Do you believe in hell?

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there's lots of "fun" sex that goes on in committed relationships

My mistake -- I assumed you had conflated fun with committment-free. The one is very different from the other, and I agree with this point.

The rest of your post, and a response, is probably best addressed in another forum...
 
It's interesting that when you talk about hell, most people believe they are not going there. They are so sure that they have the answer. I don't know...but I believe that God has a sense of humor. From the lowliest places...his people seem to come forth and lead. It never seems to me that the people who are in the know, or think they are in the know, God always throws a curveball.

Maybe we create our own hell. We are judged by the standards that we clung to in our lives.

My bet, is we reach the pearly gates, get a taste of what it is actually like to be in God's presence, and then we realize what it was like to feel that presence, we are judged...and then get a taste of what hell really is...separation from that presence.

I have another little theory...there are moments in our lives that we feel that presence...knowing what true love is...the birth of a child....puppy kisses...seeing the sunrise and knowing that this day will be better than any other...

We are not separated here on Earth...but I am not sure we are always aware of the presence.
 

I have ordered that book off Amazon and am looking forward to reading it. Just a problem I have with a part of the synopsis so far...

conversely, the evil of hell works so that if a soul remains in, or returns to, the grey town, even its happiness on earth will lose its meaning, and its experience on earth would have been hell. None of the ghosts realize that the grey town is, in fact, hell. Indeed it is not that much different from the life they led on earth: joyless, friendless, and uncomfortable.

To say that non Christian's lives are 'joyless, friendless and uncomfortable' on earth is not true. 'Blessings not just for the ones who kneel.' Hell is then where God takes all these blessings away and we're left living in our own sinful misery and who would really choose that for eternity?
 
It's also worth noting that the type of free will that posters in this thread seem to assume we possess has a few problems. The notion of cause and effect in our world tilts me towards determinism and even introducing some truly random non-deterministic event that alters my actions still leaves my thought processes beyond my control. My feeling is that we all have an illusion of choice and are psychologically primed with concepts about moral responsibility that don't easily reconcile with determinism.


NY Times

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March 21, 2011
Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It’s the Only Choice
By JOHN TIERNEY
Suppose that Mark and Bill live in a deterministic universe. Everything that happens this morning — like Mark’s decision to wear a blue shirt, or Bill’s latest attempt to comb over his bald spot — is completely caused by whatever happened before it.

If you recreated this universe starting with the Big Bang and let all events proceed exactly the same way until this same morning, then the blue shirt is as inevitable as the comb-over.

Now for questions from experimental philosophers:

1) In this deterministic universe, is it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for his actions?

2) This year, as he has often done in the past, Mark arranges to cheat on his taxes. Is he is fully morally responsible for his actions?

3) Bill falls in love with his secretary, and he decides that the only way to be with her is to murder his wife and three children. Before leaving on a trip, he arranges for them to be killed while he is away. Is Bill fully morally responsible for his actions?

To a classic philosopher, these are just three versions of the same question about free will. But to the new breed of philosophers who test people’s responses to concepts like determinism, there are crucial differences, as Shaun Nichols explains in the current issue of Science.

Most respondents will absolve the unspecified person in Question 1 from full responsibility for his actions, and a majority will also give Mark a break for his tax chiseling. But not Bill. He’s fully to blame for his heinous crime, according to more than 70 percent of the people queried by Dr. Nichols, an experimental philosopher at the University of Arizona, and his Yale colleague Joshua Knobe.

Is Bill being judged illogically? In one way, yes. The chain of reasoning may seem flawed to some philosophers, and the belief in free will may seem naïve to the psychologists and neuroscientists who argue that we’re driven by forces beyond our conscious control — an argument that Bill’s lawyer might end up borrowing in court.

But in another way it makes perfect sense to hold Bill fully accountable for murder. His judges pragmatically intuit that regardless of whether free will exists, our society depends on everyone’s believing it does. The benefits of this belief have been demonstrated in other research showing that when people doubt free will, they do worse at their jobs and are less honest.

