RE: On the subject of Hell and Salvation
February 17, 2019 at 7:25 pm
(This post was last modified: February 17, 2019 at 7:27 pm by fredd bear.)
(February 17, 2019 at 6:43 pm)Astreja Wrote:(February 17, 2019 at 1:55 pm)MilesAbbott81 Wrote: I'm not trying to scare anyone, but I can't help but warn.
Oh, I'm not the least bit scared. I do think that you're a jerk, though, who gets his jollies by pretending to be a spokesman for a god.
Quote:If you're not afraid, you will be. Everyone comes to fear the Lord eventually.
Au contraire, monsieur Abbott. One cannot fear something that one believes is fictional, and I think that your god is fictional. I read the Bible 55 years ago, and it's never been anything more to me than a work of very, very old fiction from a comparatively primitive culture.
I believe wholeheartedly that you will never get to meet your god in person, no matter how hard you pray. Never. Not in an infinity of infinities. At the end of your life you will fall unconscious, your heart will stop, hypoxia will cause your brain circuitry to break down, and literally everything you ever believed will simply vanish as if it never existed.
Live life as if this is the only one you will ever get -- because it probably is. The molecules that comprise your body may eventually become part of some other life forms, but "Miles" has a best-before date.
Indeed.
The Torah is the mythology of a tribe of illiterate bronze age goat herders who lacked the wit to invent their own god; IE ;YHWH was a Chaldean god, part of a trinity, they stole him. He also originally had a wife, called 'Asheroth/ Asherah . Fairly strong evidence has recently been found in Israel**
From making a comparison, I think it's likely that the flood myth of Noah was lifted from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The Ten Commandments have more than a passing resemblance to parts of Hammurabi's Code. Also from making a comparison.
Never ceases to amaze me how evangelicals especially emphasise the Torah, with its petty, nasty, jealous, vindictive sadistic, capricious etc etc god. When in the New Testament there is an infinitely compassionate God and an emphasis on forgiveness.. This especially when the concept of an eternal hell is a christian concoction; it does not exist in Judaism
The hell of which what's his name warns us did not even exist at the beginning of christianity, as far as I can tell. Initially ,as far as I can gather, it was similar to the rather vague eRoman concept of the hereafter.
With these warnings about "fearing god" (rather than loving him) and threats of damnation, I'm beginning to suspect the existence of a fair amount of schadenfreude .
[quote pid='1885506' dateline='1550439754']
**The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, a book published in 2001, discusses the archaeology of Israel and its relationship to the origins and content of the Hebrew Bible. The authors are Israel Finkelstein, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, an archaeologist, historian and contributing editor to Archaeology Magazine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_Unearthed
[/quote]
