Darth Dane

I sense a tendency, that all discussions end up arguing if God is or not. The OP, seemed to assume God Is, if so why is the entire discussion not conducted under that premises?

I just wonder...

member Darth Dane, how can you believe in God and not be afraid of it?

I hadn't seen it before!

What is there to be afraid of? I am much more concerned with the actions of say G Bush, S Hussein, as that will affect me here and now.

God is the source of Love, what is there to be afraid of? Should I be afraid of Love?




DD - Love Spliff

Ronin

Love is love, Darth...no superfluous deity theory required.

Rhea

whhops. wrong thread.

Ronin

It's alright, Rhea...we're all human.

BioBeing

LWF:

Lets get back to the discussion at hand then shall we? For the sake of this discussion I will allow you to suppose a God. [However, to invoke the scientific method and then, in the next sentence say “If God…” is just guaranteed to get an atheist-scientist’s (i.e. my) back up ]

Now, is this God omnibenevolent? He is generally assumed to be so.
You have stated (with biblical evidence, I believe) that heaven is bliss (without tears).
HelenM has supplied the biblical quotes to show hell is torment.

You said that free will exists in heaven, and thus souls in heaven are not drones, automatons etc (I assume you have biblical evidence for this also?).

It has been pointed out that empathy, the feeling for someones predicament, must also exist in heaven. To have such a central concept of what you might call “grace” removed from an individual on entry to heaven would seem to violate the principle of inviduality and free will.

You in fact said This is the central paradox as we atheists see it. If heaven is bliss, how can hell (torment) exist? Magus55 just used circular logic to say “God moves in mysterious ways”, another concept that annoys many atheists, and an aurgument I find unsatisfactory. You implied there is a better aurgument, using a scientific method of rationally explaining the apparent contradictions.

To summarize:

God omnibenevolent, heaven bliss (with free will and empathy), hell torment --> not logical.

Where is the flaw in my logic?



PS HelenM: attached is a picture of my kids (not from the beach though )

HelenM

Your kids are gorgeous! Thanks for sharing that picture with me

It was nice of you to apologize about your 'where have all the Christians got to?' comment. I've seen a number of comments like that on IIDB but that's the first time I've remember seeing anyone apologize in case it came across as rude. I do appreciate it.

Helen

long winded fool

There is no flaw in your logic that I can see. We both come to a reasonable conclusion that if there is suffering in Hell, and if there is no suffering in Heaven, then any in heaven cannot suffer because of Hell. This includes suffering from empathy for any in Hell. Therefore, nobody in Heaven suffers from the knowledge that there are souls in Hell. We can reject this as unloving or drone behavior, or we can try to figure out how this could be the case if Heaven is eternal happiness and God is omnibenevolent. It seems to me that, once a person permanantly rejects you, the only real reason for suffering is personal and instinctive human emotion. It is possible to love a person who rejects you and still not lament their chosen fate. Animal instincts are preached against throughout the whole Bible. The selfish instinct of personal contact doesn't exist in Heaven. Only the complete selflessness of unconditional love exists. Feeling bad for someone who has chosen a different fate than you suggests the instinctive selfish desire for companionship or community. While there is nothing wrong with these things in themselves, there is something wrong with loving them more than others. While I realize that we wouldn't describe empathy as a selfish desire, empathy can be a very misleading emotion. For instance, giving a stressed out friend a cigarette when she's trying to quit smoking. The motive is empathy, however the outcome is undesirable and is unloving if you're aware of the consequences of your actions. You are essentially alleviating her suffering for your benefit of not having to feel bad for her. Therefore, what feels like genuine empathy is not always the right thing to do. If we can agree that what we interpret as selfless empathy is not always loving, then it becomes plausible that feeling bad for those tormented in Hell is not necessarily a loving emotion. It may be that our empathy is misplaced and is designed to make us feel better about ourselves and has no place in selfless and unconditional love.

