seebs

You may if you wish.

My point is that this is a case where reported desires do not line up with actions taken.

If I tell you that my greatest desire in life is to get out of debt and save up money, and then I tell you that I bought a dozen DVDs this week, and I'm thinking about getting an xbox and a few games because I'm a bit bored with my current collection... Is my first statement really accurate?

If I tell you that, quite definitely, I would rather have eternal comfort than temporal comfort, but I refuse to give food to the hungry because I'm having trouble making the payments on my second SUV, should you trust my initial description of my values?

This is true if all else is equal. Let's say that I want a beautiful gemstone. I think that I can buy one from a local company that sells agates, but they haven't got any at the mall; what they do have is diamonds. And those diamonds, they're beautiful. But I know that deBeers is an essentially murderous organization built on slave labor and war.

I might decide that, while some sources of gems are interchangeable, not all are.

Most people, I think, have some standards they would impose on a potential source of anything, even eternal comfort.

Ahh, that's the terms for this source. Other sources may have different terms. That would be a way in which people might care who they get their eternal comfort from.

Furthermore, I think many Christians value aspects of the faith other than eternal comfort too, and might be unwilling to accept eternal comfort without those.

Have you ever read Smullyan's dialogue, God is a Taoist?

Johnny Skeptic

In my hypothetical scenarios, all factors “are� equal. Regarding my comfortable eternal life scenario, I am assuming that an equally comfortable eternal life would be available form an alien being and a being claiming to be God. Regarding my cancer cure scenario, I am assuming that cures from any source would be equally effective.

Relatively equal comfort is available from a variety of products in stores, for example food products and medical products.

If an alien being or a being claiming to be a God showed up and offered people eternal comfort, we would not have the power to impose anything on him, and that includes if the God of the Bible showed up. It would simply be a matter of take it or leave it, and most people would take it unless they believed that it was reasonably possible to obtain better eternal comfort from another source.

What aspects are you talking about?

The topic of this thread is ‘Christians want eternal comfort, and they don’t really care who they get if from.’ I stand by this assertion, and when my questionnaire is distributed among a lot of Christians, I believe that the vast majority of them will agree with me. My two employees are both fundamentalist Christians. I asked them if they would accept eternal comfort from someone other than the God of the Bible, and they immediately answered “yes.�

seebs

Okay, they're equally comfortable. One is very comfortable, but thousands of innocents must be slaughtered. The other is equally comfortable, but nothing happens to the innocents.

If one prefers one of these over the other, it's not true that one "doesn't really care".

This may be. However, this doesn't address the question of whether they think there are other factors.

As an example, some people are Christian because they feel the need to have a moral standard to appeal to.

And, once again, I point out that many people would rather die with honor than live with dishonor. Comfort is not everything. (Now, if you assert a form of comfort which trumps all such concerns, we're into Smullyan territory. Me, I'll pass.)

IMHO, "don't care who they get it from" carries the implication that other terms are not at issue. In other words, if you really don't care who you get it from, it doesn't matter whether it's from Bob's Harm-Free Comfort Emporium, or from Jim's Torture Of Innocents Makes You Comfortable Shoppe.

But in fact, once you include things like that, many people start caring.

Johnny Skeptic

The title of this thread is ‘CHRISTIANS (not anybody else) want eternal comfort, and they don’t really care who they get it from.’ In other words, it is a given that they will gladly accept a comfortable eternal life from God, choice A, and it is virtually a given that most Christians would accept a comfortable eternal life from anyone else who was willing to provide it for them, choice B, if they did not have sufficient reasons to believe that it was available from the God of the Bible. So, Christians would have three possible choices, 1) accepting eternal comfort from the God of the Bible if he offers it to them, 2) accepting eternal comfort from someone else who offers it to them, and 3) if someone other than the God of the Bible offers it to them, they have the option to wait for the God of the Bible to show up and give them a comfortable eternal life. In all three cases, the desire for eternal comfort would be the common denominator.

I refer back to my previous comments.

Moral standards attached to religions are usually accompanied by promises of eternal comfort. Moral standards invented by humans that do not offer eternal comfort are deemed by religious minded people to be unacceptable.

I believe that when after I get the results from the questionnaire that I plan to send out soon the results will show that the majority of Christians would rather be sick in this life and have a comfortable eternal life than to live a comfortable earthly life for 90 years and become dust in the ground.

[quote=JohnnySkeptic] The topic of this thread is ‘Christians want eternal comfort, and they don’t really care who they get if from.’ I stand by this assertion, and when my questionnaire is distributed among a lot of Christians, I believe that the vast majority of them will agree with me. My two employees are both fundamentalist Christians. I asked them if they would accept eternal comfort from someone other than the God of the Bible, and they immediately answered “yes.�

The torture of innocents is not a valid argument. Christians do not believe that God tortures innocents. In addition, if someone other than the God of the Bible shows up and offers Christians a comfortable eternal life he might not want to send anyone to hell. He might offer more noble Christians a version of the Ritz Carlton and less noble Christians a version of a cheap motel.