Dr. Donald Whitaker - Ex Atheist

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Do you have a citation for this?
If my soul is immaterial, it won't be affected by fire, for good or bad.

Yes, that is exactly what the Bible says will happen. At the resurrection, the dead in Christ will rise first, then everyone else. This is a physical resurrection since the souls are already in heaven—or hell, whichever the case may be.

Now, if you want to make a decision based on fear of hell, Islam is your best bet.  Yahweh just throws people into the lake of fire and is done with them. But Allah rejuvenates their skins when it burns away so they will eternally get the full effect of torment.

You know, I never thought about it before, but their claim that "the dead in Christ will rise first, then everyone else" (as you put it) seems to also assume that Christ would be imminently returning, as in "within this generation", when they wrote the stories. Otherwise, WHAT dead will rise? It has been 2000 years... most of the people who "died in Christ" have completely decomposed; there is nothing left to raise from the dead, even if their spirits somehow are what animate bodies, as the ancients believed. It's not a small question, either; churches have opposed the practice of cremation on the basis that the bodies needed to return, which is also why we have the practice of burying bodies "facing the east", from whence Christ will supposedly return. (Presumably, he will appear over the Pacific somewhere, and sweep westward over Japan toward Israel.)

Under normal circumstances, a body decays down to bones in 12 years. The bones will usually be gone within 200 years, though they're "dry and brittle" and tend to fall completely apart after roughly 40 years, depending on burial circumstances (soil acidity, etc). At what point in the decomposition process does a Christian corpse become un-resurrectable?