Problems with the Heaven Concept

[another1]

People are pessimistic sadists who will watch suffering for all life, so if eternity obviously doesn't matter, why would they have the right blame Religions? Why not just blame themselves? They are horrible little people. The ones... I can agree. They are in great number with and without Gods.

 

[Rhea]

I think believers can have great confidence that God will respond to their prayers on behalf of their children and their children will be with them in heaven. Of course, non-believing parents can expect to be with their children also - but this is not guaranteed.

You are saying that - contrary to what your bible clearly says, sinners and unbelievers, fornicators and homosexuals will all go to heaven even if they do not accept Jesus into their hearts, just because their parents prayed hard?

That's a new one. No wonder it's so comforting if you can just make shit up whenever there's an uncomfortable hole in your padded box.

 

[bilby]

I should point out that "have great confidence that" and "but this is not guaranteed" are basically identical sentiments. The difference is only in rhutchin's personal assessment of their likelihood and/or desirability.

Both boil down to "I have no clue", but the former he hopes is right, and the latter he hopes is wrong.

Cruel and sad simultaneously. Neat.

 

[Keith&Co.]

People are pessimistic sadists

Not true. The Christain sadists that get hard-ons at the thought of a viewing platform over Hell are quite optimistic.

who will watch suffering for all life, so if eternity obviously doesn't matter, why would they have the right blame Religions?

You mean, blame religions for teaching that eternal torture is a good thing?
Teaching that pain without purpose is righteous?
Teaching that we should emulate the idea that some people just deserve unending punishment without hope of parole, forgiveness or redemption, so there's no point in treating our enemies any better than paper targets, because their fate is in God's hands?

Why not just blame themselves?

I think you're missing the whole point, again.
We do blame the believers, the faithful, the thumpers. Because there's no point in blaming their fictional skybeast.

 

[funinspace]

So here's an interesting Heaven problem.

You are a parent. You have some children who lose their faith and become atheists. When you go to heaven, and they go to the lake of fire (your children, the ones you would do anything to protect, whom you loved and nurtured and would be horrified if someone beat up,) when you're in heaven and they are burning YOU DON'T CARE. It doesn't bother you one bit that they are burning. because heaven is defined as without pain, lament or regret. In your new body, you forget about your children and don't care about their suffering.

Weird definition of perfect, huh?

Nobody ever loses their faith. Faith is permanent - once God activates faith in a person, it cannot be lost.

LOL…this used to bug me, in the early years after I lost my faith in the Christian God, as religionists were essentially saying that I faked my faith for those decades. But consider this, if I thought my faith was real, and that I was guaranteed to become part of your imaginary heaven, but in reality I was never really saved, where does that leave the idea of confidence of salvation? You either have to assume that tons of people are lying to you about their former faith, or that no one really knows whether or not their perceived faith in Christ & salvation is real. The only way to remain confident that your faith is truly real, is to assume that each and every single person that says they lost their faith are fakers/liars.

Not really. There are people who say that they are saved because they do good things; others because they are not as bad as they could be; others because they go to church and got dunked in the water. There are other explanations for why people say they have faith. The Bible tells us that God protects those who actually have faith - as He is the one who gave them that faith - and that He will not let them fall from faith. So, the question here is why you thought you had faith. Maybe it was because someone got you to say some prayer and then told you that you were saved. What's the truth here?

The truth here is that I grew up mainstream Protestant, joined the church in 8th grade. I was the youth leader for our youth group for about 1.5 years (the adults were still really in charge…). By the time I finished HS, I had read thru the Protestant Bible. In my college years I switched over to an independent Bible church as my mainstream church was ignoring the Bible more and more IMPOV. I spent a dozen years in a couple independent Bible churches, partly switching due to moving after graduating from college. I felt I was saved by Christ’s grace and did not doubt for my future or my faith. I felt I had God's presence in my life. I did Bible study, even outside of Sunday morning. One of the longer studies utilized The Footsteps of the Messiah: A Study of the Sequence of Prophetic Events by Dr. Fruchtenbaum. I regularly attended church, participated in small devotion groups, spent time in prayer, donated time to help others, volunteered frequently at the church, and tithed to my churches. My faith wasn’t just an undigested bit of beef.

