I find the idea of a place of literal fiery torment to be a bit inconsistent with a loving God providing a universe of perfection where sin is gone forever...but just as there are consequences for breaking man's laws, I can see Hell as being a condition of eternal separation from God for rejecting him and his laws. Why can't torment be the realization of that separation? In some ways, that realization is like the cognitive dissonance and subsequent anguish a JW experiences when they see that their belief system is wrong.
The Doctrine of Hell
by Yizuman 226 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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PSacramento
Hell is a place we put ourselves, as anyone that is alive can atest, LOL !
I can understand how some who have been so burnt by religion can turn away from God, but I wonder if they would still turned away when faced with God in all his Glory and Love as shown in Christ?
I don't think many will turn away when the time comes.
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designs
TYA-
Some sects of Christianity are just stuck in the Dark Ages ala Dante's Inferno scenario, other sects have progressed to view hell as a conscious agony as some Eastern Orthodox prefer. No consistency, just religions trying to soften a horrible idea. In their gut they know it has to give way just like a geocentric view of the solar system and a literal 6 days of creaion had to give way to rational science.
Let's stop terrorizing our kids with myths, its cruel.
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tec
TenYearsAfter - That is exactly what I think hell is. And I think people underestimate that feeling of torment. I tasted that feeling, that torment. I felt it after I stopped my study and decided NOT to join JWs. Not because I didn't think they had the truth, at the time I left I still thought that they did... but because I could not be one of them. I could not do it, nor look forward to all those people dying at Armageddon. So I felt that I had separated myself from God, and from the truth... and death/nothingness would have been far more preferable to the emptiness that came with what I felt from my self-imposed separation.
Tammy
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tenyearsafter
designs,
I agree that the Dante's Inferno view is meant to frighten people into believing, just as destruction of mankind at Armageddon is a JW tool to frighten people into compliance.
I guess the more unpalatable tenants of Christianity would not be very attractive on their surface, but on the flip side, the teachings of love, grace and forgiveness are what attract non-believers to embrace Christianity. True believers don't choose their religion based on fear of Hell any more than you choose to follow the law because you don't want to go to jail. I guess it all boils down to what we are willing to accept as reasonable constraints in our lives. Just as we teach our children that breaking the law can bring serious consequences up to and including a death penalty, we could reasonably teach them about the consequences of breaking "higher" laws. It shouldn't be a threat, anymore than jail or worse is a threat for breaking the law, but rather a knowledge of consequences for choices made.
Anarchy, be it literal or spiritual, is not a positive force for change.
My two cents
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tenyearsafter
Tammy,
I think the majority of moderate Christians feel as you do...
Cheers!
TYA
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Dogpatch
Yiz says,
God never infers that you would go to Hell if you choose not to love Him. In fact, that's a personal choice. When I say "free will", I mean you choose your own path and destiny
Oh my! Sounds too suspiciously like, "We don't disfellowship anyone, they disfellowship themselves by their actions."
Christians will go to great lengths to cover over the original belief in a literal hell with apologetic arguments like that.
http://www.freeminds.org/doctrine/bible/hell-traditionalist-vs.-conditionalist-views.html
Randy
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BurnTheShips
I believe there is a Hell. God did not make it. We make it for ourselves.
Hell is more a state than a place.
Heaven is perfect union with God.
Here, we have partial union with God through grace.
In Hell, there is a complete divorce between the soul and God.
The human soul was made for the highest and best: God.
Those that choose a lesser place/state than that to spend eternity, choose Hell for themselves.
Oh my! Sounds too suspiciously like, "We don't disfellowship anyone, they disfellowship themselves by their actions."
Christians will go to great lengths to cover over the original belief in a literal hell with apologetic arguments like that.
Randy, have you spoken with your Catholic friends on the matter?
Here is something Tom Cabeen posted a while back:
Catholics and the Orthodox, following the teachings of the earliest Christians, believe that it is impossible for God not to love us, his earthly children. Love is his very essence and he made us expressly so that he could love us. God loves us so much that he sent his only-begotten son to save us and demonstrate the length he would go to to show us he loves us.
