Do I believe Atheists are going to hell?

[polymath257]

The doctrines that have been built up around Christianity are insanely complicated...

The basics are so simple that a child can understand them. We have collectively and personally offended the moral order of the universe and are broken. God has given us the opportunity to be made whole again if only we are willing to accept His offer.

Everything else is gravy.

And why would anyone other than a child believe this?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Agreed. Plus that, some atheists do believe that morality is objective-- so you theists don't have a monopoly on that by any stretch. 

And such proposed foundations for objective morality are open to the same level of scrutiny at theistic proposals. I personally find them them rare, inadequate and poorly grounded. YMMV

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The basics are so simple that a child can understand them. We have collectively and personally offended the moral order of the universe and are broken. God has given us the opportunity to be made whole again if only we are willing to accept His offer.

Everything else is gravy.

And why would anyone other than a child believe this?

It requires someone to examine their life and honestly assess if he or she perfectly exemplifies the absolute best of what he or she could be. If you believe you have been, are now and always will be perfect then of course you won't see your need for a Savior.

[polymath257]

I'm not sure what transcendent good means, tbh. I googled it but didn't really come up with an explanation.

I'm using the word in contrast to immanent. The Good that exists beyond any individual subject or particular circumstances. This, as opposed to what appears to us at some given time and place as good for any one person, group of people, or even all of humanity. The latter is self-referential; the former is not.

Why would you think there is 'Good' outside of what humanity requires?

Morality is about how people interact with others. That's it. Not an aspect of the universe at large, nor even anything (yet) off this small planet. Well, unless there are other intelligent social species in the universe.

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Agreed. Plus that, some atheists do believe that morality is objective-- so you theists don't have a monopoly on that by any stretch. 

And such proposed foundations for objective morality are open to the same level of scrutiny at theistic proposals. I personally find them them rare, inadequate and poorly grounded. YMMV

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And why would anyone other than a child believe this?

It requires someone to examine their life and honestly assess if he or she perfectly exemplifies the absolute best of what he or she could be. If you believe you have been, are now and always will be perfect then of course you won't see your need for a Savior.

And why would I need a savior simply because I don't always live up to 'perfection' (or, for that matter, even my own standards)? I expect people (including me) to be human, which means we make mistakes and, hopefully, learn from them.

I don't see why a 'savior' is required.

[vulcanlogician]

Agreed. Plus that, some atheists do believe that morality is objective-- so you theists don't have a monopoly on that by any stretch. 

And such proposed foundations for objective morality are open to the same level of scrutiny at theistic proposals. I personally find them them rare, inadequate and poorly grounded. YMMV

Yeah, a lot of people would agree with your assessment.

I personally think Plato did a pretty good job. G.E. Moore as well with his Principia Ethica. Just because an argument isn't easy to make, doesn't mean it isn't a position worth defending.

[Astreja]

The doctrines that have been built up around Christianity are insanely complicated...

The basics are so simple that a child can understand them. We have collectively and personally offended the moral order of the universe and are broken. God has given us the opportunity to be made whole again if only we are willing to accept His offer.

Everything else is gravy.

Ah, but I don't accept those basics.  I don't believe for one moment that an entity capable of being "the moral order of the universe" would be so full of itself as to see humans as broken.

[GrandizerII]

Let me know when you (or some other theist) can come up with a good logical argument as to why we need a Transcendent good to exist, as opposed to arguing that the absence of it is merely impractical (rather than also illogical).

Why do you need a logical argument to tell you that what is good depends on your personal assessment?

That's not what I asked for.

[SteveII]

Like I said in another post: I think everyone has an obligation to seek out truth about God. There is excellent evidence that this desire is built into us. I personally am aware of the basics of all the worlds main religions. I find Christianity to be the most evidenced, most internally consistent, and most closely aligned with reality. 

As part of that built in desire to seek out the truth about God, a Muslim would ask the same three things about Islam and he/she may find their native religions lacking (or maybe not). But the process requires you to at least ask the questions and to compare the religions. I think you are wrong that people do not question their religion (even Christians here). I think all people serious about whatever religion they follow ask hard questions.

So, then why would a so-called ‘just’ god, give an overwhelming advantage to a only fragment of the total population?  I mean, not everyone on the planet has equal opportunity and resources to glean an education on world religion.  So, we’re all judged equally, but some of us have the odds impossibly stacked against us, while others of us are just...lucky?  Pretty unjust, and rather silly, I think.

Did God "give" an overwhelming advantage or is it simply that part of the world has an overwhelming advantage because of the accumulation of trillions of free will decisions man has made over the millenniums? For your point to be valid, you need God to have some control of most or all of people's actions. 

Since I believe God judges you on the basis of your responses to the truths revealed to you (as we have been discussing for many posts), it is about as fair as a world can be that consists of people that have free.

[Cyberman]

The doctrines that have been built up around Christianity are insanely complicated...

The basics are so simple that a child can understand them. We have collectively and personally offended the moral order of the universe and are broken. God has given us the opportunity to be made whole again if only we are willing to accept His offer.

Everything else is gravy.

The standard operating procedure of every scam artist, pyramid scheme and advertising executive desperate to shift useless junk since the first lazy coward dreamed up the perfect way to get rich and powerful without having to do anything to earn it. And you fell for it so hard, you need to do whatever it takes to defend it in order to justify your gullibility.

Understand that I'm also using the word 'you' in the loose general sense.

