"heaven" meme on facebook

[Redbeard The Pink]

"Well, my assumption was that you're "one of these" who blames god's alleged wrath on us ("You send yourself to Hell!") and defends his faith with the "No True Scotsman" fallacy ("No True Christian believes/does that! No True Christian could have left the faith!").", there is not a thing called "God's wrath", as I have told you. God's only feeling towards you is love, and everything He does is for your good and because He loves you. Rather than the pompous statement this can be, it hides all the truth from christianity, either you accept it or not.

You dodgy little shit.


Also, tell that to Sodom and Gomorrah, everyone who died in the flood, the Egyptians at the bottom of the Red Sea (and their first born children)...none of which actually happened, of course, but in any case the Bible clearly depicts and talks about the wrath of God in both Testaments. I don't want to call you a liar by asserting that you just haven't studied the Bible, but--

"No, my assertions are based on a thorough reading of the entire Bible and 20+ years as a Christian myself. To me, all forms of Christianity are based on fiction.", since you obviously lack theology, I believe you lied to me and you did not even touch the Bible (most likely). No, to you, not all forms of christianity are based on fiction. You just simply got dissapointed by some form of protestantism and you decided we are all the same. Very anti-intellectual, in my opinion.

Oh...I see how it is. In that case, yeah, you're a liar. I don't think you've ever studied the Bible in your own language, and I don't think you're really an Orthodox Christian. You're probably a poe or a troll or something. Even if you are a so-called Christian, your assertions in this and other posts make it clear that your theology does not comport with what's actually in the Bible, which means you're not a True Christian™, obviously. Check mate.


All joking aside, I'm amused that you think I care enough about people on the internet to lie to them. I don't, though. I've only been an atheist since June of last year, and prior to that I was a sincerely believing Christian since childhood. I've read the entire Bible multiple times in varying translations, and I've got some knowledge of Greek and Hebrew culture and history. I also used to spend a lot of time studying apologetics, so I'm familiar with all the dirty tricks theists use to shoe-horn science into their religious texts; I'm guilty of many of them myself.


So Protestants aren't True Scotsman, huh? They'd say the same thing about you, and you both have the same amount of evidence (none), so why should I believe either of you?

"That means that they believe that humanity's only salvation lies in the torture and death of a human sacrifice (Jesus), and that people who do not accept this gift and believe in their god will experience Hell. They also believe that the greatest possible human achievement is to die and experience Heaven. Sound about right?" Just because you do not like how this sound it doesn't make it true. You can do in this life thousands of achievements, but compared to the eternal blessing of be in God's grace (uncreated energies) they are nothing. Also, Heaven is an experience of the soul that starts in this life, not "after death".

Even if that were actually true, it wouldn't stop your religion from being a death cult. If your religion were correct, then it would just so happen that the correct religion is a death cult. You still haven't defended any assertion to the contrary. You're glorifying death in this very quote, and holding it as a loftier achievement than anything that's possible in life.


Death cult.

"They're a death cult because they glorify death, and Hell is the cruelty/spiritual threat that they broadcast as "god's love." Sickening.", it is true, God's love is what make people suffer in the state of Hell. Again, you are just being emotional here, you did not make an actual statement. You just said that it is unpleasant to you how christianity is. This has no point in it being real or not. Wars are also displeasant to me but they still exist.

You keep acting like you're going to explain why Christianity isn't a death cult, but then you keep jumping back to whether or not it's real. Whether it's real is separate from whether your religion is a death cult.


Furthermore, whether it's a death cult technically has no impact on whether or not it's true. It happens to not be true because it does not comport with demonstrable reality, which is why it's immoral to convince people to live as though it is true.

"Also, I haven't read any of that crap. There was one book, though, that pretty much single-handedly convinced me that the entire Bible is a lie. Know what book that was? It was the Bible.", I do believe that this is a lie you are telling yourself.

"If you don't believe now, then you never really did," is the most common form that the Christian "No True Scotsman" takes, and it's insulting enough as it is. "You don't believe what I do, therefore you're just lying" is about ten times worse, and it's even more untrue. I am thoroughly familiar with the Bible, and it was the very claims in the Bible that showed me the Bible can't be true. It took my critical thinking faculties a long time to chip away at the layers of indoctrination and finally realize it, but that's what happened. If you don't want to believe that, fine. I give zero shits.

"If you're going to tell me that we decide, then no, that's not how that works.". This is a lie.

I just explained to you why it isn't a lie, so you're either lying or you're just an idiot. I'm thinking it's a little of both.