In one experiment, some people read a passage from Francis Crick, the molecular biologist, asserting that free will is a quaint old notion no longer taken seriously by intellectuals, especially not psychologists and neuroscientists. Afterward, when compared with a control group that read a different passage from Crick (who died in 2004) these people expressed more skepticism about free will — and promptly cut themselves some moral slack while taking a math test.

Asked to solve a series of arithmetic problems in a computerized quiz, they cheated by getting the answers through a glitch in the computer that they’d been asked not to exploit. The supposed glitch, of course, had been put there as a temptation by the researchers, Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In a follow-up experiment, the psychologists gave another test in which people were promised $1 for every correct answer — and got to compile their own scores. Just as Dr. Vohs and Dr. Schooler feared, people were more likely to cheat after being exposed beforehand to arguments against free will. These people went home with more unearned cash than did the other people.

This behavior in the lab, the researchers noted, squares with studies in recent decades showing an increase in the number of college students who admit to cheating. During this same period, other studies have shown a weakening in the popular belief in free will (although it’s still widely held).

“Doubting one’s free will may undermine the sense of self as agent,” Dr. Vohs and Dr. Schooler concluded. “Or, perhaps, denying free will simply provides the ultimate excuse to behave as one likes.”

That could include goofing off on the job, according to another study done by Dr. Vohs along with a team of psychologists led by Tyler F. Stillman of Southern Utah University. They went to a day-labor employment agency armed with questionnaires for a sample of workers to fill out confidentially.

These questionnaires were based on a previously developed research instrument called the Free Will and Determinism Scale. The workers were asked how strongly they agreed with statements like “Strength of mind can always overcome the body’s desires” or “People can overcome any obstacles if they truly want to” or “People do not choose to be in the situations they end up in — it just happens.”

The psychologists also measured other factors, including the workers’ general satisfaction with their lives, how energetic they felt, how strongly they endorsed an ethic of hard work. None of these factors was a reliable predictor of their actual performance on the job, as rated by their supervisors. But the higher the workers scored on the scale of belief in free will, the better their ratings on the job.

“Free will guides people’s choices toward being more moral and better performers,” Dr. Vohs said. “It’s adaptive for societies and individuals to hold a belief in free will, as it helps people adhere to cultural codes of conduct that portend healthy, wealthy and happy life outcomes.”

Intellectual concepts of free will can vary enormously, but there seems to be a fairly universal gut belief in the concept starting at a young age. When children age 3 to 5 see a ball rolling into a box, they say that the ball couldn’t have done anything else. But when they see an experimenter put her hand in the box, they insist that she could have done something else.

That belief seems to persist no matter where people grow up, as experimental philosophers have discovered by querying adults in different cultures, including Hong Kong, India, Colombia and the United States. Whatever their cultural differences, people tend to reject the notion that they live in a deterministic world without free will.

They also tend to agree, across cultures, that a hypothetical person in a hypothetically deterministic world would not be responsible for his sins. This same logic explains why they they’ll excuse Mark’s tax evasion, a crime that doesn’t have an obvious victim. But that logic doesn’t hold when people are confronted with what researchers call a “high-affect” transgression, an emotionally upsetting crime like Bill’s murder of his family.

“It’s two different kinds of mechanisms in the brain,” said Alfred Mele, a philosopher at Florida State University who directs the Big Questions in Free Will project. “If you give people an abstract story and a hypothetical question, you’re priming the theory machine in their head. But their theory might be out of line with their intuitive reaction to a detailed story about someone doing something nasty. As experimenters have shown, the default assumption for people is that we do have free will.”

At an abstract level, people seem to be what philosophers call incompatibilists: those who believe free will is incompatible with determinism. If everything that happens is determined by what happened before, it can seem only logical to conclude you can’t be morally responsible for your next action.

But there is also a school of philosophers — in fact, perhaps the majority school — who consider free will compatible with their definition of determinism. These compatibilists believe that we do make choices, even though these choices are determined by previous events and influences. In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”

Does that sound confusing — or ridiculously illogical? Compatibilism isn’t easy to explain. But it seems to jibe with our gut instinct that Bill is morally responsible even though he’s living in a deterministic universe. Dr. Nichols suggests that his experiment with Mark and Bill shows that in our abstract brains we’re incompatibilists, but in our hearts we’re compatibilists.

