imagine being stuck in a place with ONLY people of one religion. it would be hell
Which is how you know hell is probably secretly heavenly.
Someone elsewhere said if you need religion to be a good person you’re just a bad person on a leash.
That is Christian doctrine. “The sinful nature of man.” IOW in the evangelical world view, we all need that leash or we’d all be, well, like American evangelicals.
I’d rather them be a bad person on a leash than a bad person off the leash
Edit: this was not meant as a serious take or anything. Just playing with the anecdote.
Sure, but they also are trying to force you on the same leash so… 🤷♂️
On the one hand, I agree. But on the other hand, that leash has led to pretty bad places many times over the centuries. I’ve come to believe that there’s some truth to the “humans are kinda shit” premise of Christianity, just that sometimes it redirects that shittiness and other times it directs it (or individuals do in its name, since Christianity itself isn’t an entity).
I have no idea if humanity would be better off with or without religion. I don’t need it personally but others having it might make everyone’s lives better simply because they don’t think they can get away with some things so don’t try them.
Did people before Christianity just evaporate then?
IIRC the so-called “virtuous pagans” went to purgatory
Who made that up?
It’s in the beginning of Dante’s Inferno, not sure where he got the idea from.
Same place all the preachers had to go to answer all the people who kept asking this exact question. They made it up with the only excuse that would get everyone to shut up. It’s not from anywhere.
Well of course none of it is real, but you can still track the origins of specific theological ideas/beliefs from the various individual authors, councils, etc.
It’s like a checkered screen going black. Sorry for the spoiler.
Doesn’t matter because that’s the western Orthodox baptist second reformed heaven and you were a heathen western Orthodox baptist first reformed
Pheh, who needs heaven anyway, just install linux onto the afterlife.
Can heaven run doom tho?
It doesn’t run it bare metal, but does offload it to a remote sandbox.
Putting aside the doom recompilation meme, I find this idea conceptually funny.
Nazis, Israeli abominations, and christian pedophiles go to heaven… why the fuck would I want to go to heaven and be stuck with them for eternity?
Did you personally go to heaven and verify?
Fairly sure some people did go to Heaven.
It was nothing but empty, no gods, only suns everywhere.
Disappointing.
Sure
Heaven was invented by Rapists, Pedophiles, fascists, and other wicked creeps in order to control the masses.
So fuck off religious pedo supporter.
I assume you have died and found out?
You should see it this way: Look at our world. Look at the bad things. Look at the horrific things. God lets all those things happen AND he wants his dick sucked as if he doing jack shit is a good thing.
Go to hell. Be a rebel. Be proud of it.
You don’t understand, all that suffering and all those dead babies are part of His plaaaaaaan. How can you even have morals without believing in god, please excuse the piles of dead babies.
Dead babies?
“God works in mysterious ways.”
“Trust God’s plan.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“You have to have faith.”
“We should pray.”
“He is testing our faith, like the book of Job.”
These are the bullshit answers they give us because they don’t really have an answer.
And when something good happens what do they say?
“God is good!”
“Praise the Lord!”
Look, believe in God all you want but when someone pisses on you, don’t call it rain.
Have a meaningful conversation of how an all powerful, good God can allow so much suffering. Either he isn’t good or he isn’t powerful.
There is a third option - he’s tarded.
True and fair.
Have a meaningful conversation of how an all-powerful, good God can allow so much suffering.
Evolution is driven by adversity. Organisms experience stress, seek to relieve themselves of that stress, and improve upon their function iteratively over billions of years.
Pain is a form of information which gives an organism an imperative to change. And with a great number of organisms, you will necessarily have a great deal of suffering. But without that pain, you lose the incentive to change. The end result is stagnation and decay. A lack of pain isn’t joy, it’s numbness. A lack of adversity does not imply triumph but inertia. What you’re asking for isn’t a Utopia, it’s the heat death of the universe.
I get it. Rape, murder, war, horrific disease, and all the other “adversity” the all-knowing cock known as God allows is for our own good. It’s like a man beating his wife so she’ll know better next time. She’ll evolve due to the information provided by his fist.
“What you’re asking for isn’t a Utopia, it’s the heat death of the universe.” I dunno about you but all I’m looking for is a little less genocide, maybe a bit fewer hungry children, maybe some consequences for well-known pedophiles.
