If you were an all knowing all powerful god who supposedly loves everyone unconditionally, would you create a fiery pit and send people there for all eternity?
God never loved anyone unconditionally. My favorite Bible quote:
Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me. ...whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.
— Matthew 25:41–43 (NIV)
He very explicitly hates selfish people. VERY specifically these people, spoken by Jesus, this group of people are damned to hell. Gays, never spoken of by Jesus, btw.
Any entity who tortures their creations for eternity based solely on their performance over a ~80 year time span is not an entity worthy of worship.
Any entity that either permits or doesn't have the power to prevent suffering on earth isn't worthy of worship either.
If there is a supreme being, they've either failed or they're malevolent.
Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Dey's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried.
The fiery pit/dante's hell version doesn't actually exist in the bible. The main thing about hell is you don't experience god's love/presence, which is weird but a lot better than an eternity of torture.
At what point does it stop being a punishment and just all you've ever experienced?
Like how would they make it so you don't get use to it? Erase your memory every 10 minutes? Sounds like the end of those 10 minutes is relief. So all you've ever experienced is 10 minutes of pain than relief. Doesn't sound so bad. Even if all you ever remembered was the memories of your past life and then 10 mins of pain at least you would have those good memories to reflect on before you would have relief again.
You're trying to corporealize a concept that is fundamentally non-corporeal. An omnipotent being could make eternal suffering mean suffering eternally simply by virtue of being all-powerful. The means by which this is done is (would be) completely beyond our understanding or even able to be conceived by our current understanding of the world.
Assuming there's enough supernatural power to sustain a torture pit of fire for all eternity, It's probably trivial to just have you suffer non-stop regardless of any hypothetical limits.
However, even in real life pain receptors are distinct receptors in your body that don't dull themselves after a while, the way our smell and sight receptors do
I mean your senses would adapt to it which means you would die.
As you cannot die as you are invincible, your nerves cannot take damage. But that would mean your brain would overstimulate and that also cannot take damage.
So either you stay in constant pain, which has to get lower and lower as you cant handle constant pain (legalize Cannabis for those people for fucks sake).
So I guess yes, to stay invincible you have to get used to it.
Or you have pain and damage, but that state resets like all the time. So you would stay in a state of immediate pain, without remembering the past, as it has to be removed entirely, as that pain will harm your brain.
So you would stay in immediate pain without a sense of time, which is probably way way less extreme than you imagine it but still horrible.
So people, just dont believe that crap. When you die its over, and that may be an even harder truth to accept.
I always found it funny that they've confused the idea of eternal life and death. If you're burning forever you're still alive, in some way. So the idea that it's "death" doesn't make sense. It would only be death if you were destroyed completely (which is what Jesus says he will do at least once in the gospels) so idk where they get the idea that being tortured forever isn't eternal life.
You are absolutely correct. The original Hebrew word in the Bible for hell is Sheol, which means grave, or place of resting. He even says "this is the second death". You don't get eternal life, except through accepting him, according to the scripture.
Well it's not their word for hell, that's the point. It means death or grave, the idea of hell wasn't even considered until the Greek started being converted in the first and second century and folded their ideas about the afterlife (including their underworld 'hel') into the mix of Jewish belief about death being non-existence and resurrection being the return from non-existence.
That's how we get the two testaments treating death differently, and the conflation of the word "sheol" to mean hell, when it really just meant being dead.
So if im already in hell and while I'm being tortured for eternity I can be like "I'm sorry for detonating Canada in 2052 jesus" and he be like "lmao no prob fam up you go"
I still don't understand how eternal life would be a good thing. Seems to me all things would fall away and as the patterns that make up make up consciousness become less and less important you would slip away from your identity.
Now I know you could consider the reseting of your memory or something like that but the moment you start talking that way you've introduced some level of reincarnation which is not apart of the Christian belief.
It wouldn't be, in fact most Christians will self acknowledge that it's not a good thing with their explanations for the following series of questions.
Lucifer had free will, and existed in heaven alongside God in the same way that we will supposedly exist alongside God in heaven. It was entirely possible for him to defy/rebel/choose to not be in union with that God and be cast out of heaven. Do we have free will in heaven?
1a. If yes, then do we have the ability to also reject and sin once we are in heaven according to the salvation of Jesus?
1b. If we can't, then do we have free will?
If God is altering our state of being in order to make us "ok" with living/worshipping forever, are we still the same individual? Or are we being made into a new being based on a change in our values and desires?
2a. If we are being changed in some way to accept eternity as good/enjoy it, then how do you reconcile that with the idea that God wants communion with beings of free will? If he's just going to change us to fit the needs of eternity anyways, how is that different than programming sapient robots to worship him? Why go through all of the trouble with having us choose him via free will if he's going to alter/overwrite our consciousness to make us able to deal with immortality? He might as well just start with that if it's the endgame.
The only way out of the situation is to claim that we do still have free will in heaven and can choose to rebel at any time, or else you're dealing with the philosophy and ethics of how changing a sapient being to want things they didn't before can't possibly coincide with free will.
But how? Like I'm not saying you won't feel pain or won't suffer but if we're talking all of time that is just your state of being having known nothing else.
Does the concept of eternity have any meaning at all? It's a very philosophically nebulous thing when taken beyond a superficial level. We can't fathom existing for a huge number of years anymore than we can conceive being the size of the universe. Spiritually being eternally cast into fire could mean to be removed from the being that is everything which is to be nothing forevermore. Or eternity can just mean until the end of time, which could very well be finite.
Depends on a whole lot of factors, most of which we don’t even know we don’t know. Presumably, they believe that an all powerful being would find it easy to make sure to maximize the suffering.
Through Christ all things are possible, even not getting used to being on fire. I make this sacrifice for Jesus. Who, coincidentally, already suffered for my sins. So...
Atheists: 0
Christians: 1