SO WHAT IF YOU GO TO HELL???

minimus

If all we have to worry about is nonexistence, then why worry about anything? The WORST that can happen is you peacefully sleep, forever.

Haereticus

Would all Go To Hell Caps be unnecessary?

minimus, I've been thinking about this lately. Cycles. Going around and back. I don't know what I believe about death anymore. When I was young, I believed in non-existence. When I became a jw, I believed in living on a paradise earth.

We are born, grow, experience life, mature. When we get old, our memories are long-term: we remember our childhoods, but not what we did five minutes ago. We get senile as our brain cells die. We become babies, even physically helpless again. Then, we die.

I have no remembrance of existing before birth. But, I've been thinking about what if we just go back to whereever it was before we were born? It is sad to think that the special thing that makes each person unique is forever gone, forever forgotten. It used to bother me a lot. Maybe there is something we came from and something we are going to.

ISP

If the wages of sin are death......what is there to worry about?

ISP

pomegranate

nuttin.

Nathan Natas

Remember what it was like before you were born?

It's the same after you die.

Windchaser

Yeppers, nathan and pome, but some people do feel that they've experienced reincarnation, etc. I'm not one of the lucky ones, though. Guess it's nada for me.

Francois

This thread has all the earmarks and potential of a really great one.

True - if there is no hell or heaven, only non-existence - NO SWEAT; Gandhi and Hitler get the same reward. If JanH is right, no sweat; if I'm right, no sweat. At least no sweat if God is as "big" as I think he is. And there's the rub.

God's attributes are infinite, right? If so, then his mercy is infinite as is his justice. Now, the human assumption that there is a lack of unity (read: flaw) in the nature of Diety that causes Him conflict between His love & mercy and His justice - that is, in any given case especially the borderline ones, which will prevail? His mercy or his justice? They ARE both infinite, right?

We humans got around that problem via the concepts of original sin and its evil twin, the atonement doctrine. But those artifacts of a child's overactive imagination prove nothing except that a "perfect" God has a glaring flaw.

We are aware that God doesn't desire sacrifice, but Love. Infinite amounts of it. Consider:

Although Jesus did not die this death to atone for the racial guilt of mortal man nor to provide some sort of effective approach to an otherwise offended and unforgiving God; even though the Son of Man did not offer himself as a sacrifice to appease the wrath of God and to open the way for sinful man to obtain salvation; notwithstanding that these ideas of atonement and propitiation are erroneous, nonetheless, there are significances attached to this death of Jesus which should not be overlooked.

When once you grasp the idea of God as a true and loving Father, the only concept which Jesus ever taught, you must forthwith, in all consistency, utterly abandon all those primitive notions about God as an offended monarch, a stern and all-powerful ruler whose chief delight is to detect his subjects in wrongdoing and to see that they are adequately punished, unless some being almost equal to himself should volunteer to suffer for them, to die as a substitute and in their stead. The whole idea of ransom and atonement is incompatible with the concept of God as it was taught and exemplified by Jesus of Nazareth himself. The infinite love of God is not secondary to anything in the divine nature, as noted above.

All this concept of atonement and sacrificial salvation is rooted and grounded in selfishness. Jesus taught that service to one's fellows is the highest concept of the brotherhood of spirit believers. Salvation should be taken for granted by those who believe in the fatherhood of God. The believer's chief concern should not be the selfish desire for personal salvation but rather the unselfish urge to love and, therefore, serve one's fellows even as Jesus loved and served mortal men.

The entire idea of the ransom of the atonement places salvation upon a plane of unreality; such a concept is purely philosophic. Human salvation is real; it is based on two realities which may be grasped by the our faith and thereby become incorporated into individual human experience: the fact of the fatherhood of God and its correlated truth, the brotherhood of man. It is true, after all, that you are to be "forgiven your debts, even as you forgive your debtors."

If only we would just once stop and analyze the reasoning and the philisophosical grounding of some of our most closely held beliefs, such as atonement, original sin, etc. it becomes IMMEDIATELY clear that there are basic problems in and with the relationship between the entire human race and the God that created it.

We have, in the West, worshipped the same concept of God, Jehovah, for over five thousand years, with NO updating to comport with our evolved ability to think and to reason. Christianity, which claims to be the ONLY approach to this stern, humorless God who has every human failure writ large, has left behind it a lake, A LAKE, of blood, a virtual eternity of suffering, and NO ANSWERS. Christianity cannot possibly represent the God of Infinite Love. Christianity HAS NOT SERVED THE HUMAN RACE. Or at least we have so perverted its message it is no longer recognizable.

I suggest that we do something about all this. If we don't, who will? The Catholic Church is too busy guarding its treasure and fighting off furious parents of abused choir boys. Jehovah's Witnesses are too busy guarding thier treasure and fighting off furious parents of abused children.

Some may find the idea of a small group of people analyzing a system of belief and then coming up with a new approach to Reality a silly idea, but think of this: Has it ever been done any other way?

And our "religion" will have no name, no hierarchy, no rules, no elders, no creed, no churches, absolutely no preaching - just teaching by example (and no calling attention to that). It will be a way of life, a method of acting and reacting to the universe and the things that happen in that vast tapestry of life. And if we're wrong, and Jan and all the other humanists are right, it will be OK, 'cause there ain't no hell, no punishment. And if we're right, Jan will be alright too, right there with us pointing out the fine points of how this couldn't possibly have happened. There will be NO demerits for getting it wrong. Our teaching will be something like "perfection is something to attain, not something we can claim now."

Watcha think? Wanna go for it?

francois

minimus

FRANCOIS, That was quite a response!.....So can I join your religion?...

Xena

It is sad to think that the special thing that makes each person unique is forever gone, forever forgotten

Windy that thought has always made me sad too!

SO WHAT IF YOU GO TO HELL???

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