One irony is that the seed that started forming cracks in my serene God-fantasy was a Christian video (watched in a Bible study group) that claimed that there was scientific backing for the Deluge. I wanted to know more than the video offered, so I would be able to explain it to others if there was an opportunity. Well the video was backed not by facts and science, but with obfuscation, misdirection, and essentially lies. That left me taken aback to read lies from Christians. I ignored that for a while, but every time the preacher would bring up some of the grand miracles from the OT, I couldn’t help but think of some of the information I had reviewed. Eventually, I decided I needed to figure out more about the grand miracles and how they could or couldn’t work. So I spent about the next 2 years reading, praying, and getting more and more frustrated as my faith felt like it was under attack. I spent some time talking with a local Bible college professor that I knew, and he provided some of the apologetics for my reading. In those 2 years I read a dozen or so books of apologetics from CS Lewis to the dolt Josh McDowell, other books like Eusebuis’ History of the Church, some of the Nag Hammadi Library, John Romer’s Testament, several book on Sumerian and Egyptian archeology, and others I have forgotten. Anywho, I don’t think my general story is all that unique here on this board, as there are even ex-preachers on the board. I still remember reflecting on 1 Cor 10:13 “No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it.”…well that didn’t work out so well.

 

[Keith&Co.]

How will they be seen? on a movie screen, Looking down from heaven or what?

I don't know. Maybe a two way mirror.

Um... Did you mean a one-way mirror?
A two way mirror would be a mirror from both directions. Or, you know: Mylar.

 

[rosy tetra]

The teaching I got about heaven when I was a kid: We can't imagine how it will work because it's so far beyond human understanding. It will be better than you can imagine. So don't think about it too much.

The teaching I got about hell: It's just for reaaallly bad people. Don't worry, nobody you know is going to hell because pretty much everybody is Christian even if they don't know it. So don't think about it too much.

Yeah, I grew up in a pretty liberal, laid-back Protestant church.

I figure a lot of nominal Christians view heaven and hell about like this. They don't think about it too much, and when they do think about it, they imagine it will match up with their own particular sense of how things should work, whether that agrees with their scripture or not. Try to think about details too much and there are all kinds of problems to solve about eternal existence and heavenly bodies and social order.

You can spend years trying to work out details, connecting it up with scripture, plugging in connections to discoveries in biology, psychology, physics, etc. That seems to me so much like trying to figure out how Star Wars or Star Trek works. Assume the fantasy stories are true, and work like nerds trying to construct theories to explain how it can be consistent and work with known or proposed science.

There's really, really no reason to think any story about an afterlife is true. The best reasoning I have heard (from "experts") boils down to, "There must be an afterlife, because I really, really want there to be one, and it's going to be just the way I want it to be." Well that's fine. If we're going to play fantasyland, I'll stick with my surfer heaven. It's a heck of a lot better than bible heaven.

 

[funinspace]

There's really, really no reason to think any story about an afterlife is true. The best reasoning I have heard (from "experts") boils down to, "There must be an afterlife, because I really, really want there to be one, and it's going to be just the way I want it to be." Well that's fine. If we're going to play fantasyland, I'll stick with my surfer heaven. It's a heck of a lot better than bible heaven.

Sorry but the theological nerds said the surf is dead...via one of the dozen or so vague description of this goat herder fantasy
Rev 21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea.

 

[Keith&Co.]

, "There must be an afterlife, because I really, really want there to be one, and it's going to be just the way I want it to be." .

 

[rosy tetra]

Rev 21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea.

No sea! I want no part of that heaven. In my heaven, God is the cosmic surf. And forget about a holy city. That's way too corporate.

 

[Keith&Co.]

And forget about a holy city. That's way too corporate.

Of course it's corporate! How else can we get individualized afterlifes if there's no corporate sponsorship?

That's why the Egyptian afterlife is the only one that makes sense to me. You live, you sample the alternatives, and you decide to allow Coke to place a dispenser in your tomb.

Product placement for eternity.

 

[sdelsolray]

I think believers can have great confidence that God will respond to their prayers on behalf of their children and their children will be with them in heaven. Of course, non-believing parents can expect to be with their children also - but this is not guaranteed.