Out of love for us, he made us in such a way that our deepest longings, our most profound needs, are satisfied in Him. He made us to find our fulfillment in the best he had, Himself. He made us to be his lovers; thus we will never be satisfied until we are in perfect relationship with him. When that happens, we will also be in the correct relationship with all other creatures who are in relationship with him, a huge loving family of giving and shared experiences. That is why he made us, so that he could love us and share his life with us.
Love, by its very nature, must be spontaneous. It cannot be forced or coerced and still be love. In order to meet that condition, God had to give us free will, along with the qualities of character we would need to exercise that free will, including intelligence, curiosity, and the capacity for faith and love. As a consequence, we must make a free choice to obey God; we must come to him in pure loving response to what he has done for us. God would never try to force us into obeying him, even though He knows we will never be completely happy until we conform our thoughts and actions to His.
But free will also has a downside. Since we have the God-given capacity for choice, He must also give us the right to reject Him. If that were not true, we would not truly have free will. If we choose to go down that path away from our Creator, God will use every means at his disposal, short of violating our free will, to call us to repentance. He offers free forgiveness and He demonstrates his love for us over and over again, in hope that we might come to realize that only in full, complete relationship with him will we ever realize our potential as his children, made in his own image. But ultimately, we have the right to reject him, even to hate him, to substitute love we ought to have for Him and give it to other, lesser things.
In the words of C.S. Lewis on this subject, it boils down to this: "In the end, we either say to God: 'Thy will be done' or God will say to us 'Thy will be done.'" God knows (because he made us) that once we get to that point, despite all his efforts to demonstrate his love for us, that our hatred will grow until we hate Him with all our heart (just as Satan does). Those who ultimately will end up hating God will seek to be away from his presence, even if they would be welcome there.
God will abandon such creatures to their own devices, and thus, they will be in what Jesus called "outer darkness". Just "where" that will be is not the point at all. Even if God were to allow such people full access to his presence, they would hate to be there. Like a Rock & Roll fan at an opera, or an opera fan at a Heavy Metal concert, the same "place", God’s presence, would be heaven for one and hell for the other. Imagery like fire is used in Scripture to represent the pain of separation from God (which is the Catholic definition of hell, by the way).
One more point about eternity. Eternity does not mean an endless succession of days; millions, billions or trillions of them. Eternity means being outside of time, timeless (that is the literal meaning of the word). All of our linear, sequential time is included in timelessness. One way to envision that is to think about the relationship of our linear time to the "time" in storybooks on a shelf. We can open a book and enter a particular "time", the succession of events found in that story. Then we can close the book and be completely outside of that "time", then later reopen it and be right back in it. That is how some orthodox thinkers have compared the linear time we live in to the eternity in which God dwells.
Those who reject God will end up living in timelessness also, but without the one thing they need to be happy: God. But it will be their own choice about the matter. They will not just be sent somewhere because they inadvertently broke some little rule or other. It will be because they have made a fully informed choice, of their own free will, knowing full well the consequences of their choice, to live without God, and, when offered the chance to change their mind and repent, will refuse. Those who do that will be, completely as a result of their own choice, in hell. -
designs
Burn-
This is what you call putting Lipstick on the proverbial Pig. There are so many holes in good ol Tom's essay you could drive a busload of Evangelicals through it. They and others like them seem to gulp this philosophy down.
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cofty
It never ceases to amaze me how XJWs continue to defend WT teaching so long after leaving the org. - Deputydog
I am an atheist who denies the very existence of god, I think that teaching children there is a sky-daddy who will punish then eternally if they don't conform is child abuse.
Somehow in your mind this equates with defending WT teaching. No wonder you find it difficult to see the manipulation behind medieval doctrines.
To say that god does not send anybody to hell because they choose to go there is the worse sort of intellectual dishonesty.