“This would help explain the persistence of the philosophical dispute over free will and moral responsibility,” Dr. Nichols writes in Science. “Part of the reason that the problem of free will is so resilient is that each philosophical position has a set of psychological mechanisms rooting for it.”

Some scientists like to dismiss the intuitive belief in free will as an exercise in self-delusion — a simple-minded bit of “confabulation,” as Crick put it. But these supposed experts are deluding themselves if they think the question has been resolved. Free will hasn’t been disproved scientifically or philosophically. The more that researchers investigate free will, the more good reasons there are to believe in it.
 
To say that non Christian's lives are 'joyless, friendless and uncomfortable' on earth is not true.

I agree.

we're left living in our own sinful misery and who would really choose that for eternity?
Some people actively reject goodness and kindness all their lives and also consciously make the choice to live without God. I believe in deathbed conversions for some people, but I don't think it's likely that these people who have been purposely nurturing their sin nature all their lives would decide at the end that they want to be with God.
 
Just a question 80s do you believe that there are people in Hell at the moment? (not earthly hell I mean.) Or do you believe that the soul 'rests' until judgement day

All I really know about that is that I believe the Bible verse "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord". So, I believe in the least the spirit of believers goes to God immediately upon the complete death of the flesh.

and then God send people to Hell?

I believe that people send themselves to hell. God offers everyone the chance to be with him. If someone chooses not to be with God, he won't force them - this side of death or the other.
 
It's interesting that when you talk about hell, most people believe they are not going there. They are so sure that they have the answer. I don't know...but I believe that God has a sense of humor. From the lowliest places...his people seem to come forth and lead. It never seems to me that the people who are in the know, or think they are in the know, God always throws a curveball.

Maybe we create our own hell. We are judged by the standards that we clung to in our lives.

My bet, is we reach the pearly gates, get a taste of what it is actually like to be in God's presence, and then we realize what it was like to feel that presence, we are judged...and then get a taste of what hell really is...separation from that presence.

I have another little theory...there are moments in our lives that we feel that presence...knowing what true love is...the birth of a child....puppy kisses...seeing the sunrise and knowing that this day will be better than any other...

We are not separated here on Earth...but I am not sure we are always aware of the presence.

:up: I like your summary! Living in the moment and staying near that presence is the key to sanity I think. :D I have a theory too. When we die we acutally get to judge ourselves in the presence of God. We get to feel every wrong we inflicted on others, all the pain and suffering. But we also get to feel the good and all the joy we created in others lives. Hopefully the good will outweigh the bad.
I don't believe in a vengeful God. I believe in a forgiving God who sees all and knows all; loves all.
 
Personally I think the thought of any eternal afterlife is scarier than a finite end. I mean really, who wants to live forever? After a couple billion years you'd have to think enough is enough already, but then to know there is never going to be an end? That's a scary thought.
 
but then to know there is never going to be an end? That's a scary thought.


it is, but we're all in the same boat, aren't we? like, the one thing we can say about every person on the planet is that we're all doomed. we're all going to die. and so, even if the afterlife sucks, at least we'll have company? maybe?
 
Personally I think the thought of any eternal afterlife is scarier than a finite end. I mean really, who wants to live forever? After a couple billion years you'd have to think enough is enough already, but then to know there is never going to be an end? That's a scary thought.

It scared me a lot when I was a child. I remember even having nightmares connected with the vision of endless life after death.
Now I believe that if Heaven lasts forever, it must be entertaining enough.
 
Some people actively reject goodness and kindness all their lives and also consciously make the choice to live without God. I believe in deathbed conversions for some people, but I don't think it's likely that these people who have been purposely nurturing their sin nature all their lives would decide at the end that they want to be with God.

