Kintaro

I think the same. They ban suicide I believe, but this was an accident.... wouldn't they want to cry their hearts out that god(tm) didn't take them ? Were they not worthy ?


As for a DDR forum debate that sparked, I had to also mention that if God is so just, and if the Trinity = Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.......... why did he let one of his bodies commit virtual suicide (like in Lemmings) just to revive it later ? And why, if we can't speak to God directly, and need to go through Jesus as an advocate........ the justice is obviously compromised. When the lawyer is the judge, that's loaded dice. I never knew people justified cheating until I figured that out.



As for the objective moral code "other than god(tm)" that some people want, a) there is no OTHER code, since humans are error-prone, and b) god's code, objective ? Psalm 137:8-9. Enough said.

parkdalian

Hell is unfair as a punishment because it is not verifiable. There is no real warning, other than what it vaguely says in an ancient book and the beliefs of some people today.

And I agree that hell is also unjust because it is infinitely harsh.

Godot

Am I the only person here that recognises the futility of punishment as a means of achieving behavioural modification?
just a thought...

HelenM

Actually, I think negative consequences can be very effective in behavior modification. Perhaps the problem with punishment is that the consequences are voluntarily imposed on you by others and you might rebell/object to them and determine not to let the punishment change your behavior.

But if you set aside possible objections to the fairness of the punishment and think about a situation with negative consequences that were inevitable - like, say, you crossed the street without looking and got hit by a car - I think you'd find that a very effective deterrent to crossing without looking again, at least for a while. Therefore, the negative consequence did modify your behavior.

Of course, the purpose of hell cannot be behavior modification since it's eternal.

Helen

Inconnu

Godot, but it has worked, thats why there are so many christians, all in fear of eternal damnation, you only have to believe, apparently, to avoid crispy death. Just the threat of punishment is enough. Sounds like dictatorship.

DoubleDutchy

No, but there aren't many of us. I brought up the point in this thread but it didn't rouse too much attention.

Jack the Bodiless

It works as long as the victim believes that Hell is the inevitable consequence of disobedience, but I think it becomes counterproductive once unbelief reaches a certain "critical mass" in the population. There is no longer just Heaven or Hell, there is "none of the above". Christians bothered by Hell can simply reject that belief.

...Which is, I think, why so many Christians of the fundie variety are upset by the mere existence of atheists, "liberal" Christians, Wiccans etc who don't believe in eternal damnation. They don't want knowledge of non-Hell-based alternatives to get around.

Biff the unclean

I think that Irishbrutha clearly demonstrates a problem with the type of argument we Atheists generally use with Christians. These are often arguments about the inconsistency / self-contrariness of God behavior / attributes. We see it as self-negating while Christians see it in legalistic terms. God is good despite A and B because of D. It's like arguing about the effects of red vs. green kryptonite on Superman. In one comic it had one effect but in another things were very different. All the while ignoring the point that Krypton and Superman only exist in the comic books. Only here we have Heaven, Hell and God instead of Clark Kent and company. These too are only places and heroes in a book.
Yet whenever we speak of self-contradictions we use terms like "When God does this then he goes against his own attributes." When all the time God doesn't do anything, he's a fictional character. If we stated that when Superman flies around the world so fast that time reverses itself that would break the laws of physics we would see that as showing that Superman was fictional. The believer sees it as saying Superman is cool.

Look at all the baggage we are dealing with here.
A fictional superhero.
Punishment by this superhero for not following his instructions.
Death not being what it obviously is…the end of consciousness.
Fictional invisible lands of pleasure and pain.

It's all red and green kryptonite. I think that we shouldn't talk about them as if they existed to show that they can't exist. That confuses the minds of the believers. IMO we should focus on this superhero just being a character in a book.

Jack the Bodiless

Bif: ...True, but the believer often goes beyond that.

For instance, the original Superman could "leap tall buildings in a single bound", but he couldn't fly. Yet I've never heard of a Superman fan attempting to reconcile the jumping Superman with the flying one by redefining the words "jump" and "fly" to make them synonymous.

...Whereas many Bible-believing Christians redefine the meaning of the word "justice". The whole concept of "justice" involves matching a punishment to a crime. If there's a death penalty for sneezing and Bob sneezes, it CANNOT be just to kill Joe for it, because Joe isn't the one who sneezed: yet the Bible has God punishing the descendants of wrongdoers, which CANNOT be just.

Would it be just to execute Bob in this scenario? That's not so clear-cut, because Bob DID sneeze, so it requires an assessment of whether death is an appropriate level of punishment for sneezing, and that depends on how you calibrate the scale of crime and punishment. But, when considering eternal damnation, it is merely necessary to note that no finite quantity can equate to an infinite one. No finite act can deserve infinite punishment on any "just" scale.

All too often, the Christian who believes this garbage becomes dysfunctional, unable to comprehend "justice" as a concept. Like a Superman fan who thinks that aeroplanes jump and kangaroos fly.

pgtr

Back to the original premise for this thread of her stating SHE could not understand... why not simply ask her to reach back in her memory to the time before her automobile collision - therein lies the answer to her own question from within herself.

Simple enough?