You are saying that - contrary to what your bible clearly says, sinners and unbelievers, fornicators and homosexuals will all go to heaven even if they do not accept Jesus into their hearts, just because their parents prayed hard?

That's a new one. No wonder it's so comforting if you can just make shit up whenever there's an uncomfortable hole in your padded box.

Rhutchin is entertaining. He makes things up as he goes along. He's not as entertaining as some other theists that have been here or at the old forum, such as Self-Mutation or Ed.

 

[Mageth]

I think believers can have great confidence that God will respond to their prayers on behalf of their children and their children will be with them in heaven. Of course, non-believing parents can expect to be with their children also - but this is not guaranteed.

You are saying that - contrary to what your bible clearly says, sinners and unbelievers, fornicators and homosexuals will all go to heaven even if they do not accept Jesus into their hearts, just because their parents prayed hard?

That's a new one. No wonder it's so comforting if you can just make shit up whenever there's an uncomfortable hole in your padded box.

What I get out of what rhutchin said is that his God may save children whose parents pray to God to save them from Hell. All the other children are more than likely fucked.

 

[dockeen]

To me the key point is that to people like rhutchin, Ed, and Tigers!, eternal conscious torment is an entirely reasonable act by their god. Self-Mutation at least seemed to recoil from the notion, even seeming to embrace a form of universal salvation at some points.

 

[Keith&Co.]

To me the key point is that to people like rhutchin, Ed, and Tigers!, eternal conscious torment is an entirely reasonable act by their god. Self-Mutation at least seemed to recoil from the notion, even seeming to embrace a form of universal salvation at some points.

Self-Mutation at one point said no one was evil enough for Hell except for the Fallen. Not even Hitler.
At another point, he said that if God didn't send Hitler to Hell, then that would make Heaven uncomfortable for the Jews that managed to make it there.

Of course, Self also embraced evolution and rejected it entirely.

 

[dockeen]

To me the key point is that to people like rhutchin, Ed, and Tigers!, eternal conscious torment is an entirely reasonable act by their god. Self-Mutation at least seemed to recoil from the notion, even seeming to embrace a form of universal salvation at some points.

Self-Mutation at one point said no one was evil enough for Hell except for the Fallen. Not even Hitler.
At another point, he said that if God didn't send Hitler to Hell, then that would make Heaven uncomfortable for the Jews that managed to make it there.

Of course, Self also embraced evolution and rejected it entirely.

I remember one evening when he was laying out thoughts that were clearly universalist, until that word was used, and then he changed his tune.

Of course, this was someone who stated many times that the fact that he made man (1) Entitled him to do whatever he wanted to and (2) Entitled him to be worshiped, absent any other virtue. Ironically, Syed says the same thing. He worships god because he is powerful, no positive reason. Might makes worthy of worshiping.

 

[rhutchin]

To me the key point is that to people like rhutchin, Ed, and Tigers!, eternal conscious torment is an entirely reasonable act by their god.

It is entirely reasonable that God establish standards for entry into heaven. Failure to meet those standards means failure to enter heaven (and reside in eternal conscious torment). God has explained all this in the Bible. I don't see that there should be an issue with this - other than that people just don't like that system.

 

[rhutchin]

What I get out of what rhutchin said is that his God may save children whose parents pray to God to save them from Hell. All the other children are more than likely fucked.

I think it is stronger than "may." I would make it close to certainty. There can always be exceptions - Esau is usually noted in this respect - but these would be unusual situations. It would be like saying that the person buying a lottery ticket may not win - obviously one person may not be lose.

 

[rhutchin]

Rev 21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea.

No sea! I want no part of that heaven. In my heaven, God is the cosmic surf. And forget about a holy city. That's way too corporate.

Heaven does not appeal to everyone. The problem comes when the alternative is less appealing.

 

[rhutchin]

There's really, really no reason to think any story about an afterlife is true. The best reasoning I have heard (from "experts") boils down to, "There must be an afterlife, because I really, really want there to be one, and it's going to be just the way I want it to be." Well that's fine. If we're going to play fantasyland, I'll stick with my surfer heaven. It's a heck of a lot better than bible heaven.

The sole basis for believing that there is a heaven is because the Bible speaks of it. Without the Bible, people would only be concerned with this life.