Division By Zero

Better analogy: Is it a threat for a mountain climber to tell his partner that if he doesn't believe the X-Files are true stories, he'll cut the rope?

Quote:

Really? If I strongly advise you not to touch the hot stove, is it a threat?

Better analogy: If I strongly advise you to choose between 1) believing my story about being experimented on by aliens, or 2) being strapped to the top of a hot stove for the rest of your life, is it a threat?

Cross Examiner

Division By Zero, cool name, you write:

If hell is punitive, yes, better analogy. If hell is a natural consequence, as is falling due to gravity, then the mountain climber analogy is better. So, what is hell?

Yeah. Same deal to the above. So, what is hell? Hint: there are no devils and pitchforks. That's Dante and Jack Chick, not the Bible.

Regards,
BGiC

DMB

BGic: you missed the major part of my post.

Division By Zero

Thanks

Quote:

If hell is punitive, yes, better analogy. If hell is a natural consequence, as is falling due to gravity, then the mountain climber analogy is better. So, what is hell? Yeah. Same deal to the above. So, what is hell? Hint: there are no devils and pitchforks. That's Dante and Jack Chick, not the Bible.

I don't think it changes anything. The original "consequences" you wrote about were falling off the mountain and being burned by the stove. I altered the circumstances because the condition for going to heaven and avoiding hell is essentially to accept that God's avatar died to atone for our sins, right? (If you have a different idea, I'll have to come up with a different analogy.) The idea is that I can't make myself believe that that happened any more than I can make myself believe that the X-Files are real, even if not believing carries the consequence of hell or falling off a mountain.

Mageth

...only that such allows one to "to overcome the heat", which is an entirely different thing

No; it's the physics that allows one to "overcome the heat" (I don't see much distinction between overcoming the heat and not getting burned, in any case.

Cross Examiner

DMB,

Apologies, I thought the second part was directed to Normal.

Hot coals always burn feet. Faith aside.

Do you believe only in things you see? Or are there other things?

God's Holy nature requires justice when mercy is not accepted. God's Holy nature requires him to separate light from dark, truth from error, submission from rebellion; ergo hell is a natural consequence not unlike fired coals burning the man who walks across them.

Get more evidence. It's too important a decision to say: I've already seen enough. Not sure where to get more? Let me know what your particular hang-ups are and I'll point you in a good direction. Don't want to do that? Don't want to continue to seek truth? Think you've already arrived at truth? Well, that's your choice, your determination alone. Free will.

As mentioned prior, I am not arguing God's existence. I originally entered in response to your challenge:
"please answer striaghtforwardly: does the god you believe in punish people for not believing in him"
Thus the existence of God is out of scope and wholly for another time, another place.

Again, this is out of scope but I can answer briefly that the Qur'an accepts so much about Jesus and the Bible but stops at the Resurrection of Christ. It has to though if you understand Islamic theology. I've researched well the historiocity of the Resurrection and am confident that it occurred, thus invalidating the Qur'an. Though the Qur'an may be invalidated on other grounds as well. There are other problems with the Qur'an that the Bible avoids but the aforementioned will suffice for now.

Regards,
BGiC

Cross Examiner

Division By Zero,

Yes I do have a different idea. Failure to "accept that God's avatar died to atone for our sins" is a serious oversimplification of a much deeper spiritual problem. No, you cannot accept such a preposterous notion from where you stand now. You have many intellectual and emotional objections that are stumbling blocks to acceptance of such a claim that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. I can appreciate that. Ardent atheists, in particular, must come the farthest to get to where the Christian is. The two are diametrically opposed. Conversely, a man who is at the end of his rope, has gone his own way to his detriment, has been humbled, easily takes Christ and finds him personally satisfying and needs no more convincing. Does such a testimony help the atheist? Of course not! Ardent atheists are typically well read and thoughtful. They realize this, compare themselves to the "mindless masses" and take comfort in their greater "intellectual honesty." So you had doubts and fed your doubt some Biblical criticism and some Cosmology from Hawking in order to awaken from the "lie?" If you can still conceive that atheism may be the lie then you can continue to seek the truth. Whatever that is. How so?

"It is hardly academic whether or not you trust that there is truth, that you will find it if you seek, that you purposely seek as much of the other side as possible because you trust that the decision is the most important thing and that your current position may be wrong, and that you can come to love a being you originally doubted entirely."

So your decision is not whether or not to take Jesus but whether or not you have decided upon enough evidence. This is your "falling off the mountain" point. If you think you've seen enough, well, ok. But realize that you freely and arbitrarily set this threshold for yourself...no one else did it for you.

Some thoughts.

Regards,
BGiC

Jobar

BGiC:God's Holy nature requires justice when mercy is not accepted. God's Holy nature requires him to separate light from dark, truth from error, submission from rebellion...

"Requires"? Not a word to be used concerning omnipotence, Billy. Especially considering that He is responsible for all darkness, error, and rebellion Himself. (To say otherwise is also to deny His omnipotence.)

Thus the existence of God is out of scope and wholly for another time, another place.

