“The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with, isn't it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.”
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“When I was little, I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to Hell, he would put out all the fires”
― My Sister's Keeper
― My Sister's Keeper
13 comments:
The hell of eternal damnation is a cherished concept among the infernalists that heavily populate conservative Christianity. I believe their actions and words speak loudly of a ghoulish vindictiveness that cannot possibly be motiviated by the Holy Spirit. Armstrongism is infernalist along with the rest. But, if one wants to deal in gradations instead of binaries, it is one of the least infernalist religions around. The infernalistic tendencies of Armstrongists really center on The Great Tribulation rather than the traditional eternal damnation of Christianity.
My sentiments are captured in this statement made by David Bentley Hart here briefly excerpted from one of his books:
"One argument that I shall make in this book is that the very notion that a rational agent in full possession of his or her faculties could, in any meaningful sense, freely reject God absolutely and forever is a logically incoherent one. Another is that, for this and other reasons, a final state of eternal torment could be neither a just sentence pronounced upon nor a just fate suffered by a finite being, no matter how depraved that being might have become. Still another is that, even if that fate were in some purely abstract sense “just,” the God who would permit it to become anyone’s actual fate could never be perfectly good—or, rather, as Christian metaphysical tradition obliges us to phrase it, could never be absolute Goodness as such—but could be at most only a relative calculable good in relation to other relative calculable goods..."
Hart provides not only a philosphical renunciation of the hell of eternal damnation but also and exegesis that supports the renunciation. Hell is really a malformed creature of mistranslation resulting from the eisegesis of the doctrinally biased King James translators.
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Paradise (Millennium or Heaven) or annihilation was not a strong enough message to encourage would-be members, so the Hellenized church had to change it to eternal delight or eternal torment.
I recently read the Sam Bacchiocchi and Bart Ehrman books on Hell, and both make a strong case that Hell as anything more than the grave is not supported by scripture - only by mythology and Greek philosophy.
Some Catholic cleric wrote (paraphrased) "One pleasure in Heaven is watching the suffering of the condemned in Hell".
Hell would be having to sit still, perpetually sucking your thumb, and having blasted at you 24 hours a day sermons from Thiel, Flurry , Pack and Weinland for all eternity without any breaks!
even if that fate were in some purely abstract sense “just,” the God who would permit it to become anyone’s actual fate could never be perfectly good
Why do so many people jump to the arbitrary conclusion that we are in the hands of a "good" God? What if the Gnostics are right, and God is basically an evil being who needs to be fought, avoided, or overcome? There is no philosophical reason to require that God be "good" in any manner that we understand "good." It's nothing but a sentimental preference, or a wish.
Hell? No! We won't go!
A local Protestant Pastor with a lot of Catholic baggage continues to cry "If you don't witness to someone and they die and go to Hell it's all your fault!" This conflicts with his claim that there's no excuse for anyone living in the USA not to be a Christian because everyone can hear the message from somewhere (citing all the radio, television, newspaper sources).
Anonymous 8:39
This has been an issue for centuries and is yet today. So it is not a matter of jumping to an arbitrary conclusion at all. I am willing to take a shot at that question.
We live in a world where we have no direct person-to-person dialog with God. And it is also a world of the knowledge of good and evil. So how do we know that God is good. The best answer is given in the first section of C.S. Lewis' book titled Mere Christianity. The title of the section is "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe."
If you are not in the tiny minority of people who are psycopathic or sociopathic, you have a sense of what is right or wrong. Or from a more ego-centric viewpoint, you know how you want to be treated and you can only imagine other people feel the same way. This sense of right and wrong is a natural moral law that God has given us because it is a reflection of himself. Christ drew upon this when he said, "Do unto others..."
You might respond, "What if he has given us that natural moral sense only to conflict us and make sport of us?" Then you must consider such gifts as Beauty, Love and Joy. They needn't be present to achieve the goal of conflicted and tortured creatures.
And it is always possible you will never get a clue without help. And I can't speculate on how God might help you.
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I've always believed in an ever burning hell, even when I attended WCG I disagreed with their teaching on that subject.
I'm thankful I attend the right meeting place
Would that be A.A., or do you go to N.A., TC?
My word! I had no idea that false prophecy was a sign of God's leadership! Do you guys use the National Enquirer as your Bible?
This is David Pack.
I have no idea who this True Christian-Patrick Karikas is. He is clearly an imposter, and not a member of my church.
Hey, TC/PK: We are the swine, and resent you casting pearls into our sty. Don't you realize that pearls come from our fellow unclean animals, our saltwater brethren, the mollusks? Besides when we chew on pearls, they can break our teeth or create sharp pieces which cut our throats and damage our esophagus. Please go away! You should be selling your pearls as part of the RCG yard sale program, and sending the money to your apostle!
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