(April 14, 2015 at 11:48 pm)Iroscato Wrote: So let us for a moment imagine God is real, and a theist dies and goes to heaven. Now imagine 30 or so years later, the child of that theist, who ended up being an atheist, dies and gets sent to hell for his non-belief...My question is...what would theists think of the God who not only let this happen, but specifically planned it...
To me, it seems the author of this plot line didn't think it all the way through. In the bible, stuff like this gets glossed over without much comment, though Jesus did say, "From now on five in one household will be divided...father against son...mother against daughter..." (Luke 12.52-53), this passage cast in poetic meter after Jesus had just announced he wasn't bringing peace, but fire, to the earth.
All the usual conundra attend our interpretation of this, part of a public speech by Jesus on subjects of hypocrisy, the family divisions caused by disputes over wealth, and vigilance among servants, all told as parables. How faithfully does Luke, written ca. 85 CE, represent the actual Jesus? While Christians have always held to warning regarding one's status in the afterlife, the twisted, Dantian hell concepts we paint in as background seem to have crept in as time passed and the church grew more powerful. Many Christians no longer subscribe to the fundamentalist hell, believing spiritual accountability to God and its urgency may be expressed that way in Greek koine but not to be taken as literal description of the afterlife.
