Warning, this IS from the perspective of a Christian. But it’s something I wish I had known when I was deconverting.
The heaven and hell bullshit is just something modern Christian’s use to get you to tithe and support fascist ideals. Fuck them.
I think all Christians should watch The Good Place. It does a great job showing why the most Christian concepts of heaven and hell aren’t ethically sound.
It is a hilarious show that is also like a really great introductory ethics class. It sounds weird, but it works.
It pokes fun at a lot of ethical viewpoints. It shows the short comings deontological (lawful good, follow the rules) several times even though one of the main characters loves Kant. Christian ethics is pretty much deontological, but inconsistent and impossible to actually follow to a T.
I also think it is probably the best series of all time. At least the best I have seen. It is loaded with references, foreshadowing, details and subtleties. I have seen the whole thing 4-5 times and notice new things every time.
Go Blake Bortles!
Maximum Derek!
It wouldn’t help with the hell fear at all though.
Their own book should help. Calvinists make a good point. In Exodus, the pharaoh was going to give in to the Jews, but god changed the pharaoh’s mind. Later in Romans, god/Jesus/Paul pretty much comes out and says everything is determined by God, so there is no free will. So fearing hell is pointless, it isn’t up to you.
All it takes is one ounce of doubt to honestly search for truth to see through the Bible.
Thomas Paine did an amazing job pointing out the problems with the Bible using the Bible as his reference. He dated the authorship of the earliest books at around 500BCE, which isn’t far off from the oldest fragments found.
I don’t feel good so my brain is broken, hence the rambling tangents.
See that’s the thing that always got me. If god controls everything why is it on me to not go to hell if he controls everything
The “man has free will” argument in Christianity completely ignores the fact that free will cannot exist in a universe where an omnipotent and omniscient deity also exists. And of course it is intrinsically tied up in the whole problem of evil paradox, to which no Christian apologist has ever come up with a reasonable explanation.
I also have an issue with how there is the expectation to just trust holy books. It would be pretty easy to provide evidence by adding things that are way ahead of the time in a cryptic manner., Things that won’t make sense for thousands of years. Only the wise should wield 235 of 92, for it holds great power. Or time increases with speed. Or 8 minutes from the sun.
I never understood how Lucifer’s rebellion even happened. Didn’t God only give free will to humans? So how could any of the angels do anything against God’s will? And if that’s correct, God set Lucifer up to “rebel” just so he could cast him out?
And if “everything is according to God’s will or plan”, then God is responsible for all the bad things that happen too. You can’t blame anything on the devil because Angels don’t have free will and everything is part of God’s plan.
The conception and imagery we have of the “fire and brimstone” hell where sinners go to be fried, hang upside down in chains while red devils poke them with pitchforks, or demons torture them with ironic punishments based on their actions in life, etc. are all directly inspired by Dante’s Inferno. And what people think they know about “the devil” is largely just from Milton’s Paradise Lost. All of it is completely extrabiblical. Not supported by the source material.
In other words, a modern fabrication.
That doesn’t stop contemporary Evangelicals, most Catholics, and other assorted wingnuts from wholeheartedly believing all of it, though.
That’s a cool article I’m christian myself but that was always one thing I would have changed, I was thinking of starting my own group “christians against the end of the word” well I still am but I guess I might have to change the tag line from “better for a soul to forever wait for judgment than burn for eternity”, the 12 month thing would have to be adjusted for
Change whatever you want, none of it is real anyway my dude.
Good enough for me
John 3:18 is pretty clear about people who don’t believe in Jesus being “condemned”, and there’s a handful of other verses (like Revelation 20:15) that seem to suggest that the condemnation is to eternal torture… How do you reconcile this with your interpretation?
Did you read the article? It covers the hades translation issue. And the context of condemned there is pretty open ended in John, condemnation seems within that text to be explicitly not seeing the light of god anymore.
No one reads the article
I think buddy deleted his comment. I was worried because I was like “oh fuck maybe I’m wrong here.”
It’s not the first time I’ve heard of this “actually no hell in the original translations of the Bible” thing but the first time I actually looked into it at all so I was open to the idea that I was wrong. I’m completely atheist now so it wasn’t a high stakes fight for me anyway, but I just feel like I would have had such a less stressful time leaving Christianity if I had known this and want to help other heathens that I know would probably be super relieved to hear this.
