Whispers

Whilst browsing through Beliefnet, I came across an article regarding a Pastor who says that everyone is saved no matter what their belief, faith, actions, sins etc etc.

He says that when Jesus died, he died for everybody, not just those that believe. Jesus's death has saved you whether or not you accept it.

If the bible was more specific on this and you believed that God was more accepting than he seems to some of you, would you be more likely to believe in his very existence?

scumble

Unfortunately, it makes Christianity redundant.

Whispers

Not true actually. I have been reflecting on this.....

If God has offered us all a place in paradise and we can live for eternity, surely our natural response to this wonderful news is to worship him/her and follow the advice offered in the Christian tradition?

Asha'man

No.

That is only one piece of bad theology among many. If the OT still existed, it would still represent God as a sociopathic genocidal killer with delusions of grandure. The very ideas of human sacrifice, forgiveness by proxy, and inheritance of sin, are still perfect examples of bad morality and logic.

Even if the Bible was completely rewritten, and God appeared to be a generally nice fellow, there would still be the problem of an utter lack of objective evidence for his existence.

I guess you don't understand atheists very well. We aren't rebelling, we aren't running away from God, we just see no reason to believe any of the absurd claims that are made about him.

Wayne Delia

Absolutely not. Validity of existence is not a function of changes in description to make the proposed entity more acceptable. Validity of existence is a function of the strength of available evidence supporting the existence of the proposed entity.

WMD

tensorproduct

You are labouring under the common misunderstanding that atheists have made a conscious decision to reject Jesus. This is not the case, for the most part we are non-religious because of the lack of evidence present to support theism, not because we don't happen to like what is taught in Christianity. Although from Asha'man's post you can see that we don't have much reason to like it anyway.

Barcode

What TensorProduct said.

Personally, I've never made a conscious decision to *reject* anything. How can I reject something that doesn't seem to be remotely credible in the first place? I do get annoyed with these people who think we're living in denial by not letting Jesus into our hearts and all that mindless rhetoric.

You could present him as loving everybody, remove the notion of hell, do away with the silly theory we're all born sinners and need to redeem ourselves .... but the point is, ascribing all these qualities to something does not bring the thing into actual *existence* ...

Division By Zero

Nope.

I'd be less disgusted with Christianity, as the brutality of "hell for nonbelievers" would be gone, but there is still no evidence that it is true.

DMB

There have already been a lot of threads about the xian heaven and some of us find it pretty unappealing, particularly for eternity. I personally can't imagine eternity or want it. I also find the doctrine of "salvation" somewhat screwed up: god creates a pretty imperfect world (something to do with free will, that I also find hard to take as an excuse) and then sacrifices himself in order to save people from the initial mess-up.

MortalWombat

Would you be more likely to believe that Islam is the true religion and Mohammed was actually his chosen prophet if the Koran said that eating pork and drinking an occasional glass of liquor was OK?