(June 10, 2014 at 4:45 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: If I really believed Hell was a real place and that the vast majority of people were destined for eternal torture, the sadistic nature of which would make the Nazis cringe in moral disgust, it would drive me crazy. I couldn't stand the thought of no one heeding my warnings or that even one person I spoke with couldn't be saved. It would be like watching as all of us obliviously walk off the edge of a cliff into an active volcano, only there wouldn't be the release of death to end our torments in the lake of fire below.I've wondered about that. The JWs do not believe in a fiery hell or eternal torment; they believe that if you don't earn god's reward, you just die and that's it. That might have made it easier to stay with the religion as long as I did. Not having such an objectionable and disturbing belief made god seem a heck of a lot less terrifying (even taking his OT persona into account).
Then again, I'd have trouble worshiping a god who would do that.
"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
