Destronicus

Here's something I've never understood about Christianity -- if I equally reject God AND Satan, why do I go to hell? The way I see it, there's four possibilities:

Reject Satan, accept God = Heaven
Reject God = Hell
Accept Satan = Hell
Reject both = Hell

That's not a very fair and just God when the odds are stacked against you. I recall that line from "War Games", when at the very end Joshua has played thousands of games of Tic Tac Toe and Global Thermonuclear War against himself and he says, "The only winning move is not to play." Well, in the case of Christianity, not playing will still result in losing.

seebs

Think of it this way. You are driving towards a brick wall. There is a tunnel. If you go through the tunnel, you don't squish. Otherwise, you squish.

Someone has painted a fake tunnel on the wall. If you accept the fake tunnel, you necessarily go squish... But avoiding the fake tunnel and going for blank wall doesn't solve your problems!

I don't particularly think turn-or-burn in its popular sense makes any sense, but if you look at any of the many variants where this is not a set of rules arbitrarily imposed, but something a little more like the way actions normally have consequences, I think this analogy may help.

meh

This assumes that Christianity is the only game in town. There are thousands of other games to play. Why not accept Odin, die in glorious battle and be taken to Valhalla by some hot, hot Valkyries? Booze and fight until Ragnarok! There's no mention of alcohol in the Christian heaven. No hot, hot Valkyries either.

Odin seems a whole lot more plausible than this Jesus guy, anyway. Odin is the strife-bringer. Notice much strife abouts? He isn't omnimax. He is destined to die. And he plucked his own eye out! And sacrificed himself unto himself. None of this annoying the locals until they kill you, this guy did it himself.

Your list is about a thousand entries too short. Here's two more.

Reject Odin = no hot, hot Valkyries
Accept Odin = hot, hot Valkyries

compton steel

Heres the good bit
Reject God ,Accept Satan ,Reject both
Get a job as a priest and spend 50 years cornholing students, decide that cornholing is not fulfilling a basic need and lead an invasion of the lower states eradicating all non whites along the way. Beat your grandparents to show them how powerful you are then beat off over the same act then ask for forgiveness and Bingo its HEAVEN TIME

JaredM

"Roads? Where we're going we don't need...roads."
--Christopher Lloyd as Emmett Brown in "Back to the Future"

If you are driving down the road, and you know that there is a fork in the road, one leading to a painted-on fake tunnel (a la Wile E. Coyote) and one leading to a real tunnel, you owe it to yourself to pull over to the side of the road, get out and examine what is down each fork before you pick which road you will continue down. You may not have absolute certainty as to what is at the end of the tunnel, but you can have some degree of certainty as to whether or not you have picked the correct road.

As anyone with a background in geography or transportation planning knows, there are usually more than two ways to get to any particular place. (I took a lot of geography/cartography courses in college, and I used to work for a civil engineering firm.) And if there is only one road to get to where you want to go, you had better be damn sure that that's where you really want to end up.

Who was it that built the damn road anyway? Who was in charge of designing the road, intersection and tunnel, and who was it that allowed (intentionally or negligently) the fake tunnel to be painted on the wall? If you believe that Yahweh/Jehovah is the sole creator of the universe, he is therefore responsible for everything in it, good, bad, or neutral. It's a damn shame he is such a lousy civil engineer.

Sorry Seebs, this analogy just doesn't cut it for me.

--Jared

jaded_revenge

Reject Jesus as the son of god = hell
Reject holy ghost as pet of god = hell
reject god = hell
reject specific bibles teachings, even if they contradict each other = hell
concentrate on good works = hell
concentrate on life = hell

all roads lead to hell
I mean, its like that stupid door game, except all but one is bad, i say there should be more than just heaven and hell, god, make a place for us, fill in that gap! (oh, good palce to, not too hot, not too cold, no worshipping)

David Vestal

Well, to make the analogy a bit truer (at the risk of making it unwieldy), imagine that you see a thousand tunnels, only one can be real, you don't have any evidence that any are real, you get to drive for 70 years through pretty country before you get to the wall, and the drive to all the probably-fake tunnels is uglier and over considerably rougher roads.

Destronicus

Isn't that why the Catholics invented purgatory? I really don't know anything about Catholicism, but isn't that one of their big things? Also, don't they accept evolution as fact?