Love God and go to heaven or burn in hell…Why dont i have a 3rd option? If you create me and I say “no thank you, I would rather not exist”, and then you send me to be tortured and burned eternally, ummmmm, does that seem fair???
If there is a god, his concept of “fair” is probably more relevant than yours. Therefore, your main job should be to kiss his ass.
For all you know, there could be trillions of people whom God asks "Hey, would you like to exist?" whom respond 'no', and therefore God zaps them out of existence. Or, if you prefer, trillions of 'potential' people whom God in his foreknowledge realizes would rather not exist, and therefore never creates them. Either way, a third option of not-existing isn't something we, the existant, would ever know about.
A Question…
Does it say in the Bible that Hell is at the centre of the Earth?
Just wondering.
We go UP or DOWN.
What’s that all about?
Up from many places on Earth is every direction in space!!!
Australia…Up is the opposite to England…Up.
Now, if Hell is at the centre of the Earth, and you die at the other end of the universe, do you have to travel all the way back to Earth as a spirit?
Just my first feelings about this… not believing in Hell.
Hell is in the center of the earth from what I understand and its about 12,000 degrees there so you really don’t wanna end up there.
"The devil wants your soul… when is there gonna be an end to that contest? Count up all the souls and be like “Ok we got a winner… it’s the God by 400 souls” - David Cross
No. Next?
isn’t it entirely possible that heaven and hell are just entirely different realms that we couldn’t possibly fathom, instead of being somewhere in the universe we know?
Well, that’s certainly what most Christians older than 12 would claim, yes. But is it possible? I would love to examine that! What do you think it means to have a ‘realm’? A sort of place, I suppose, but a place that you could never reach by travelling in a rocket or a tunnelling machine or whatever? Can there be such a thing as a location that’s not in space?
i think there’s two possibilities as far as what it is
it could either be an entirely different thing than we’ve ever experienced or whatever, like it doesn’t exist until you die or something weird like that
or it could just be that it exists in more dimensions or something, the end result being that it’s like the earth to an ant. it’s so incredibly huge that we can’t possibly even imagine that it exists. like the whole universe to us is just the anthill.
If we conclude that we will enter another dimension, then God created Earth in a seperate dimension to himself. Did he create Earth in a dimension that he cannot see?
No, he created Earth in a dimension that he can see.
I presume the Devil can see in this dimension too…
I presume that the devil is in a different dimension to God, being as Heaven, and Hell are seperate places.
So that is now 3 dimensions. Earth, Heaven, Hell.
Now, can Hell see Heaven?
Can God see into Hell?
Let’s start with “what’s a dimension”. So far, it just seems like a convenient way to say “A place that you can’t get to”, which seems like nonsense to me without a little explanation.
Ucci, don’t encourage him.
Didn’t anyone notice the “kiss-ass” link in my first post? Not exactly theologically sophisticated, but cute nonetheless.
I’m not perfect (whatever that means) but I’m not a terrible guy either. I have some productive habits and some destructive habits, some helpful and some hurtful, etc. I have some good in me and some bad. If God is going to torture me for eternity just because of that, I don’t think I really want to be his buddy to begin with. Sounds like a pretty unstable friendship to me.
I’d like to go back to the basic question. What is the purpose of a belief in Hell? Isn’t it only to scare humans into doing good? Shouldn’t we do good because it is the right thing to do, rather than because of fear of punishment?
The concept of hell never made any sense to me. But then neither has the idea of a vengeful God.
god isn’t vengeful
the idea of a vengeful god shows no mercy, no grace, no love
i don’t understand how it even came about
Hi PG
Another possibility is that man on earth is unimportant so fairness has nothing to do with it. If, as Buddhism suggests, life is suffering in accordance with the laws of samsara, then our imagined self importance is irrelevant.
Consider hell from the Buddhist perspective. It refers to the psychological connectedness of human being itself. From this perspective, hell is a type of lawful cleansing reaction in accordance with the continual turning of the wheel of samsara. You may find this article revealing as to types hells in Buddhism where fairness is not the issue.
khandro.net/doctrine_hells.htm
In Christianity it is help from above that frees a person from the lawful consequences of samsara or “dust” to dust from the Christian perspective.
Depends, I would say, on if there’s actually a hell or not. If there’s not, then there could any of a number of crazy reasons for people believing in it. If there is, then the reason for believing it is no different than the reason for believing water is wet, or fire hot.
aporia, I can’t help you there- I’ve never seen God as a buddy who was obligated to help me out. Well, maybe when I was a kid.
Creation imperfect: You seem to be saying a loving God wouldn't be vengeful. Well, if you believe in God, then you have to believe he causes/allows/permits tornados, malaria, and boy bands. So, if there's a reason the Loving God would allow all that stuff, mighten't he allow hell as well?
This is where Jesus Christ the savior comes in. So, basically, u believe in Jesus, try to be a Christian as best you can, but if you mess up here and there you are forgiven if you ask for forgiveness and believe and you are pretty much guaranteed entry into heaven if you believe in him…
That’s a rather bizarre interpretation of what I said. I don’t see any “obligation” between me and god either way. The concept of obligation itself is a crude and simplistic characterization of complex relationships. My point is that if this god is so loving and fatherly and all, he wouldn’t break a relationship off unless I steadfastly refused the relationship. And even then, to punish me eternally for not taking a liking to him would seem like an unloving, unfatherly thing to do.
Some (particularly Catholic) theologians recognize this problem and say that hell’s torment is not so much physical suffering as the unhappiness caused by separation from god, whom we seek by nature. This I’m okay with. If I make myself miserable by refusing to have contact with god, then I can hardly blame god for the choice I made.
But the idea of god sending people to hell for other reasons than that (say, for not getting baptized, or masturbating) suggests a god who is not so fatherly and loving, a petty god who holds grudges for eternity, regardless of his supposed children.
long story cut short: every man by right has to die (because of our own sins). but God decided to give a chance for those who’ll believe in Jesus Christ salvation. This isn’t something that God has to do. God created us not for us to be condemned, but our actions lead to our own damnation. Even so, God still proposed another chance out of grace alone.
But yeah. I wonder. “Why must there be something instead of nothing?” Even as I wonder, I’m glad there is something instead of nothing. I really don’t want to like… perish.