If your god decides what the criteria is for who experiences Heaven and who experiences Hell, and he creates us with advance knowledge of who will wind up in which state, then he is personally responsible for everyone in Heaven and everyone in Hell. It is not sufficient to dismiss this as a lie. You need to explain yourself. If we're just going to dismiss each other out of hand, this discussion can go nowhere, and also fuck you, you're a dick.

"That takes us right back to the robber analogy.", analogy which fails and I explained why.

No, you gave me a pointless anecdote from your childhood which does nothing to address my analogy, and I explained why. Obviously you either ignored that (because you're ignorant) or didn't understand it (because you're stupid). Again, I'm thinking it's a little of both.

"If your god invented Hell and all the criteria on which people end up there, then he is responsible when people go there." Lies over lies. And this comes from a person that over the course of 20 years did read the Bible everyday (just the Bible, of course, God forbid he actually read some christian history, exegesis of some early Fathers and so on...).

I mean, I got the Protestant side of the story, but yeah, I've studied that garbage. It does nothing to add to the veracity of the god claim.

First of all, what is this nonsense of "god invented Hell", didn't I tell you that Hell is not a place but a response of the soul to God's presence?

Yeah, you said that, it's just not what the Bible says, and it's not what a host of other Christians say, and you don't have any more evidence than they do. Ok, so your personal hell is different than the one I was raised with. So what? You still haven't given me any reason to believe in your Hell, your god, or your interpretation of the Bible.

That is exactly the analogy about me and the sun. While I experienced the sun as being a warm ball in the sky that gave me confort, some people may experience it as pain and burning. That is all of it, not the sun is the problem, but the people that are experiencing the sun.

Except that the sun doesn't pick some people out and hurt their eyes forever because of some arbitrary criteria that the sun made up.

"He is responsible when people go there", again, Hell is not a place where you go like you go to a vacation because it is not a physical space. Let me copy-paste the information you did not read: "Hell or Heaven are not places at all, it is not like you send someone to Virginia. Heaven and hell are relations to or experiences of God's just and loving presence. There is no created place of divine absence, nor is hell an ontological separation from God. One expression of the Eastern teaching is that hell and heaven are dimensions of God's intensifying presence, as this presence is experienced either as torment or as paradise depending on the spiritual state of a person dwelling with God. For one who hates God and by extension hates himself as God's image-bearer, to be encompassed by the divine presence could only result in unspeakable anguish."

I did read that, and that's why I tried to word most of my post without referring to Hell as a place, but as an experience, a state, whatever. I was trying to help you understand, since the whole "place" thing is obviously either an obstacle or a scapegoat for you, but you still seem fixated on this.


It does not matter what form Hell takes. It is still a threat of eternal torment for finite crimes that are arbitrarily decided and judged by a divine despot who is no more moral than the beings he punishes.

Basically this is it: God creates humanity, the humanity (Adam and Eve) fall because they must be put to test in order for them to want God, not to merely be in communion with Him like puppets. But of course, the fall, that is, separation from God, caused effects in humanity, since they separated from the source of life (God is life) death entered into the world, human will became gnomic, suffering appeared and so on... But God saw this, and He knew perfectly that people, due to the corruption their soul is damaged and will experience Him as suffering when His created energies will shine upon them, did something to bring them to life, gave the world Himself in order to save them from the effects of the fall, corruption, death, suffering and so on. This was not a Plan B, was the plan from the beginning, the Incarnation of the Word. So it happened, the Word incarnated, thus uniting the fallen human nature with the perfect divine nature, ascending people to where they should be. This is subjective redemption, now, every person must take objective redemption, that is, willing participation in the acts of redemption. I do not see anywhere the angry God you described, what are you talking about?

You obviously haven't read the whole thing, and you obviously don't understand the implications of being both omnipotent and omniscient and being the creator of the Universe. If your god created everything with full knowledge of what it all would do, and he didn't change his plans even though he knew they would involve suffering, sin, and death, then he has no right or reason to punish anyone or anything when things turn out exactly as he knew they would.


If his original plan was to manifest as a human to sacrifice himself to himself to placate his own attitudes toward natural human behavior, then he is an imbecile not worthy of worship, and also...death cult.

"Does your church not accept the gospels? Do those gospels not depict Jesus himself describing a place with weeping and gnashing of teeth, where the fire never goes out?", a place, again? Of course He describes that, and yes, my Church not only accepts the Gospels, but collected the Gospels into what we now call the Bible around the 4th century. Yes, Jesus Christ describes all of that, but the question you are missing is: Even if Jesus Christ describes these places of suffering, does the suffering here occur because Jesus Christ punishes people with it, or has another nature?