Again, I think that speculating on the physical nature of heaven or hell is misleading, despite the fact that they are described (probably metaphorically if one examines all references in logical comparisson with references to the nature of the physical as opposed to the spiritual) as physical places in the Bible. Those in Heaven are not going to love their bodies according to the Gospels, since loving the physical will prevent you from loving God. Only those who reject their physical lives will find eternal life. This leads me to think that physical things are temporal, which means that physical things can't exist in the eternal. After the curtain of history falls, the death of space-time, Heaven and Hell will still be around. Therefore things like pain and suffering and torment are entirely irrelevant to an eternal omnibenevolent God's love. Whether you die painfully tomorrow or peacefully in a trillion years makes absolutely no difference. In fact, the only thing relevant to God's love is the eternal soul, whatever that is. According to the Bible, pain and suffering are irrelevant when compared to the state of the soul. The soul spending eternity outside of God's love is terrible. It makes earthly physical suffering a blessing. No ammount of physical torment can equal spending eternity addicted to physical things with no body to experience them with. If someone freely chooses a personal addiction over a relationship with me, I don't lament my fate or theirs. I honor their decision and still love them in my heart, even if they reject my love. They only know themselves, therefore I cannot feel sorry for them for pursuing this honest desire. They've horded their treasure where they wanted it and are now pursuing it with all their heart. Good for them. Feeling bad for them would be a selfish emotion. It would be misplaced empathy.

BioBeing

I guess we will have to agree to diasgree on this one, lwf

My definition of empathy (from www.m-w.com) is

Main Entry: em·pa·thy
Pronunciation: 'em-p&-thE
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek empatheia, literally, passion, from empathEs emotional, from em- + pathos feelings, emotion -- more at PATHOS
Date: 1904
1 : the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it
2 : the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this

I see this (definition 2) as being part of love (especially an unconditional love, as espoused by Jesus), not separate from it.

Ronin

long winded fool ~

What a tragically sad way to perceive perfect love.

You are proposing a tyrannical and vain deity that would eternally punish someone for the simple and beautiful act of non-belief in an entity that hides so well...that stories of Him do not coincide with notions of love and compasson.

Sounds more like a dictator's ruse to me...and not a forgiving being.

long winded fool

And how would you reconcile this with the empathetic friend who gives a cigarette to her friend who is trying to quit? You missed my point. Empathy is not separate from love by definition, but actual empathy and the personal fear of experiencing negative feelings are easily confused. In fact, I think all "empathy" as we understand it falls short of what true empathy would be. Empathy as we refer to it is ideally totally free from selfish desires. Empathy as we experience it is not completely free from selfish desires because we are animals with instincts. If we are positing the God of the Bible, true empathy is the willingness to sacrifice all things physical: wealth, comfort, suffering, death, genocide, applied to ourselves, our parents, our friends, our enemies, our babies, for the greater good of the eternal. It is the allegorical sacrifice of knowingly putting someone I love through discomfort that I could easily alleviate (nicotine withdrawals) for the greater good of ensuring she is one day no longer in need of my support. Someone might call me a monster for not giving my stressed out friend one of my cigarettes when she asks, and by doing so making myself responsible for her current pain. They might call me a vain and petty friend only interested my own problems. Not a true friend at all and certainly no one they want to get to know. I know a few people like this. They call themselves "heart people." Their 'empathy' for my stressed friend is admirable. Their understanding of it is entirely wrong because they're using neither their brains to think nor their hearts to understand. They're sensing with their instincts alone. They think they are heart people, but the heart they care about most is their own. If they were truly empathetic, they'd have nothing to fear. They'd truly understand what it means to love my friend. Taking care of her is loving myself. Allowing her to take care of herself is loving her. If they were truly empathetic, they wouldn't see what they want to see in order to placate an instinctual insecurity by passing judgment on a loving act that they blindly mistake for an unloving act. They have a perfectly sound logical argument proving I'm a jerk. All they have to do is to ignore real empathy (understanding apart from the personal instinct of fear) and they can be vindicated by their imagined superiority and once again hide from the psychological insecurity they've become so adept at evading. This is truly the tragically sad way to perceive love. Love filtered through fear is not truly love. Human love is flawed by instinct which puts the physical above all else. God's love is not.