• Bizarroland@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    And now that family will still get to hear the screams of that man burning in the everlasting fires of hell after a hundred trillion quintillion years.

    That honestly does not sound like heaven to me.

    I could understand a thousand years of punishment. That would still be excessive but if after a thousand years of that man who killed my wife and child being tortured in horribly inhumane unimaginable fiery screaming terror, if you came to me and said do we still need to punish this guy I would say a thousand years of suffering was more than enough.

    I don’t know why Christianity thinks that that is somehow okay. Don’t get me wrong, I am a Christian, but I am afraid that there has got to be some sort of misunderstanding.

    I mean, eye for an eye right? Tooth for a tooth, right?

    And we are all ignorant of the consequences of our actions. We at best have a weak estimation system for what will happen because we choose to do or to not do a thing, and yet there’s a boogie man in the room that’s never going to ever stop torturing us ever because we were born unless we are perfect and unfortunately it’s too late to be perfect because you’ve been born.

    I hope I’m not wrong, but I just I can’t see, I can’t envision any concept of God that uses eternal punishment as the sole consequence for temporary things.

    I mean, according to Christianity, stealing 25 cent pack of bubble gum is equally as punishable as murder, rape, and genocide.

    Telling a white lie to your wife that her ass doesn’t look bad in a dress gets you the exact same punishment and chains you to the exact same chains as Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.

    Something just doesn’t quite add up here.

    I could accept it if the options were to hit a brick wall when you die and never come back, but the exceptional and saintly would come back into a paradise, sure. That would make sense.

    I could accept it if for every sin you commit you receive three times what you did to others back to you, and after convalescing you may possibly be allowed to enter paradise.

    I feel like that would be painful but merciful.

    I’m no great theologian. Don’t take my words for anything other than me saying what’s on my mind, but if you believe that God is real, and you believe that God loves you, and you believe that he knows every thought that has ever crossed your mind everything you ever said, everything you’ve ever done, he’s been with you your entire life from before you were born all the way to the end of time, then you’ve got to believe that there is a point where the wrath of God will end and a point where the loving kindness and mercy of God will begin again no matter how far you’ve gone into the red.

    And that God would have to love you whether you believe in him or not, whether you have been fortunate enough to find the real religion or whatever is close enough to it to count or not, that God would have to love you the way a parent loves their children.

    A parent may ground you, they may spank you, they may blow their top and scream at you and take away all the things that you love as a punishment for your misdeeds, they may ask the state to step in and take over because they’re not up to the task of raising you, but no parent could imprison their own child and torture them at the maximum amount of torture a creature can exist in for all of eternity.

    There are cruel people out there who could do something like that for 20 years maybe. Maybe 40 years. But at some point they would get so tired of it and so bored of your torture that they would just give up and put you out of your misery rather than to continue to torture you.

    I can’t help but hope that God would at least be as good as the most horrible human being on the planet when it comes to punishing their own children for their minor misdeeds.

    • De_Narm@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m not christian, so I may have some wrong assumptions, but the same problem happens with heaven. Do you truly deserve eternal bliss for behaving 80 or so years? If you only get judged once, what’s stopping you from sinning in heaven as much as you want? Presumably, you keep your free will, meaning there is a chance for you to sin and any chance becomes 100% if stretched to eternity. I’ve read multiple times from Christians that morality for them is only derived from the fear of eternal punishment, going as far as arguing atheists cannot have morality. So either you keep that fear, meaning it’s not true bliss in heaven, or you’re even more likely to sin than you were on earth.

      In short, there are three options for heaven I could imagine and none of them seem like ‘heaven’ to me:

      1. Heaven is full of sin.
      2. We all go to hell eventually, because we all sin eventually.
      3. We lose our free will and become sinless puppets of ourselves.
      • ChexMax@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It doesn’t take 80 years of good behavior to get into heaven, it just takes repentance on your deathbed. The shooter in the comic can " find Jesus" in the next panel and then he’ll be a part of that group hug in heaven

      • Euphorazine@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think you maintain free will in heaven. You just worship God all day for eternity. It’s like the hive mind trope in sci Fi. When people get infected by the hive mind they seem happy and convince you to give in. You won’t find grandma in heaven, y’all are both too busy worshipping all day.

        Either way, Christianity doesn’t seem love based, it’s fear based. You don’t do good things because you love God, you do them because you fear he will banish you to damnation.

      • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        And as far as I’m aware it doesn’t actually exist in Judaism which is the wellspring of Christianity and predates the Grecian mythologies.

        As far as I’m aware, the Jewish tradition believes in Gehennim, which is a spinning cleansing fire that only Burns you until you don’t need to be cleaned anymore.

        To me that is a much more fitting and loving punishment.

        It’s like, you did a lot of bad stuff, but there is still good in you, the good in you would suffer throughout eternity if the bad stuff you did was there along with it so let’s just scrape all the gunk off, wash you clean, and then you can come and enjoy Paradise.

        I believe at this point there’s not much I could do to avoid going through that but at least that is something to look forward to even for a piece of crap like myself.

        • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Aside from that though, read my posts, lol.

          I know I could work on concision but it’s hard to get a good thought out sometimes.

        • Thranduil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Still not very loving when he could just snap his fingers and the gunk is gone. Its not like god isnt guilty of commiting crimes since he goes out of his way to commit mass murder for fun