God the father

"Our Father who art in heaven....""...Father, Son and Holy Ghost...."It seems to me that one of the themes of Christianity is that God is the ultimate father figure. He is described as having perfect love, perfect mercy and perfect justice for us. He is also described as being a jealous God and ready, willing and able to condemn anyone who doesn't believe in him and keep (some of) his laws to eternal suffering.This, of course, makes no sense.I have a son. I love him unconditionally. He's 20, so my days of having any meaningful say in how he lives his life are dwindling. I have tried to raise him to be a good person. To that end, I have from time to time had to punish him in various ways for various transgressions. It makes me sad when I have to punish him, because I hate to see him unhappy. But I know that sometimes it must be done to try to make him a better person. I have tried to do this in a manner that will teach him what mistake he made and show him not to repeat that mistake. As you can imagine, these efforts have met with mixed success.On the whole, however, he has turned into an intelligent, compassionate, caring young man, one that, with all the hubris of a parent, I am proud of.I cannot imagine anything that he could do that would make me want him to spend eternity suffering. It seems that one of the biggest transgressions one can commit against a god is to deny his existence. If my son were to disown me and never want to have anything to do with me again, I would be profoundly sad. There may be nothing that would make me sadder. But I certainly wouldn't want my son to suffer for the rest of this life, much less for all of eternity, just because he disowned me. I might be very angry at him depending on his reasons for disowning me. But wish him to suffer? No. I love him too much to ever want to see him suffer for anything. His well being is more important to me than my own. So the very idea of wanting him to suffer because he offended me is ludicrous beyond words.So please, someone, explain to me how the god of the bible can be considered all-loving and still allow anyone to suffer forever, much less impose the suffering on them himself? I don't know what you call that kind of a being, but it sure isn't a father.

Thread copied here from the God the father thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

The Problem of Evil is still the Problem of Evil, no matter what you call the deity.Jon

Which is irrelevant to my question. How can a loving father condemn a child to eternal suffering?

Any father that at one time or another not wanted to throttle his offspring is just not being honest.But do you really want a discussion on the subject and how some Christians see the issue or just want to rail at fundies?

Guilty. At one time or another. But of course, that's a far cry from wanting him to suffer for eternity. I'd love to see anyone's take.

A good friend and Episcopal Priest once covered the subject of hell and eternal damnation in one short statement; "Hell? Fuggitabutit!"

Is that anything more than simply ignoring part of the bible that you don't like?

It's understanding that the Bible was written by humans of different eras, different beliefs, different cultures and to different audiences.

And so we ignore that part?Please, don't misunderstand me. I'm seriously not trying to goad you or pick at you. I'm just trying to understand, and it sounds to me like that's what you're saying.

No, you understand that the folk writing stuff are different people with different cultures than folk today.

Right. I get that.So what do you do with the parts of the bible that say accept God or go to hell? If your position is that they were written for a different time, does that mean that they can be ignored today? If it doesn't mean that, what does it mean to you?

It depends on which parts you are talking about. Give me a chapter and verse and we can discuss that chapter and verse.

So it sounds like you agree with me that the idea of a loving god sending anyone to suffer for eternity is inconsistent.

Again, it really helps if we were specific on Chapter and Verse, not being difficult but all too often it turns out that what is being marketed is something taken out of context.Yes, I agree that to us and to me, sending someone to suffer for an eternity is inconsistent with a father figure image, but remember, even the father figure image is but one snapshot again taken out of context.However, condemning those you hate to eternal suffering is not inconsistent with what many folk did believe at various times; even today we see folk asserting that position. Nor are religious beliefs necessarily consistent. In fact, inconsistency could be said to be a hallmark of religious beliefs.That is certainly true of what was written and included in various Bibles.