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Author | Topic: Religion without hell? | |||||||||||||||||||
forgiven Inactive Member |
quote: now now... the doctrine of hell is troublesome to most christians i know, as it seems to fly in the face of an omnibenevolent God... something c.s. lewis once wrote has always stuck with me... i'll have to paraphrase, since i don't have it here and my memory isn't perfect.. "it's true that the only way to heaven is through Jesus Christ, but it doesn't necessarily follow that one must have heard of him in order to enter God's presence *through* him" i think what you should do is simply ask individual christians what they believe... maybe even ask *why* they believe it... i personally define heaven as "being in God's presence, eternally" and hell as "being outside God's presence, eternally"... the ramifications of those two things probably can't be grasped until the one applicable to each of us occurs... to me, it would be miserable living eternally apart from God... even tho i can't quite understand all that would encompass, i understand enough now (being in his presence now, in a sense) to know it's not something i want the link you provided shows the universalist slant, and having debated many of them i can testify to the strength of their arguments... what to believe? i think (just my opinion) that focusing on eternal damnation is a fear tactic that christians are better off staying away from... we see no evidence in the new testament that those who carried the gospel to the world taught anything but, in paul's words, "Christ and him crucified" for our sins
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RedVento Inactive Member |
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Chara:
[B][QUOTE]Originally posted by RedVento: Seams like Christians really have no originality at all.... Red[/B][/QUOTE] It never ceases to puzzle me that people use the existence of tales in other cultures as evidence against things written in the Bible. Resting on the belief that God is the Creator and all things come from him .... why wouldn't other cultures have those "stories"? Mayhap they didn't just make them up.[/B][/QUOTE] Because "christians" like to say they are the ONLY ones to be saved.. IF they were so willing to adopt other culture's beliefs into Christianity then they should make no pretenses about it and would not be so judgemental about the cultures whose beliefs they just incorporated... Christmas coincides with the winter solstace celebration, what a coincidence.. Christmas trees taken from Germanic tribes. Churches placed at existing places of worship.. Christianity is not so much about saving people as it is getting more converts.
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RedVento Inactive Member |
But isn't it worth pondering? Jews originally had no sense of heaven or hell, when you died you died. The Christian notion of Hell never became that popular until "Paradise Lost."
Now in all my years of going to temple not once did any Rabbi talk about Hell. At none of the jewish funerals I went to did the Rabbi talk about Hell, or Heaven for that matter. As far as I was taught we are to do good for the here and now, and not for the promise of eternal salvation/damnation. Plus what about religions like Budism? They beleive in incarnation. Those who are evil come back as a lower life, those who are good come back as a higher life until reaching Nirvana. No hell their either, well not in the "eternal suffering" sense.
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forgiven Inactive Member |
quote: i think jews believed in 'paradise' and 'sheol' didn't they? i don't know if those beliefs are still held... as for hell, read my post above... different people believe different things... blanket statements as to those beliefs might be in error
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Karl Inactive Member |
Sheol and paradise seem to be later developments; it became abundantly clear, when you sat back and looked at it, that people's just rewards didn't necessarily come in this life. This frustrated the writer of a number of Psalms, as I'm sure you know.
The later addition of ideas about some kind of afterlife was the sticking point between the Sadducees and Pharisees in the gospels - the former only accepting the afterlife-free Pentateuch as Scripture. Theology evolves through the Bible. It's an interesting topic.
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forgiven Inactive Member |
quote: right, i remember the "disagreements" between the sadducees and pharisees... not much has changed in the religious world, eh? but i'm not sure about sheol coming later, although maybe different terms were used... remember the ones to whom Jesus preached until his resurrection? they were held somewhere, and (according to scripture) had been for some time... i think they were the "watchers" we read about in 2nd enoch, and their offspring, but i could be wrong
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RedVento Inactive Member |
If I remember my hebrew school properly, schoel was a place where the dead could go, but it wasn't hell in the modern place, more like Purgatory. There was no real notion of Hell and Heaven till later on.
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John Inactive Member |
quote: I haven't been able to find anything about this phenomena, though I haven't look very hard. Initial thoughts: This lady was connected to scores of machines right? I suspect it isn't too hard to fake this accidentally with technology. Secondly, this is the sort of thing that is just too obvious. Is finding a soul were this easy there would be no doubters. ------------------http://www.hells-handmaiden.com
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Karl Inactive Member |
Forgiven - you can search as much as you like; there is no mention of an afterlife in the Pentateuch. That is why the Sadducees didn't believe in it. In the Pentateuch, everything is "this life" based. Obey God's commands, everything goes well. Disobey, get squashed. It was the gradual realisation that this wasn't actually happening that led to theological development and the concept of an afterlife.
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
quote: According to Straight Dope, it was the Zoroastrians who invented the concept of paradise and hell and this was borrowed by the Jewish tradition c. 100 BC. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/020201.html PE ------------------It's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. - Bertrand Russell
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joz Inactive Member |
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Primordial Egg:
[B][QUOTE]Originally posted by allen:How do you know you didn't imagine this? Especially if you've never mentioned this to anyone....memories have a habit of changing to what we would want them to be, rather than what they actually were.[/B][/QUOTE] You are far more charitable than I PE the question I would Allen ask is how do we know that you aren`t just lying....
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