it whatsoever while still finding it to be offensive, and disagreeing with those who do consider it to be true.

juvenissun said:

I do science, so science is always with me.

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Sounds good.

Hell is all the ways you've died, rolled into fire.

If all you live is for yourself, all you want to remember is how you've died.

If all you want to remember is how you've died, setting fire to your deaths is a relief.

Gottservant said:

Hell is all the ways you've died, rolled into fire.

If all you live is for yourself, all you want to remember is how you've died.

If all you want to remember is how you've died, setting fire to your deaths is a relief.

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I'm sorry, but this is very opaque. Could you be clearer?

You know, even when I was a pot-smoking, beer-guzzling, street-fighting, shop-lifting, class-wagging, street-sleeping agnostic I never truly believed God was evil, or to be blamed for my own mistakes.

Mature a little. If you think about the question enough you can find your own answers.

Blessedj01 said:

You know, even when I was a pot-smoking, beer-guzzling, street-fighting, shop-lifting, class-wagging, street-sleeping agnostic

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For to be acknowledged as a full-fledged criminal you would have to have been a die hard atheist.

quatona said:

For to be acknowledged as a full-fledged criminal you would have to have been a die hard atheist.

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No, 'cos I never knew either way. My stoned a- [word replaced, read: 'posterior'] would smoke weed all day (and a lot worse...), sit around staring at the beach, wondering about Ancient Egyptians and the Omega Point, basically just stuff I read on the internet or saw on TV. I figured if there was a God, I could either define who he was or research it 'till I thought I knew. But since I didn't have definitive proof he did or didn't exist, I couldn't make my mind up. But I never openly hated God, or really was convinced he didn't exist - I just didn't know. I wasn't raised on any particular religion and my parents always told me to make up my own mind. I'd just never read a Bible. The first one I was given, was at a concert - and my then girlfriend took it out of my hands and threw it on the road. She thought God was a big cosmic jerk. To be honest - God didn't really even play a part in my life, it was just a concept I was always curious about.

At one point I was even called Moses, because I had a long beard and I did some strange graffiti.

Anyway, all the real criminals believe in God. Or at least they pretend to. Ain't you ever seen the Godfather or listened to Gangster's Paradise? "...on my knees in the night, saying prayers in the streetlight." And I was a criminal long after I supposedly became a Christian. Back then it was easy to imagine God didn't love me, or I was always stuck in the same patterns. I never really believed in any other way. It wasn't for about a decade that I started pulling myself out of that hole and went back to the Word I always relied on in the hard times. And since then it hasn't been easy. But no - I can't really understand why people are so mad at God. If he wasn't real he didn't matter to me. And if he was, then I figured it was probably me who had some missing information about him. Either way, my guess is that people with a big God sized chip on their shoulder really are seeking God, but they're letting their lack of understanding rule their emotions.

Don't be like that people. Go out and read a Bible, read The Essence of Buddhism - even read the Koran. Not seriously, but read something. 'Cos there's no point whining and wasting your emotion on something you don't even understand. Make an informed opinion, don't go by your own wisdom because you can't compare God's to your own perspective...and try to find out what things really mean as opposed to what you think they mean. I'll admit, when I first started reading the Bible I was disgusted. I literally thought God hated me. But the more I got into it, the more I realised this was meant to be taken with that and that to be taken with this. God's word is never one-dimensional. Ask around, get an informed opinion. Militant atheist youtube channels aren't going to cut it - and preconceived notions certainly aren't going to either.

Blessedj01 said:

You know, even when I was a pot-smoking, beer-guzzling, street-fighting, shop-lifting, class-wagging, street-sleeping agnostic I never truly believed God was evil, or to be blamed for my own mistakes.

Mature a little. If you think about the question enough you can find your own answers.

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No one explicitly said god was evil, although I could be wrong and I missed that. In any case, we are arguing that sending people to hell on the basis of belief alone is immoral; god could certainly do some evil things and still be considered overall "good".

I was thinking there is vague analogy between rawls "veil of ignorance" and Johns "apoyalypse" in that we are asked to see the revealed or unveiled effects of our actions or choices.

I think also that nowadays the idea of hell is thoght more symbolically, and people can (perhaps ironically speaking looking at the state of the world today) be herded by reason more that fear of eternal damnation. Yet if you look at the first world, who ought to know better about climate change, the most educated are amongst the worse offenders. Pop culture is lived with a sense of Neitzchean drunken abandon oft by the least religious (or most irreligious) out there. Boo hoo. Reminiscent of Moses descent from Sianai?