Nooo no no no...stop right fucking there, son.


You've been harping all this time about how Hell isn't a place, and now you're trying to blow right past having to admit that Jesus himself describes Hell as a place. Nope. Not gonna work, Dodgy McDodgerson. If Jesus himself describes Hell as a place and people as going there, then your entire line of reasoning is demonstrably non-biblical, and this little hopscotch game you're playing ceases immediately.


Also, I notice you keep saying Hell isn't a "physical" place. I know that. I didn't believe that, even when I was Christian. I used to think that Heaven and Hell were part of an entire spiritual plane of existence that ran concurrent and tandem to the physical world but was mostly inaccessible to it. The form of the nonsense does not matter. What matters is that there isn't evidence for anybody's Hell, yours or mine.


In either case, though, Hell is an empty threat, and your god is the one on whose behalf you're threatening us. If people experience Hell, it is 100% your god's fault because he had the power to choose a different plan with a different outcome and he did not.

"The point is that you think your god is justified in inflicting eternal punishment for finite crimes committed by a creation that he knew in advance would behave that way.", again, you are wrong. If you believe Hell is a punishment from God you do not have even the slightiest piece of christian theology. Hell is the energies of God experienced as suffering by those who did not purify themselves in this life. If you believe that if you live 30 years of your life in a dungeon with no way out, and you suddenly escape, being in the middle of a field in the month of August, and the burns and sufferings the sun causes you are punishments and torments from the sun to an innocent creature like you, it is not me who is delusional. God doesn't actively burn like the sun, but passively, that is how His essence is, never God wanted for people to suffer. Why doesn't the sun "punish" those peasants who have been working said fields day after day? Because they constantly lived with the sun and are used to it. You do not believe love causes suffering? Do you remember the Prodigal Son? What occured when the son came back? His father was overwhelmed by his son's presence, he felt the most pure love He could have ever feel and his son's presence made him feel the most joyful person on earth. But what caused the prodigal son's presence to his older brother? He started to hate him. The very same "thing" caused two different reactions to the people around it.

"If you believed Hell is a punishment, then you weren't a True Scotsman! No True Scotsman believes Hell is a punishment!"


Your entire argument is  based on a fallacy, and you still haven't realized or acknowledged it. Plenty of self-proclaimed Christians have theology that conflicts with yours, and you ALL have the exact same amount of evidence, which is ZERO. There is no good reason to believe your theology for the same reason there's no good reason to believe theirs.

"If I refuse to believe in your god, I'm am not responsible for being in Hell any more than I'm responsible for being shot. The analogy seems pretty straight-forward to me, but let's see if you can explain yourself.", again, leave the analogy because it is not good, anymore than it is good for you to believe that if the sun gives you insolation for staying too much time unprepared in its presence it is because it punishes you. Since God is the medicine, are you responsible for being sick if you do not take it?

Yeah, you keep saying that my analogy isn't right, and then instead of explaining why you just make another, unrelated analogy that is actually incorrect.


The medicine thing doesn't work because god is also the one who inflicted the "Illness" of sin, and the "medicine" is to accept ridiculous assertions without evidence and join a cult that glorifies death and human sacrifice.


The thing with the sun also doesn't work because the sun does not arbitrarily decide to hurt some people and not others. Anyone who stays in the sun long enough will die of sun poisoning, no matter how "prepared" they are.

"What you're positing is a being that will inflict eternal torment on me (in one form or another) if I don't believe in him when I die.", what is the nature of this lie? Where did you get the "if I don't believe in him when I die"? Hell is caused by a sickness of the soul (sin) because it blocks you from perceiving God as He is and turns His presence into suffering for you. If you do not heal yourself of that sickness is entirely your choice. God has disposed absolutely everything for humans to get saved, He sent His son to destroy the realm of death, corruption and sin that has taken over humanity, He founded an ekklesia that is constantly the place of indwelling of the Holy Spirit that constantly sanctifies its members through the sacraments and other acts. Yet here you are, complaining that you will "go to Hell" after you die.

Lol no, Hell is not real. I am not complaining about going to Hell. None of that other stuff you mentioned is real, either, and you have no evidence to the contrary. That's why I don't believe you. It has nothing to do with Protestantism, Catholicism, or anyone else's religion. I don't believe your bullshit because your bullshit lacks supporting evidence. Period. Regardless of whether "Hell" is a place or a state of being, you have given me no good reason to believe in it or your god.