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Originally Posted by Khalif
Yes, He is pissed with you if you do not obey Him after He created you and created everything else for you to enjoy.
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Really? So he created things like bacteria, viruses, and cancer for me to enjoy? He created natural disasters, death, and all kinds of miseries for us to enjoy?
I don't know. Maybe your life is filled to the brim with nothing but good times and enjoyment, but for MOST people, life only contains very few and very fleeting moments worth remembering. MOST people simply spend their days struggling just to survive.
I really don't give a rat's ass if God is pissed because I don't obey. I'm a sentient being not a slave; if all God wanted was blind obedience, he should have created a species that did exactly that. Yeah, I guess God doesn't want robots. He wants you to voluntarily choose to be a robot and then receives the added extra bonus of eternally torturing those who actually USE their free will.
I also don't give a rat's ass how powerful or divine God is, either, because morality is independent of the actor and not even God is above that -- especially a God who is supposed to be the wellspring of love and compassion. There is absolutely nothing moral about creating a sentient, thinking, feeling species like humans just so you can boss them around, demand their worship, and brutally punish anyone who dares to defy the creator.
It's just too bad that many deity worshipers of all kinds, including Christians, never seem to realize that the gods they worship behave in precisely the manner you would expect a typical mortal human to behave if said human had unlimited power. For a goodly number of humans, they would demand obedience, worship, adoration, praise, and love from a "lesser" species and punish those who refused -- just like damn near every god ever worshiped by humanity.
In other words, the early authors -- the inventors of religion -- simply didn't have the imagination or understanding of what a truly divine being would be like or how it would act so they did the easy thing and asked, "How would we behave if we were divine? Oh right, we would demand obedience, worship, praise, etc. etc." Viola! Some 3,000 gods of various kinds -- including Yahweh -- were born.
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Originally Posted by Khalif
Because that would be easy to endure and, therefore, not be enough to deter you from sinning. The deterrent has to be real deterrent.
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Except it's not a real deterrant. Hell is as made-up as Mordor and Oz. The reason why Hell is all about fire is because fire is universally known to be extremely painful. The fear of fire cuts across all cultures especially in those primitive eras when fire was a poorly understood phenomenon. Hell had to consist of a universally feared element and fire was the best choice. Otherwise some people might not be overly afraid of Hell.
Notice how religions are usually quite specific about what Hell is like because it's easy to find aspects of our world that are universally feared no matter who you are -- and fire is considered to be THE number one worst kind of pain the mortal body experiences. Thus creating a Hell made of fire is a no-brainer.
However, notice too how the nature of Heaven is very non-specific, extremely vague, and often encompasses the kinds of luxuries that someone with a Bronze Age lifestyle would find appealing. For instance, having streets paved with gold is the kind of thing that a Bronze Age peasant would be awed by, but someone in the 21st Century probably wouldn't be all that impressed -- and wouldn't care what the streets looked like.
In any event, the problem with Heaven is that it would be different for each individual. There can be no universally loved Heaven. So the authors of religion were smart enough to keep Heaven vague and only include things that everyone wouldn't mind having there -- no sickness, no pain, no sorrow, no death, that kind of thing. Those attributes fall under the "no duh!" category.
But you can't really start describing what Heaven actually looks like or what we do there for all eternity because the more specific you get with Heaven, the greater the chance of turning someone off. If a holy book decides that Heaven is a wintery mountain wonderland filled with crackling fires, knee-deep snow, and a cozy cabin in the woods, lots of people would say, "That's not at ALL heavenly -- where are the tropical beaches with balmy breezes, turquoise water, and someone bringing me a drink every 15 minutes?"
This is why you can tell that it's all made-up from end to end. If Heaven and Hell were real places, they would be more than just a place of physical torture or a place where there isn't any negativity.
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Originally Posted by Khalif
God doesn't get any satisfaction from it, the sinner gets the reward from it for sinning.
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Balderdash. Poppycock. If God actually existed, you can bet your eternal soul on the fact that God gets off punishing people. That's all God did all throughout the Old Testament. And his punishments were quite often out of all proportion to the actual sin being committed -- like sentencing a jaywalker to the electric chair. And his whole family, too. And everyone he's ever had contact with from the doctor who delivered him as a baby to the cashier at Wal-Mart who rang up his purchase 10 minutes ago.
However, the most obvious proof of God's punishment fetish is the fact that, well ... he's God. He didn't HAVE to set up the world in this fashion so that enormous amounts of punishments have to be dished out. Remember very clearly that humans didn't bring sin into the world -- God did as the punishment for disobedience.
Bringing sin into the world as a punishment even though God hates sin is about as smart as being on a cross-country car trip and saying you're going to punish your rap-hating child with 3,000 miles of rap music -- even though you hate rap as much as your kid. Duh! Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Not a very quick-witted god.
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Originally Posted by Khalif
To reward you for sinning.
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Meh?
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Originally Posted by Khalif
Just as you love pleasure in sinning why should you not love pain as a reward for it?
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And this logic makes sense to you, does it?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Khalif
He is able to do that but He knows what you would understand. You do understand the pain fire can inflict (you have experienced its heat) but you have not experienced pain of something 10 times worse. He, who created you, knows what you will understand what you would not understand. The reward for sinning has to be experienced. Fire is perfect for you to experience pain.
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It's amazing to me that people still buy into this primitive garbage -- as if the best punishment God could come up with in his infinite imagination was something as shallow and one-dimensional as physical torture. If anything, our life here on earth is more equatable to a punishment than something as prosaic as hellfire. The torture we all experience here on earth is infinitely more diabolical and painful than merely having your physical body burned. Everything from losing our loved ones to death and disease to the law of diminishing returns -- and many, many more things -- makes THIS life the true punishment.
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Originally Posted by Khalif
Hell fire or Paradise are not literal places. Nobody knows exactly how it would be either in paradise or hell. In scriptures, these are indications, parables, examples, allegories and not literal places. The abode of sinners is abyss. It is called hell fire just to make you know what it is like to be in abyss.
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Uh huh ... and there are as many guesses as to what Heaven and Hell are like as there are stars in the galaxy. Why? Because NO one knows what lies beyond the veil.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Khalif
You could be nothing after your death just as you were nothing before your existence. Some people dislike that thought rather than being in paradise or hell. I said that to my younger brother once and he got worried. He said, "you are joking, aren't you?" I smiled when I saw that he didn't want to be nothing after his death.
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Just ask him how horrible he thought his "existence" was before he was born. Yeah. That usually ends that line of questioning immediately.
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