??? Have they renamed this forum? I don't think so. Any discussion of God's existence is purely on topic here. In fact, all this Christian apologetica is somewhat off topic, but since we normally have to deal with Christian theists, we let it stay here.

Billy, the atheists addressing you here have, many of us, spent years in search of truth. Plenty have gone to sites run by theists and asked our honest questions, in terms and ways as polite as polite can be.

We get banned from those sites if we persist, because no one has answers, and our questions make them so uncomfortable that they silence us.

Yet we allow believers of any stripe to come here and try to explain their truths as best they can- and many of them either become enraged by our refutations, or go away troubled, or even de-convert and stay here as living testaments to the irrationality and inhumanity of theistic belief.

Doesn't all this make you wonder who *really* is seeking truth?

Cross Examiner

Jobar,

Omnipotence does not include making round squares or married bachelors or Holy God unholy by being permissive of error.

God is responsible for all error? Or is human free will responsible for choosing evil?

By all means don't rename the forum on account of me. You'll kindly note I did not say that you all can't discuss the existence of God. Only that I did not care to since the issue was very tangential to my initial foray into this thread. Remember when I told Mageth I wanted to just focus on the issue of God sending people to hell or not, as DMB queried, and not whether or not God exists? And that if Mageth wanted to talk EoG or the nature of God or gods or the color purple he could do so with another person? I'm still allowed to limit the focus of those discussions I choose to partake in, no? I don't have to focus on things I find irrelevant to the discussion at hand, do I?

I can appreciate that. Sounds like the way to go.

David M. Payne said the same thing. He didn't recall which sites did this to him but said I could find out if I solicited the names from the atheist community in a GRD post. I am angered that they would do that to you guys if you persisted politely. In fact, please PM me (if you prefer this to be a private matter) the name(s) of the site(s) that booted you unfairly and the handle you used. I want to take this up with them personally. It's not cool to boot someone or censure someone simply because there's disagreement.

In all fairness though, there are plenty of converts from atheistm to Christianity as "living testaments to the irrationality and inhumanity" atheistic belief. Let truth prevail, regardless the outcome.

Not sure what you mean by that. In any case, hope the misunderstanding is cleared up.

Regards,
BGiC

DMB

Bgic: this is not accurate. Please refer to one of the sites I mentioned.
No, but I don’t believe in things for which I see no good evidence.
This is a crux in your apologetics. You also say:
So by your ideas, a god’s being holy means creating creatures to a certain pattern and then discarding the majority of them (with or without punishment, since that is still to be argued). The god is obliged to be “holy”, and thus has no choice in the matter.

I find it significant that you use the word “justice” to refer to the process of the god’s rejection of its created beings for the non-acceptance of its “mercy”.

Like Normal, you also manage to justify this system on the premise of free will. It is quite true that we all value free will, but there are plenty of situations where the majority of people are prepared to eschew it in exchange for some kind of security.

I’m interested in your justification for rejecting islam and accepting xianity. You have inspected the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and are totally satisfied with it, presumably at least beyond reasonable doubt. Islam, of course, denies the resurrection of the prophet Jesus, and declares blasphemous the xian belief in the triune god or in the idea that god could have a son. Blasphemers, according to islam, suffer eternal torments. But you apparently are sure enough of your ground to take the risk. You say to me:
So it’s OK for you to say you’ve seen enough, but not for me, because I would be wrong.

I also find it significant that you appear to feel that
supports your position. And among your reasons for not exhautively investigating other religions are:
Now I would suggest that the reason why your researches have led you to a belief in xianity is precisely because you are American. Most of the people who visit this board are also American, which explains why the concentration of topics is on monotheism and xianity in particular. In fact, I get the impression that the majority of American atheists here were once xians.

It may be true that a large majority of Americans accept some form of xianity, but in the wider world the majority of people are not xian. So arguing from numbers isn't a great help. Do you seriously think that if you had been born to a muslim family in, say, Iran or Pakistan, your researches would have led you to the inescapable conclusion that Jesus was resurrected and that the bible was the true word of the true god?

You feel completely comfortable with your rejection of all the myriad religions other than xianity, but for someone who was not brought up as a xian, there is no obvious superiority in your beliefs over all the others. I am not American (one black mark in the eyes of god?) and have never been a follower of any religion. I am nevertheless interested in religion as a phenomenon and have spent years looking at some of its manifestations. It's not, however, the only thing in my life and I have similar reasons to yours for not going on seeking the one true religion among the thousands on offer. Before committing more of my time to taking up your kind offer of guidance, I would need to see some evidence that would make your religion obviously different from all the others. That may be a topic for another thread, but to summarise how things look to me, your position appears to be as follows:

• I was born an American xian;
• I took a brief look at a few other religions;
• They did not agree with the bible;
• So I checked out the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and found it sufficient to confirm my previous ideas;
• I therefore concluded that all other religions were false and I didn't need to look any further;
• My "holy" god will offer me "mercy" and reward me for this conclusion;
• Anyone who approaches this problem from a different direction and arrives at a different conclusion will suffer my "holy" god's "justice";
• God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.