Afterlife

Oh Hell No

/ Leedurlach / Leave a comment

Hell

Do you agree with the following Biblical thoughts?

> God is good. There is no greater good than God.

> God loves us and wants only the best for us.

> God is omniscient. He knows everything and always has.

> God created every human being complete with an eternal soul.

> Our short time on Earth is nothing compared to where we will spend eternity.

> Hell is an eternal place of great torment, suffering, separation and agonizing pain.

> The road to Heaven is narrow and few will find it.

Finally, consider that throughout history, approximately 101 billion people have been born and have since died, leaving approximately 7 billion people alive today. The Bible teaches that at the very second each of those 101 billion people died, the destination of their souls was locked in for all eternity.

NOW…

If I accept each of the above assumptions, there is only one conclusion I can draw, and it’s not a good one:

God has knowingly created billions upon billions of souls that he knew in advance (omniscience) would spend eternity suffering in Hell. Yes, each of these people had choices to make, but nevertheless, God knew before even creating them that they would each end up in eternal torture. Thousands of trillions of years from now, they’ll still be suffering in Hell due to what they did or didn’t do during their brief few years on Earth, and their intense punishment and suffering will never end. And, Hell is so horrible that if given a choice, each one of these rational people would choose to have never been born at all rather than to suffer for all eternity in Hell.

SO… this doesn’t make any sense to me (a huge understatement). How could God be good in the above scenario? It would be an evil thing to knowingly do to even one person, let alone doing it to over a hundred billion people… and counting.

In order for this to make logical sense to me, at least one of the above assumptions must be incorrect. Consider:

If God was evil, this would make sense.

Or,

If God wasn’t omniscient, this would make sense.

Or,

If God didn’t have our best interests at heart, this would make sense.

Or,

If God did not create humans complete with eternal souls, this would make sense.

Or,

If God gives us at least one more chance to change our ways after death, this would make sense (but the Bible is clear – there will be no second chances).

Or,

Hell is not an eternal place of great suffering.

Or,

Nobody will go to Hell.

When someone dies, what do you think happens to them?

The Terrible Reasons I First Believed

/ Leedurlach / Leave a comment

Broken-Chair

I spent over three decades of my life as a devout Christian.

I am no longer a Christian. Not even close.

When I ponder the reasons why I first became a Christian back in High School, I come up with three:

1. I really, really wanted to please people (a terrible reason),

2. Both of the major religious groups in my High School (the Christians and the Mormons) were full of really great people who seemed to be part of big, loving, religious groups – like big families – and I wanted that for myself (another terrible reason), and

3. Someone made an argument that I bought, hook, line and sinker.

Here was that argument:

“See that chair you are sitting in right now? I noticed that you sat down in that chair without even thinking. How did you know that chair wasn’t going to collapse under your weight? When you sat down in that chair, it took faith that the chair would hold you up. That’s all I’m asking you to do with God. Just have faith he’s there.”

And with that, I prayed and “accepted Jesus.”

Now, I realize how ridiculous the chair argument was.

It didn’t take any faith whatsoever to sit in that chair. No, it took years of observable, hard evidence that created in me a reasonable expectation that the chair would hold me up.

With god, there is zero hard evidence – none. If he’s there, he’s completely silent, 100% invisible, and he never actually does anything. There is no difference between a universe with a silent, invisible, do-nothing god, and a universe that has no god at all. Believing in a god or gods takes faith – specifically because there is no good evidence. Sitting in a chair does not take any faith at all.

Not to mention that even if that chair had collapsed, so what? I would fall on my ass and my friends would laugh at me. That’s the worst that would happen.

However, if you spend decades wrapping your life around a fable, and basing your life on that fable, choosing your mate and your friends and your job and your possessions and where you live and where you go to church and who you socialize with and who you do business with and what you do with your time and your money and what you tell your children, all based on that fable… well, the fallout from that is way worse than sitting in a collapsing chair.

I can tell you from experience, that when you finally realize the weak reasons why you initially believed, and when you finally wake up to realize you were completely duped, that experience is heart-wrenching.

Which would you choose? A collapsing chair, or wasting what precious time you have left in this amazing, only life you might ever have?

Give me a collapsing chair any day.

I’m curious… why did you first believe?