If Not Hell then what?

[Cato]

To do God's work. God can only ever repersent His expressed will.

Perhaps you getting bounced from your last church was God's way of saying "shut the fuck up".

[Dragonetti]

My point of view!

There is no hell and no heaven. You have one life. Enjoy it with your love ones, and what the planet has to offer. Once you are gone. That is it! Nothing more to follow.

[Ryantology]

I think a better way of phrasing the question is, why does God, supposedly capable of any feat imaginable or not, need to resort to a tactic as primitive, barbaric, and utterly human as threatening people with Hell to get them to obey? It would seriously call into question God's abilities, because it suggests very strongly that God lacks the imagination necessary to create something as amazing as the universe in which we live.

To best answer the question, though, I imagine that I have God's power and knowledge. For all my vinegar when I dispute someone, I'm actually a pretty nice guy and I don't enjoy mistreating people. If I had the power to create sentient living beings, it would be absolutely beneath me to torture them. If taking care of those beings required no real effort on my part, it would be beneath me to neglect them. I would never create a series of laws I knew, in advance, they could not live up to, and I would be immoral to punish them accordingly. I could never find it in myself to punish the misdeeds of individuals by killing everybody around them indiscriminately.

Put it short, I would make a better God than what the Christians worship. If people worshiped me, it would be because they thought I was good. according to their own standards, not because I declare myself to be good. If people wanted to know I was there, I would make it indisputably obvious. If I have the ability to demonstrate my own reality, I would not demand faith. When I ask people to have faith in me, it is because I am making a claim I am incapable of demonstrating on the spot. If I was omnicapable, faith would be a worthless thing if I wanted people to believe in me and give a shit about me. It would also be worthless if I didn't care whether people believed in me. But, I would never demand that people accept me, and my promises, on faith if I had the ability to prove myself immediately. The fact that Christians rely on faith in a being which does not require it is a powerful reason to disregard its claims.

You see, the reason that atheists can't believe what Christians believe can be summarized very simply: we have higher standards. We believe that an all-powerful being should be held to the highest possible standards and should satisfy the strongest scrutiny. Christians settle for much less than that, because wishful thinking is a powerful urge to overcome and a lot of people just can't.

I got off track some, and I apologize. Hell was invented to supplement pointy objects as a tool to get people to accept the infinite love of Jesus Christ. A truly omnipotent, omniscient and loving God could not possibly have a use for such a concept.

[Drich]

My point of view!

There is no hell and no heaven. You have one life. Enjoy it with your love ones, and what the planet has to offer. Once you are gone. That is it! Nothing more to follow.

What do you base this POV on Faith?

[DeistPaladin]

Because the dude who put all of this together said so.

...which brings us full circle back to "Alternative? Don't be a dick and torture people for eternity."

[Minimalist]

What do you base this POV on Faith?

The lack of evidence in support of your fucking fairy tales, most likely.

[Drich]

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that every person who wrote a book of the bible wrote it as a complete work of fiction. With Genesis, that's an easy sell. But people took these books, originally written as fiction in order to spoof or fool other people, and assumed they were real truthful additions to the collection of holy texts. The more people took them seriously, the more people wrote 'spoofs' of those books, which in turn got taken seriously. We need not know the reasons why exactly, because people write satires and fan fiction and forgeries all the time. It's not impossible that the author of every book of the bible self-consciously knew it to be untrue, a work of fiction, and only later was it taken to be true by the Jews and Christians.

So we have a real possibility that all the books of the bible are fictional, and that them being fiction is their correct interpretation. My question to you Drich, is how do you know that this is not the proper interpretation?

(And I'll stress the word 'know' — how do you know this is not the case, not simply that you believe it isn't the case. After all, what you're asking of us in return is quite substantial; a mere 'whim' of belief won't cut it.)

Because there are promises/challenges in the bible that God offers to us. If we take Him up on those promises as stated we will Find what He has promised. (An awareness and abilties given to us from God.) That is the only way we can know. (That God/The Holy Spirit personally re-enforces what the bible teaches and promises.)

That subsequently is why God also tell us those who are wise according to the standard of Man will (Meaning those who prize man's knoweledge above that of God's) will never know God. Because in essence if one were to prize man's knoweledge above God that person's dedication to that knoweledge becomes their own little version of a god. In that they yeild to the authority of that knowledge rather than to the authority of God himself.

Command #1 You shall have no other God's before me. If you worship anything above God then in essence/spirit of the Law, that becomes a 'god' you put before the God of the bible.

[The Grand Nudger]

Its so hilariously easy to avoid running afoul of commandment no#1 as an atheist. In fact, it's a commandment that only a theist is even capable of fucking up.

[Drich]

God speaks to some people through their car stereo as they travel alone down country roads - these people "know"...they don't simply "believe" Apo.....

Yeah, but we know that Drich got the heebie-jeebies about hell from an ACTUAL DREAM, not his car stereo, so his authority cannot be questioned!

It wasn't the fear of Hell that inspired me to change. When I was there, I found that I had a weird sense on belonging or rather I knew that I belong there. What made me want to change was for the briefest of moments I experienced the boundless love God offered the saved for eternity, and I wanted to be apart of that more than anything. The lement and angiush I experienced in Hell was not because Hell itself, It came from the seperation of me from creation. The darkness of Hell was all consuming yes, and very scarry in it's own right, but it was the idea of eternal seperation after knowing what I gave up that was forever damming.

[justin]

Stop P.M.Sing and find something better to with his time. Stop being an asshole would be my first suggestion.