(March 3, 2014 at 5:24 pm)JesusLover1 Wrote: God doesn't punish them. They choose to deny heaven, and the only other option is the devil's Hell.In other words, if they exercise their free will, they suffer for it. Not only that, but god will not even be man (or god) enough to admit that he is punishing them, preferring to play a childish game of "stop condemning yourself! Stop condemning yourself!"
If you forsake free will and behave like a puppet, you get into heaven, where you must presumably continue to behave like a puppet for the rest of eternity. Because if you exercise the 'gift' of free will in heaven, I can only imagine that god will interpret that as "choosing hell" and send you on your not-so-merry way. And just to rub it in, as you are being dragged away he'll mockingly call out "why are you choosing to leave? Don't you want to be in heaven with us?"
God is really creepy.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
