Wyrd of Gawd Wrote:(May 31, 2015 at 4:46 pm)emjay Wrote: Yes, I would accept him - I'm an atheist, not an anti-theist, and I am an ex-Christian. I'm not angry at god, I just don't believe in him any more. But it seems to me to be a moot point anyway because you have to believe in and accept Jesus as your saviour in life, based on faith; in death and genuinely meeting god face to face it would not be based on faith but fact.
So you meet the God character and he says that the Jesus character that you've been worshiping all of your life is a fake. What would you do then? All of your religious beliefs have been for nothing since your version of the God character doesn't exist.
I was a Christian up until I was 18. I'm now 34. I was basically ignorant when I was a Christian because I believed what I was told about God and Jesus without much questioning and without any proper study of the bible save for cherry-picking verses along with everyone else. That is basically the definition of an idealised delusion so even if god was real, the chances of mine or anyone else's interpretation being correct would be practically zero. So on the off-chance my previous beliefs weren't a delusion and I genuinely met god face to face I would accept him (if he accepted me) quite happily because my previous beliefs were of the fluffy version of God and Jesus, all love and light. But if he was anything else then I would be just as ignorant as anyone else meeting an unknown god face to face and in that situation, if faced with the genuine prospect of an eternity in heaven or an eternity in hell - standing at the gateways to both - I would choose to serve in heaven rather than rebel in hell, even if that made me a coward. But serve would be all it would be; I could not love without good reason because as has been said before, love is not a choice and it is certainly not real if it is the result of both a threat and a promise. But given the real choice I would much prefer non-existence to eternal life and thankfully all the evidence points towards that outcome.
