Summer means no religion or politics?

[Vince Twelve]

Quick thoughts-

1) Do you think that a boy, born on an island who lives a good kind life, loves his parents, is nice to animals, etc, but who will never hear about Jesus or God or the Bible because he's cut off from the world will go to hell because he hasn't accepted Jesus?  Or can he go to heaven?

If "Hell," then I'd argue that your god is a jerk.  But ignoring that, if he can go to heaven:

2) Do the majority of people who hear about Jesus and the teachings of the Bible wind up converting, and thus go on to being welcomed into heaven? Or do most of them reject the teachings for whatever beliefs they were brought up with and wind up in hell?

If you think the majority accept the bible once they learn about it convert, then I would ask you why only 33% of the world is Christian.  Have most of them just not heard of it?  (They have.)  Or, do you think that even a slim majority of the people evangelized to will reject the teachings of the bible?  If so:

3) By teaching people about the bible, you're giving them the option of going to heaven by converting, or go to hell by not converting, and most of them will wind up going to hell(2), whereas if you had left them alone they would have gone to heaven due to the "ignorance clause(1)," is it still personally ethical to evangelize?

[Akatosh]

In my version..... UR MOM!

:o

* is slain *

Seriously, though, great argument there.

[MrColossal]

Hah Vince, that's like a story I'm semi-writing in my head about how the devil is trying to convince the world that god doesn't exist not to be evil but because he wants to give people that Get Into Heaven Free card for the rest of eternity

What a nice guy!

[Vince Twelve]

Sounds like a unique story!  That Satan fellow -- he's not so bad.  He's just misunderstood.

[miguel]

I lied, I can't just not participate

Vince:

1) God displays its presence in other ways other than the Catholic Church teaches, that boy would surely die as a man content with his life and in peace with the world. God appeared to us to reveal himself and what way we should conduct our lives. If someone, somewhere doesn't know that there's a God he will not be to blame or punished if you're going to ask that.
Also, Heaven isn't a beautiful garden and Hell isn't a place taken from the Lord of The Rings although happiness and suffering are indeed what differentiates our last moments in life.

2)Well I kind of answered your question about Heaven and Hell above.
I quite don't understand your question, starting with the notion that this days in our modern societies parents aren't responsible for their children as long as they were. Meaning I started to work when I was 17 and there was nothing my father could do about it without me revolting against him, something that wasn't possible some generations ago (before the Rolling Stones if may joke about it) before the kids in the 50's that started to foolishly emancipate and created a word and notion called teenager. We now accept it and we just consider normal that boys and girls will at some point start to dress funny and listen to MTV, we only hope they wont do something foolish (drugs mainly) and that they can live through it and start adult life.
What I am saying is, try to give a religious book like the Bible to a teenager and he will not accept things that are so clearly out of contest with is normal life.
Later on, the adult man or woman will have the freedom to choose whatever paths he wants to take with his life.
Then, if someone finds Christianity the right way it's only natural that we'll decide to reveal his ideas to others. I don't see anything bad with it.
And to me, it is more logic that someone reveals what he found than someone that refuses what he doesn't know.

3)This is a very good point you have here although I somehow answered it before.
You're "reading" the Bible with a very linear attitude and it's the worst way to address it. It's even dangerous to do so.
All Christians are not forced to act or live according to every single word written on the Bible. We have all accepted that it's not to be taken literally but to interpret it sensible, and focusing on the life of Jesus Christ there are hundreds of pure and rewarding events one can decide to lead his life.
Converting some lost tribe in 1500 is one thing and the world has clearly changed since that era.
I see God, Jesus and Christianity on a different way and will surely not brag about me going to Heaven or telling somebody he's going to Hell as I believe in the virtues of the Human race.

PS: to Khris and Akatosh I do apologize for being so intolerant and blunt about their posts.

[Vince Twelve]

Hey miguel,

I think you didn't quite understand part 2, or by extension part 3.

I'm not asking about kids or raising them or whatever.  I'm not making any suppositions on the nature of heaven or hell or any judgments about whether or not kids more often than not follow in their parents' religious footsteps.  Nor am I taking into account the benefits Christianity could have in someone's life (helping them learn morals, be more fulfilled, have a same-minded community, be less worried about death, etc.).

Not even asking a moral question, just a mathematical one.  Just asking for a guesstimate.

I'm just asking what percentage of people who are told about Christianity and its rules or benefits or whatever will eventually convert to Christianity?  Do you think that 15% of people who have a jehova's witness knock on their door will convert?  Do you think that 75% of the people who are approached by foreign missionaries will adopt the bible? What's the percentage overall?  Just looking for you to make a rough estimate in your head.

