RE: Can bible really be interpreted as if there is no torment but you cease to exist
February 8, 2012 at 2:59 am
(This post was last modified: February 8, 2012 at 3:17 am by Undeceived.)
(February 7, 2012 at 12:34 pm)Doubting Thomas Wrote: Unless you have a shred of evidence that what you're saying is true, don't try to convince anyone else of it.
If you stood on the railroad tracks with your friends, and knew a train was coming but didn't have evidence, would you warn them or not? And there is evidence in the forms of moral conscience, the historical and scientific accuracy of the Bible, third-party documents backing the Bible, signs of intelligent design, human psychology, logic and a number of other points. In case you missed it, evolution (or Atheism for that matter) has no direct evidence either.
(February 7, 2012 at 2:23 pm)Aardverk Wrote: Do you really want to be brain dead with a silly grin for an E T E R N I T Y?
It sounds like you're having trouble grasping eternity, and so do I. It's beyond the human scope of mind. We can't expect to have the same human emotions or imperfect body we had here on earth. Quite likely we'll be made of substance entirely different from the combination of protons, neutrons and electrons. Heaven's humanly-imagined concept being illogical to other humans sidesteps the real question-- Does God exist, and if he does, is he a personal, loving God who deserves my attention? And in conjuncture, did Jesus really rise from the dead? All historical documents, artifacts, locations and knowledge of the time between AD 0 and AD 33 point to Jesus living, dying, the body vacating the tomb, and people believing him resurrected. There are no contradictions to these events. If we were truly honest, we’d say there is more testable/observable/demonstrative scientific evidence in favor of Jesus Christ than for evolution.
I listed some reasoning for God’s existence in my other response above. Is He personal and loving? Well logically He wouldn’t create us for the sole purpose of hating us and wreaking havoc. If He wanted a little fun, He could do it in larger, more entertaining ways than a natural disaster on speck-sized people every now and then (and if you argue He has different notions of fun than us, why hold Him to ours when it comes to His 'cruel' actions in the Old Testament?). We also have personality, as He has personality. A creator (once we’ve determined he exists) must be more complex and more-everything than His creation. If we can love, He can love more. We live and interact, He obviously made us able for a reason. He could have dropped us all on earth, unthinking and uncommunicative, and sent a giant asteroid at us on day one. Instead, most of our lives are fairly pleasant, and the Bible (this God’s messaging device) explains why it isn’t pleasant all the time. If we make God out to be evil and cruel some of the time and conveniently indifferent all other times, what have we done? We’ve used our own logic to conceptualize what God might be like, and made him out to be as illogical as we can. You can’t use the wrench and eat it at the same time. We can’t make a logic statement about how illogical our creator is when He gave us our logic, and logically producing an illogical image based on the beginning logic (wherever it comes from) is simply not feasible.
Anti-theists try to blow this over by calling God contradictory, and therefore He was probably a fabrication. But this is nothing more than a “seems to me” argument. As said before, our personal God of the Bible would be too complex to analyze with our created, less-complex brains. A dog doesn’t understand 1% of what a human does, and a robot even less. Also, if the writers thought the God they portrayed was not logical, they would have rewrote Him to make Him seem more so. Why would fabricators risk writing an Old Testament judgment that would turn away thousands of readers? If they were really after money they would have made God as perfect and as loving as possible, and throw in a reward like a planet of our own when we get to heaven. Instead, they faced martyrdom because they so firmly believed the God they wrote. God exists, He is personal, and He lovingly sent Jesus His Son to die in place of us.