Just to get back to this what are your thoughts on those who do not actively reject goodness and kindness all their lives? (as I believe most of us don't) To use Obama's mother as an example he described her as the kindest most generous person that he had ever known and yet she wasn't a Christian. Would she have willingly chosen to go to a place of no kindness and love for an eternity?
 
One of these years, Heaven or Hell is going to have some overcrowding problems. Which will be first depends on how forgiving you think your God is.
 
So you hate gay people because somebody didn't like them 1500 years ago and wrote it down. Got it.


How did you get me hating gay people from saying that we're going to make mistakes? That in of itself had nothing to do with ones sexual preference. I was implying that most of what Leviticus was made up of was all of the mistakes we're bound to make, that also is depending on which of those you choose to see as a 'mistake' (meaning: not for everyone). I have absolutely nothing against someone being gay, I don't judge and if you like that kind of thing, good for you.
 
You are judging, though. You're telling them they're making mistakes because they're gay, simply because someone wrote it down 1500 years ago in a book.

Mistakes are choices. Irvine being gay is not a choice.
 
To follow up what I should have added, Leviticus is more like guidelines. You should just say the whole bible is just made up of guidelines, choosing to follow them if and when you feel like it. "Just pick out the ones that matter to you."

That might make people feel better.
 
How did you get me hating gay people from saying that we're going to make mistakes? That in of itself had nothing to do with ones sexual preference. I was implying that most of what Leviticus was made up of was all of the mistakes we're bound to make, that also is depending on which of those you choose to see as a 'mistake' (meaning: not for everyone). I have absolutely nothing against someone being gay, I don't judge and if you like that kind of thing, good for you.

So you really believe that eating shellfish, touching pigskin or sleeping in the same bed as your wife during menstruation are all "mistakes"?

How do you explain a loving God that makes you kick your wife out of bed once a month?

You really don't seem to understand Leviticus.
 
The carcass of the pig, not, like, a pigskin football. The same word is also used of human corpses. Hide is distinct from flesh in Hebrew. No observant Jew would ask such a question seriously, nor why a loving God hates pigs or menstrual fluid. But whatever.
 
IMO Leviticus is not to be interpreted as "guidelines". Like most of the OT, the overall purpose is to demonstrate the "covenant" nature of the relationship between God and His people. Obey and you are blessed; disobey and lots of bad shit happens, rinse, repeat. I'm not saying I agree with this or believe in this, but this is the overall purpose surrounding how/why it was written. Whether or not half the stuff ever actually happened doesn't matter, the narratives all point towards this recurring theme. Studying Levitic law out of context and asking "are we REALLY supposed to be doing this?" misses the point, which is to say that the birth of Jesus fulfilled this covenant between God and His people, so all these Levitic laws are a moot point, and if one really wants "guidelines" for how to live life, treat people with compassion, respect, and decency, then look to the example set by Jesus and not these archaic verses taken out of context.
 
^ That's not how rabbinic Judaism understands the law, but, yes, it's an accurate summary of the priestly religion of the ancient Hebrews.


(ETA--And this is getting pretty far off-course...)
 
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I took away an appreciation of the Bible as a work of literature. I experienced no stigma.

This is how I feel, too. The Bible is indeed a fascinating book. I have no problem believing some of the people and events in it did exist/take place. And I think there are some very important, interesting, beautiful messages/lessons one can take from the book.

I just tend to think it's like any other book in that regard and don't get why it holds so much more weight over anything else, is all.

I didn't argue or didn't press a point. I didn't try to prove I was right and they were wrong. I respect their faith. I just don't participate in it.

We occasionally discuss religion and leave it at "I came from apes (translation: an ancestor common to apes and man which does not have the same zing as a slogan) and Mom did not". It works.

I can't tell you I don't vacillate back toward flirting with faith now and again when I am feeling vulnerable or helpless and everything seems out of my control because for some reason or other, it gives me a temporary feeling of control. I haven't lost all my superstitions. What you learn as a child does stay with you. But I am a results person. Do I see a tangible return in the here and now beyond that momentary comfort? Do I see a god that is fair and just or just a bunch of people saying he is? While I will experiment with anything, ultimately I only believe what I see when it comes to faith.