[Ravenshire]

I still posit that if god simply wanted to hang around with other, yet lesser, holy beings for eternity, he could simply create them. This whole song and dance about creating inherently sinful mortals, and then testing their belief in a creator entity that feels that faith is somehow superior to knowledge, is idiotic. It's also incredibly immoral.

So, when Christians start throwing around terms like 'perfect justice' or 'perfect good', I simply must laugh. Because it's obvious they never actually thought about the nonsense terms they wield so easily.

Allegedly, it tried making beings without all the song and dance. According to the story, 1/3 of them rebelled, including the greatest among them, Lucifer. Seems gawd is just complete shit at creating beings that will actually do as commanded.

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But if a place had to be created that was separate from God as a result of our sins in light of God's essential (as in could not have been any other way) perfect holiness/justice, then who is responsible for such a place existing?

Well, *I* didn't create such a place.

And what good is "holiness/justice" if it requires existing in isolation from anything that might sully it?

Amazing how such an amazingly powerful being can be so easily sullied by the actions, hell, just the thoughts according to the buy-bull, of mere mortals.

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I would say that God is the perfection of each of his attributes. Arguments can be made that holiness is better than wicked. Justice is better than injustice. Concepts of perfectly holy and perfectly just separately and together carry entailments such as can't abide the presence of sin nor the can allow it to go unaddressed.

No, that doesn't necessarily follow.  A perfect being should be capable of at least seeing an imperfect being's point of view and able to lead that party closer to an acceptable state.  Your argument just makes your god sound fragile and petty.

Please remember that the main doctrines of Christianity have been discussed and written about by learned people for 2 millennium. Billions of hours of thought have gone into these concepts. Christianity's main problem today is the inability of the typical believer to defend doctrine against a more organized and sophisticated objector. However, that does not mean the there are not very good answers to the objections.

I've been aware of Christianity for over fifty years.  If anything, it makes even less sense than when I was first exposed to it.

Those "2 millennium [sic]" and "billions of hours of thought" are no help at all, as Christian theology doesn't come even remotely close to lining up with the reality that I'm aware of.  I've probably heard the best apologetic arguments dozens of times in the last decade or so, and from my POV the lot of you are just whistling in a big, noisy graveyard of stillborn ideas and wishful thinking.

2,000 years and billions of hours worth of dogs chasing their own tails, then trying to convince the common rabble there's actually something to it all.

[SteveII]

First, why would we look at it on a person-by-person basis? There are billions upon billions of people who have had, on average, good lives and will would participate in heaven--so there is certainly an argument to be made the there is an aggregate greater good than bad to our existence. 

Second, for your objection to be carry any weight, you would have to ignore the fact that the people bound for hell didn't have any say in it.  

Third, I could argue that even the chance of eternal bliss outweighs the chance of eternal hell (especially factoring you that the result has to do with your choices) in the question of whether it is better to have existed or not.

A greater amount of good to bad in a finite amount of time doesn't mean anything in the face of eternal pain.  Remember: according to your own doctrine, it's not enough that people have led good lives, but that they accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.  According to simple math, the vast majority of people through the history of humanity have not believed in him in that capacity.  So, billions upon billions more people have been (and will go) to hell than those that haven't/won't.

Your point is just an appeal to emotion. The math is even more simple than that: everyone had an opportunity to respond to whatever truths God gave them. So logically everyone could have gone to heaven. The fact the everyone does not, in no logical way negates the infinite good of those that chose wisely AND the potential infinite good that could have been the persons that chose poorly. 

For number two and three, I'd argue that people don't have enough information to make an informed decision in the matter.  There's no conclusive proof that any of this is real.  Basing salvation/punishment on faith is utterly illogical, and evidence of bad design.  For something this important, I'd expect the creator of the universe to do more than rely on Middle Eastern myths as the only source of information.  Especially since everyone's starting point is different (someone born in Iran is incredibly likely to have a different opinion regarding Jesus than someone born in Kentucky).

Then it should be simple enough to show me the flaw in the logic. Go ahead. Use a syllogism so we can all follow along. 

Regarding starting points, that has been discussed at length here--if God judges someone based on the information that has been revealed to them, your point is irrelevant. 

It is easy to think the doctrine of Hell is like one of the many caricatures one sees of hell over a lifetime. Again, it is not like this cannot be avoided by one's own actions. It is a logical consequence, not a selected punishment from a list of possibilities. Other than no escape, it has nothing in common with a prison and "prisoner" is not the right word.

"Other than it being mostly like a prison, it's not at all like a prison."

Really? 

Also, you keep saying "logical consequence" as though it's somehow different than "sentence."  It's not.  "If you don't choose Christ, you go to hell" isn't substantially different than "If you commit a crime, you go to prison."  And there's no greater crime against god than disbelief. 

"If you commit a crime, you go to prison" is a bad analogy to what is happening with salvation for one simple reason: it is your natural condition that will result in you going to hell--not one or more things you decided to do. So, a better analogy is if you failed to acquire a free waiver from prison, you will end up in prison. That analogy illustrates what I was saying above about your moral objection (that it would have been better for no one to exist than for some to end up suffering in hell) falling short on logical grounds.

So, for the third time, is the torturous pain experienced in hell the ethical treatment of a prisoner?  This is a really simple question, one that shouldn't take this amount of dodging.

It is neither ethical nor unethical. It just is the consequence of reality.