Think of it as perspective. For a Christian, spending time for God would be what they want to do- so in itself is not a waste of time. It's like playing games, really worthless from a 'life efficiency' perspective- but we still play daily, or nearly daily. You didn't consider that a waste of time didn't ya?

Perhaps, but it is a slightly different scenario.

Picture this: you have been told all your life that all your hard work doing all that religious stuff will pay off when you die. Only you die and heeeeey thers no afterlife, wouldn't you feel cheated by that? You would look back at all that you had done and see that it was all for naught.

Well, the good part is that you won't be there to feel cheated, because you'd be dead.

Well your making the assumption that if there is no afterlife there is nothing, you are just dead. We don't know. Maybe theres something different to the afterlife, could be anything. Or maybe there IS an afterlife, just not the one told by the bible or other religious documents/people.

That is indeed a possibility- in which case you will be there to feel cheated, but it is at least better then completely dying.

Would like to know why I entered into this debate? Mainly to discuss just for sheer interest in the topic, and secondly to keep things on topic.

Sounds like you have an apathetic point of view towards whether or not god exists. This looks to be derived from your preference that there not be an afterlife at all, as you even stated this. I'm assuming you'd rather not have a god exist just because you don't like the idea of there being a god. Then you go on to try to support your chosen beliefs by saying "I have no intention whatsoever of having Jesus be the scapegoat for my sins, I'd rather go to hell and get my deserved punishment, rather then go to Heaven and enjoy paradise as a forgiven sinner".

So I have a couple of things I want you to think about. The first is that you do care either way, otherwise you wouldn't have stated your opinion here asking for viewpoints towards it. Apathy results in an inherent loss of the argument unless you care enough to win the argument, by which the point of you contradict your own claims.

Secondly, in order to not mind whether or not god exists, and by extension whether or not you will go to hell, you would have to know what hell is like, heaven is like, and nothing is like in order to make that preference call. I assume you have been to none of those three places, and as such don't know which you would prefer. You are basing your entire world view upon whatever you defined heaven, hell, and nothingness to be. I don't think you know if heaven isn't good enough to make you prefer to accept Jesus's salvation or not, and as such I don't think you can honestly make a judgement call like that.

I believe that you choose to be agnostic because you find it easier than taking the burden of a different belief, and you even border on claiming apathy. Don't base your world view off of purely what you think heaven or hell would be like. Base your world view off of what you believe to be most likely to be true, rather than appending the agnostic clause, simply because it's easier to defend your arguments as one.

But of course, this is only my opinion of your world view, so I'm not even sure if what I just responded to is really what you believe or not; I had to base my responses off of my interpretation of your small post.

Again, you probably haven't been to heaven and in the full presence of god, so I don't think you know that you wouldn't find it appealing.

This is certainly an interesting sentiment. I'd like to point out that many things are easier said than done. Sure, to say that you prefer the high moral ground of accepting responsibility and going to hell rather than goin to heaven is a noble thing, but to accept that responsibility and actually go to hell is a whole different matter. If a God and heaven and hell really do exist, then there are powers in this world we know not, and its very possible that hell would be nothing less than eternity in absolute pain. It may not even be possible to imagine it in this topic, but there are plenty of things we can imagine that would be intolerable. Say, every three seconds you are impaled by twelve wooden stakes which splinter as they enter you, while simultaneously you are lathered in oil and set afire, except you don't die afterwards. You are healed, and five minutes later, the process begins anew. I don't think any person, even an insane person, would choose to accept that fate for eternity. It's the whole "actions speak louder than words" adage. If you were to stand before God and say "I'll take hell" I would believe you, but not until then.

Cecil also has a good point about making decisions based off of things we don't even know. Sure, we do the best we can with what we think we know, but we'd better be very careful when deciding things that we don't know much about.

If hell is anything like you just described, then that just means this God isn't worthy of worship in my opinion. It certainly is a contrast to the all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God that the Christians keep preaching about. If God was truly all powerful and all loving, I believe we would live in a world where love can exist without evil, and pleasure can exist without pain. It's just that within our own reality (which would be as breakable as the Law of Conservation of Energy) we cannot have a positive without a negative. Why not do away with this crippling law and have all souls exist within a different reality in which suffering is not needed and everybody can go to Heaven yet everybody still has Free Will? It just seems like Yahweh is bound to our current reality, and must obey its rules as much as we do.

grAffe, don't take a supposition to a truth to a conclusion. What Vrael described Hell is a mere imagination of what might be, not what it is. The truth is that we don't know what it is, and we don't know what God may be, and we definately don't know what Heaven is either.
And Yahweh does not equal to 'God'. They are completely irrelevent.