I walked away from the faith. I never walked away from the people who had faith.

:up:. Well said.

My parents have never been all that religious-they have a few beliefs here and there, but they're also very skeptical and always questioning and pretty much just leave it up to, "Who knows?" I never had to debate with them about religion, we were generally on the same page. I know my grandma was definitely religious, though, it was because of her I went to church regularly when I was a child. After she died, that stopped.

I've just never felt all that comfortable in a church. Not so much because of the people, the people I've met in the churches I've been in have been very nice. I just get bored easy there and I've always felt...weird holding hands with a bunch of people or standing up with them and reciting the same things from a book as them at the same time. Somehow it sounds odd coming out of my mouth, if that makes any sort of sense. Add in the numerous questions I have and I just feel I can do my own searching in a way that I feel comfortable with on my own time.

But there are indeed many people who are wonderful examples of their faiths, no matter what they might be. And I love having discussions with them about it. And I certainly won't stop them from believing whatever they want. All I ask is for mutual respect.

Angela
 
Just to get back to this what are your thoughts on those who do not actively reject goodness and kindness all their lives? (as I believe most of us don't) To use Obama's mother as an example he described her as the kindest most generous person that he had ever known and yet she wasn't a Christian. Would she have willingly chosen to go to a place of no kindness and love for an eternity?

This will seem like it has nothing to do with what you're asking, but bear with me, please...

2 Peter 3: 1-9 tells us that God has been holding back the End Times because of his love for us:

"But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. " (2 Peter 3:8-9)

If God wants everyone to come to repentance, he will make sure that everyone has the opportunity to come to repentance.

I believe that those who earnestly seek God will discover that the Gospel is indeed true.

Matthew 7:7-8
"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. "

I also believe that those who have lived their being kind and good (for no ulterior motives) will discover at some point before they die that Christ is the author of righteousness. They will have the free will to accept or deny Christ, but I can't imagine that that kind of person would deny Him, knowing that He is truth. For this idea, I have no specific Biblical proof; it is a strongly held conviction based on my knowledge of the nature of God.
 
I also believe that those who have lived their being kind and good (for no ulterior motives) will discover at some point before they die that Christ is the author of righteousness. They will have the free will to accept or deny Christ, but I can't imagine that that kind of person would deny Him, knowing that He is truth. For this idea, I have no specific Biblical proof; it is a strongly held conviction based on my knowledge of the nature of God.

How do you think this would occur for those who have (or had) absolutely no idea even of the existence of Christ/Christianity?
 
Does it really matter? The answer you'll get is just opinion, which is what we all have. I don't think anything that's described in here with regards to afterlife exists. Can I prove it doesn't exist, well no, but then I really don't think that's a valid argument.

Everyone can have their opinions, but I'm not going to base how I live my life on a few people stating "Jesus is the answer" or "Buddha" or whatever.

If it makes you feel better about yourself, makes you a better person, and helps you deal with hardship, that's perfectly fine and admirable.

I'm sure there will/can be many answers to your question Earnie, which is exactly why it's so hard to believe.
 
interesting article which I largely agree with, I lean towards incompatibilism (determinism precludes free will) but sometimes I wonder if the notion of free will which say Christians use is just logically impossible. Even if our actions didn't follow normal causality how does that make them free? Would they be completely uninfluenced by outside factors and somewhat arbitrary or would they follow complex relationships of knowledge and beliefs in a causal chain?

I think the weakness in moral actions which are measures in those surveys may be consequences of how people believe determinism takes something away when in fact it says that all of our greatest moral actions must have been determined by fortuitous circumstances which I humanity is causally set to adopt.

Lock rapists and murderers up from a justifiable concern for public safety and minimising harm. Do right because you believe that minimising suffering is a good thing. Determinism is not nihilism.
 

You are judging, though. You're telling them they're making mistakes because they're gay, simply because someone wrote it down 1500 years ago in a book.

Mistakes are choices. Irvine being gay is not a choice.
It wouldn't matter if it was a choice. There is as much intrinsic harm in homosexuality as in heterosexuality.
 
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