In other words, if you walk up to a random non-Christian on the street and he allows you to sit down with him and tell him all about Christianity, what are the odds that that person would wind up converting to Christianity and accepting Jesus as their savior?

As far as heaven/hell in part 3, if someone hears about Jesus and the bible and is told about everything by their friend, but decides to continue following their own religion, say, Hindu, where they worship other gods, would they still get to go to Heaven?

I'm just making the argument that if someone has never heard of Jesus, but lives a good life, that person will not go to Hell.  But if they are told about Jesus and reject him, and this person goes to hell, then wouldn't it have been better to not have told that person at all?  Just a hypothetical.

[Akatosh]

No, because then you're going to hell for not spreading the gospel. Note that this does not count as a selfless act and is not torture-deductible.

Feel the love.

[miguel]

I did understand, but again, your notion of Heaven and the one I would address somebody on the street is different.
Let's go slowly here as mixing maths and religion can give odd numbers (666). See, Christians can tell bad jokes as well...

An old woman living on her pension has somebody knocking at her door saying she/he is a Jehovah witness. Unaware of the danger she opens the door to this stranger but everything turns out aright because it was not a thief.
Due to solitude and lack of somebody listening to her she hears the witness and accepts some literature. She agrees to meat the stranger again. A month later she finds that the witness message was suitable for her. Or not.
A younger person, in my belief, would politely say he was not interested after the first 10 minutes or not even bother to answer the door.
There you go. These are my statistics.
As for foreign missionaries, I have problems relating to a part of history that is no longer mine. Seams like you are reporting to something that happened a long time ago. As I said, the current modern world doesn't work like that and how many times in your life were you approached by missionaries?
If I was a non believer I would probably tell the persons to leave me alone. But then again, I had time and the will to read and educate myself through my life and made a rational choice about my beliefs.
Although I never found Catholic priests to be not polite to me or pushy as some of you mentioned before I didn't have the same experience with other religions as they sometimes don't respect people intelligence by addressing them on a old-fashioned and paternal way that clearly made me avoid them.

Part 3. Vince, I can't be any more honest to you than to tell you that I believe that there is one God that created our world and people might be calling him different names. And for what I studied, the god we are discussing here might not be the true God. It's a long story but if you're interested check Saklas or the Demiurg or Ishmael and maybe you'll find some cool stuff about this subjects.

Heaven and Hell is just the sum of our presence in our world. There will be a time where every single one of us will ask for forgiveness to God as we see our life slipping away. You'll do that to your loved ones if you (I hope it never happens) see them die as well. All sane men don't reject God when their time is finished. Even if it's a infinite figment of your brain, it will rise and cling to God as a final truce with him. Every one of us.

It's never bad to hear who was Jesus, if done responsibly.

Akatosh, nobody goes to hell for not spreading the gospel.
       

[Akatosh]

It's certainly a sin, as the Bible commands you to spread the religion.

[miguel]

C'mon Akatosh, after pages and pages of this topic you still only read what you want!
The Bible was written (specially the old testament) within a world that was politically very different from today.
Relax, nobody will ask you to go and fight the crusades.
You are free to let people be.
   

[Khris]

You said your personal beliefs are doubtful about it, i.e. more like 5-95 or similar. I assume it's the same regarding goblins, invisible unicorns and Santa Claus. Atheists just take one step further and extend that doubtfulness to the god hypothesis.

But I accept the doubtfulness as my personal belief (or interpretation) and not a fact. Atheists* consider the non-existence of god as a fact rather than the personal belief that it is.

That's because to atheists, the probability of god's existence is as low as e.g. the probability of evolution not having happened or the earth being flat. They take into account all the superstitions of the past we successfully grew out of (at least in the western world) and extrapolate that into the future. That's why atheists usually "fight" on many fronts, whether it's against astrology, homeopathy, creationism or parents who want their kids to contract measles because they think that vaccines cause autism.
No matter if some stupid claim is several thousand years old or just a few, atheists rely on evidence, the only meaningful thing there's is when it comes to decide whether something is regarded as fact.

I get why you label it a belief, but see it this way: regarding something as fact at least still includes the -however small it may be- possibility that it is false.
Really devout people on the other hand don't accept that there's even a tiny chance that they might be wrong.
And this is what truly separates die-hard (religious) believers and die-hard atheists. The former are convinced of something that cannot be proved nor disproved. The latter are convinced of something that can be disproved.
And precisely because of that, I regard an atheistic world-view as superior.