I didn't. My statement was conditional, since I started out with "If hell is anything like you just described..." And if we have no remote idea of what heaven or hell is like, then why even assert that it exists in the first place? Unless we have some sort of idea what this "God" is like, there is no good reason to believe it exists in the first place. It's basically saying "I think X exists, but I have no idea what X is." It's much simpler to scrap this all together and simply say "if there is no concrete evidence for it, then it most likely isn't true," and put it right beside fiction and imagination.

I can agree they aren't necessarily synonymous, but it's quite a bold statement to say they're irrelevant. Yahweh refers to the God of the Abrahamic religion, which an overwhelming majority of the people in this planet think of when you say "God." Plus, people who believe in God usually aren't deists, but are theists, and since we're talking about a monotheistic God, it's probably Yahweh anyways.

Graffe, you said 'all-loving God'. The God of the Bible isn't all loving, so He won't necessarily make the world a perfect place to live. But one can also argue that God DID make the world perfect, but also allowed Adam and Eve to have free will. Then He set the conditions for the keeping of that perfect world: if they sinned, they would lose perfection. If they didn't, the world would continue normally.

(note: I agree that the God of the Bible is all-good, but not all-LOVING. It's clear from the Bible that God hates things, all of which are related to sin. For example,'Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.'

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 10 2010, 8:06 pm by zany_001.

I thought the omnipotent God loved ALL his children.

A truly omniscient God would realize that that there is no TRUE "evil" and that all "good" and "evil" is relative. "Evil" people are usually just misunderstood. They use use the doctrine "the ends justify the means" and that unfortunately often goes against the morals of some other group.

You thought wrong, then. Admittedly 'hate' is a broad term to use.

As to evil, God has defined what is evil and what isn't. For example, anything going against the Ten Commandments is evil.

Ah yes, some old guy found a stone tablet on top of a mountain! That SURELY means it's God's will! [/sarcasm]

I'm not trying to offend anyone, but one can still consider that the word of God is always passed through a few individuals to the general masses. These individuals were mostly human, and therefore prone to error. For example, both the Christian Bible and the Qur'an were compiled centuries after Jesus' and Mohammed's deaths, respectively.

The COMPLETE Bible was finished ~70 years after Jesus' death, if I recall correctly. Some scholars say Acts was in the second century. But many of the books were regarded as scripture for far longer. The first five books, for example, were regarded by the Jews and Christians as the Bible for centuries.

As to the authors of the Bible being human and prone to error, the actual writers were human, but divinely inspired. So they weren't prone to error when it came to the actual Bible and what they wrote.

Anything going against these Ten Commandments is not evil, the Ten Commandments aren't even rules, they are responsibilities. The freed Israelites never had any freedom, but now they did, they had freedom without responsibility, which is license. The Commandments were given to the Israelite's not to define good and evil but to show them how to live life. Anyways, most of the Commandments are minor, the two major lessons being taught in them are to Love God and Love Neighbor. Looking at this from a macroscopic point of view, one could say that many religions have their own 'Commandments', for example The Five Precepts of Buddhism, the Five Great Vows of Jainism. It's pretty obvious that all religions answer fundamental questions about our essential nature, are we good by nature, or evil, or inbetween, or good but now flawed. Maybe God is all things, maybe he is Queztacoatl, or perhaps Olorun.

They are very clearly rules. Note the name: The 10 COMMANDMENTS. 'You shall not steal.' Not 'It'd be a bad idea to steal and it's your responsibility not to steal.'

And they are a moral code, which is essentially a definition of good and evil, with ten commands telling you to be good.

What does age of religious text have to do with anything? Wouldn't a true religion logically be the first religion? (why does god(s) lack the power to predate other religions?) (many religions predate Christianity)
They are still prone to error since the bible was written in Hebrew and Greek. So the bible that most Americans read could potentially have translation errors. Many of the translations may have incorrect statements due to changing language.
(if you know two languages you know what I am talking about because words in one language may not have an equivalent in another)

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 14 2010, 9:21 am by MasterJohnny.

Age of the Bible was @ the comment about both the bible and quran being completed centuries after Jesus' and Mohammed's deaths.

No religion predates Christianity, if you acknowledge people such as Adam, Noah, Abraham etc. to be Christians. If you define Christianity as only New Testament and on, then it could be said, but those people worshipped the same God.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 14 2010, 3:33 pm by CecilSunkure. Reason: Unsupported and vastly naive claim.

Not all religions even pertain to the Bible or the Qur'an. Arguing about the validity of either is essentially worthless, because we don't know if either need to be validated in order to know whether or not deity exists. Sure, these books can make claims to the existence of god, but unless you believe in what the book says, then that doesn't mean anything for you. If the bible were false, then only the Christian-like view of deity would be false, and similar goes for the Qur'an. It is entirely possible for some form of god to exist independently of the either of these texts. If you wish to discuss the validity of certain religious texts, that can be taken to a separate topic, as posting regarding the subject of either of these two books is becoming increasingly low in quality.