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1]Says who? skewed logic? The punishment is not proportionate to the offender. Man is finite and mortal, undeserving of eternal punishment. Simplicity itself.
Says who? skewed logic? lol
The offense is against God. The punishment is according to the crime committed. In this case, the victim is eternal. Simplicity itself.
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2]This is substantiated directly by scripture, right? Or is it self-validated adherence upheld by popular conception?
Scripture.
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3]("Sheol," the Old Testament word that is sometimes translated as Hell, only means "grave" by definition, and it is where everyone in the Old Testament went when they died--good or evil, Jew or Gentile). Thus the Old Testament does not contain the concept of Hell! If Hell is real therein, why didn't God make that warning plain right at the beginning of the Bible? God said the penalty for eating of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was death- -not "eternal life" in fire and brimstone.
There are several different words for it, but the concept is there.
[SIZE=2] Num. 16:30, "But if the Lord brings about an entirely new thing and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that is theirs, and they descend alive into Sheol, then you will understand that these men have spurned the Lord . . . 33So they and all that belonged to them went down alive to Sheol; and the earth closed over them, and they perished from the midst of the assembly."[/SIZE]
[SIZE=2] Matt. 8:12, "but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
[/SIZE][SIZE=2] Matt. 13:41-42, "The Son of Man will send forth His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those who commit lawlessness, 42and will cast them into the furnace of fire; in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” See also Matt. 13:50.
[/SIZE][SIZE=2] Matt. 25:41, "Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.[/SIZE]
The offense is against God. The punishment is according to the crime committed. In this case, the victim is eternal. Simplicity itself.
The case at hand here is inherent belief. If you were born to interpret complex "spiritual" events and reverence for the profundity of natural phenomena as Allah, and the scripture you are raised upon is that of the Qu'ran, and all your friends and family support and uphold your belief, are you are on the path to eternal damnation, by coincidence of birth? Even if you wish well the lives of those you do not know, but lead a content life otherwise, and are a religious moderate, which is a substantial minority of practicing Muslims? This is not a direct answer to the point, but a pretty convincing supplement.
On the subject of rational thought, the time-line on which a person spends his life, in the frame of all time, past, present, and future, is clearly a small frame. Assuming you are a religious moderate and do not believe the earth to be a few thousand years old, [It is several billion years old], the few decades [average] we have here on earth is minuscule compared to the indefinable phantom called eternity.
So to you eternity is defined as the following...
Since eternity is an abstract concept, it's only possible to think critically about it when you think of it in realistic terms... 70 years of conciousness.. then death... and not according to the quality of your life or your life's works but by belief in a single concept of a text conceived between 1400BC and 1700AD, depending on which Christian sect you follow, you will ascend into a land of eternal praise for your creator or descend into a lake of fire with weeping and gnashing of teeth? [There is no fully developed teaching about hell in the New Testament, though there are frequent mentions of it. Only in the course of later church history was it elaborated into official church doctrine.]
Eternity, the number multipliable by the age of the known existence of space and time itself by the age of the known existence of space and time itself, indefinitely, and on, and on, forever, and ever. 1,000,000 by 1,000,000 for ever and ever. For a man to hold firm beliefs in his life and to hold no faults of character otherwise, is not deserving of eternal punishment by mere circumstance of birth and the "wrong" belief. By this logic, the idea of Hell is clearly at fault. Anything else is armchair ratiocination to justify faulty texts...
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Originally Posted by kdbrich
There are several different words for it, but the concept is there.
[SIZE=2] Num. 16:30, "But if the Lord brings about an entirely new thing and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that is theirs, and they descend alive into Sheol, then you will understand that these men have spurned the Lord . . . 33So they and all that belonged to them went down alive to Sheol; and the earth closed over them, and they perished from the midst of the assembly."[/SIZE]
[SIZE=2] Matt. 8:12, "but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
[/SIZE][SIZE=2] Matt. 13:41-42, "The Son of Man will send forth His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those who commit lawlessness, 42and will cast them into the furnace of fire; in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” See also Matt. 13:50.
[/SIZE][SIZE=2] Matt. 25:41, "Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.[/SIZE]
Good thing the last three verses are from the New Testament, not the book in question. Even better that the verse you cite from Numbers could dubiously describe the unknown underworld, even mentioning the ground opening up. Nothing about fire, torment, or punishment, or eternity.
There should be only one "commandment": individual human sovereignty. (FLASH)
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