[Akatosh]

C'mon Akatosh, after pages and pages of this topic you still only read what you want!
The Bible was written (specially the old testament) within a world that was politically very different from today.
Relax, nobody will ask you to go and fight the crusades.
You are free to let people be.

That it was, and luckily, nobody does. (For everybody involved, I'd be a terrible soldier  ). I'm just saying that we need to be careful; the texts are still there, even if you'd like to ignore them, and as discussed earlier, it's not like they couldn't be constructed to command intolerance anymore. Fundamentalism in the Catholic Church is all but dead. Look at the Pius Brotherhood, for example. Freaky.

[miguel]

Unfortunately Akatosh, you are right about the irresponsibility of some segments of the Catholic Church. But Fundamentalist movements are wrong to me either being religious or political with the same degree.
I make sure never to conduct myself in such way when relating to others.
The Church is a big organization and I rather focus on the good they provide to people even knowing they aren't perfect.
But I'm not a member of the Church, just a Christian and believe me when I say that I don't ignore the texts from the Bible, I studied the Bible on a personal level and several other gospels and related books. From it I found that the way the classical Church represented those texts was purely political. Christian thinkers were often banned and outcast from the higher levels of the clerical power. They too suffer from the ignorance of men.
I just want you to know that to be a Christian was and still his as hard as being anything else. Instead, it seams that modern society creates soulless humans that live happily not wondering if there is more to it.
 

[Vince Twelve]

As for foreign missionaries, I have problems relating to a part of history that is no longer mine. Seams like you are reporting to something that happened a long time ago. As I said, the current modern world doesn't work like that and how many times in your life were you approached by missionaries?

Maybe it's a language issue.  Lots of churches and religious institutions mount missionary expeditions to Africa or South America or somewhere.  These missions often do great things like build hospitals or schools and also do a lot of evangelizing and preaching while they're there.  I'm not saying anything bad about these, as obviously a christian school in a poor town in Africa is better than no school.  So, that's good.  I was just creating a HYPOTHETICAL argument that they might, in fact, be condemning more people to hell than they help reach heaven by trying to indoctrinate the people they help.

Obviously you have a different belief in heaven and hell than a lot of people.  I very much respect your beliefs and think that you have more faith in your god as a kind, loving being, rather than the jealous dick-hole that some religious people make him out to be. 

My 3 part mental exercise really only applies to those who believe in a god who damns people to eternal burning for not accepting him. And, in my experience, there are a lot of those people, and they're often the most vocal and adamant about spreading their beliefs.

[Akatosh]

This intellectual "flatness" is indeed a problem, I agree with you there. It's sad how little people think about this topic, opting to adopt beliefs from their environment instead.

You focus more on the humanitarian aspects, and that's very noble of you. Keep in mind that not everybody may think so. Religion can do good in theory, but unfortunately, it can also be usher in / be used as a justification for a dictatorship.

[Dualnames]

The bloody point, is even if God exists, due to the incompetence of humans to understand something, it has been misinterpreted. You cannot be aware that your knowledge about God is so little, yet you seem to think you have enough to prove he doesn't exist. Or the other way around.

You cannot possibly argue about light speed without ever knowing the subject can you? No, because you would appear to be as a fool. The reason why none of you trying to prove of his inexistence and existence, seem to be a fool, is because all of you seem fools, therefore there's is no difference.

[Nacho]

C'mon Akatosh, after pages and pages of this topic you still only read what you want!
The Bible was written (specially the old testament) within a world that was politically very different from today.
Relax, nobody will ask you to go and fight the crusades.
You are free to let people be.
   

So, the moral in Bible can change??? How can you know that the one you follow today won't be considered as "bad" in 400 years?

[Dualnames]

The bloody point, is even if God exists, due to the incompetence of humans to understand something, it has been misinterpreted. You cannot be aware that your knowledge about God is so little, yet you seem to think you have enough to prove he doesn't exist. Or the other way around.

You cannot possibly argue about light speed without ever knowing the subject can you? No, because you would appear to be as a fool. The reason why none of you trying to prove of his inexistence and existence, seem to be a fool, is because all of you seem fools, therefore there's is no difference.

That's the reason why it will and that's the reason why it was.

[Andail]

Ok, moving this to popular.

It seems to be basically the same 3-4 people producing enormous amounts of text saying basically the same things without moving an inch in any direction, so it doesn't feel very "general" anymore...

[Dualnames]

Well, I'm trying my best here, but somebody told them that you shouldn't change your opinion even if someone hand a knife in your neck. Ah, well, no point there anyway.