I guess if there is no horrific suffering in the world we won’t evolve. I volunteer you for the next horror, you piece of shit.
Rape, murder, war, horrific disease, and all the other “adversity”
I mean, you’re talking about this as though some Divine Agent actively is making one person sexually assault another. Or kill another. Or cough on one another.
If you don’t want to live in a world full of rape, I would suggest you start by not raping anyone. Grabbing someone by the hair, pulling them into the ally, violently forcing yourself on them, and then saying “God made me do it!” is the most cynical shit imaginable.
“What you’re asking for isn’t a Utopia, it’s the heat death of the universe.” I dunno about you but all I’m looking for is a little less genocide, maybe a bit fewer hungry children, maybe some consequences for well-known pedophiles.
I mean, good news? We’ve been emerging from a state of nature for thousands of years and we are absolutely reaching an apex of civilization such that genocide and famine are at an all time low. Meanwhile, pedophilia and rape and murder are increasingly reviled rather than celebrated or tolerated.
But, again, your parents’ generation watched a thirty-year-old Prince of Wales become betrothed to a 16-year-old girl and clapped like seals. God didn’t make the English Monarchy do that.
God didn’t set up Little Saint James and stuff the Lolita Express full of post-Soviet block easily exploitable teenage refugees.
God didn’t initiate the Nakba or perpetuate a running genocide against the Palestinian people for the next 80 years. Neither did he kick off the German Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide. He didn’t spread the Spanish Flu during WW1 or factory farm in such dense conditions that COVID erupted onto the public in 2020.
All this shit is the direct result of human activity. Human ingenuity. Human passions. Human biases. Human politics.
I guess if there is no horrific suffering in the world we won’t evolve.
You can wave your hands and bemoan the existence of heat waves and hurricanes, then blame The Divine for building a universe in which some bad things happen to some living beings some of the time. But then you’re obligated to posit a world without heat waves and without hurricanes. And good fucking luck. That’s one hell of a balancing act.
You can posit a world in which bad things happen but we just don’t notice or care. But where does that end? Is suffering better if we’re blind to it? Not to get too Biblical, but you eat from the Tree of Knowledge and you begin to see the world more clearly. Language, society, historical memory, the capacity for science and engineering - they’re all double-edged swords.
You could be a microbe right now, with absolutely no conceptualization of who you are or why you’re here or what the universe outside a few centimeters looks like. And would that make you happier? Is that your Utopia? A few hours or days of existence mostly eating until you’re fat enough for mitosis. Is that your idea of a good time?
At least then you wouldn’t know enough to blame God for anything, right?
So then this all powerful God isn’t smart or powerful enough to make a universe in which suffering isn’t necessary. Seems pretty limiting for an all powerful, all knowing being.
Do you also make justifications for billionaires that destroy the world? Because you’re putting quite a bit of energy in to justifying something that is supposedly beyond comprehension. Wouldn’t the more honest answer just be “I don’t know.”
this all powerful God isn’t smart or powerful
You don’t have to be that smart or that powerful for humans to worship you as a God. Humans have worshipped their richest local neighbors. They’ve worshipped big animals. They’ve worshipped rocks.
Do you also make justifications for billionaires that destroy the world?
Justify what?
I’ll blame Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg for a big new Data Center sucking up my neighborhood’s utilities.
I won’t blame them for the existence of malaria or the eccentricities of particle physics.
you’re putting quite a bit of energy in to justifying
Am I? It seems like you want a Magic Rock to blame for all your problems.
ineffable innit?
The worst people in this world don’t think about these things. They are the ones in “heaven”.
If that’s the company in heaven, it sounds fucking awful.
God has some of the worst fucking representatives. I don’t want to be in a heaven with those assholes
Yeah, God is kinda an asshole, and if hes not, and hes worried about our opinions of him he really needs to work on his messaging and explaining why stuff has to be so shitty. Being God and all I imagine that isn’t beyond his abilities…
You know, assuming he existed…
The real problem is God doesn’t believe in me
I kinda want a t-shirt with that on it. I wonder how many pity speeches it would get for me from Christians…
Look at our world. Look at the bad things. Look at the horrific things. God lets all those things happen
Literally the Al Pacino line while he’s trying to convince his son to fuck his sister.
Go to hell. Be a rebel. Be proud of it.
I would simply break the Cycle of Samsara and rejoin the Cosmic Singularity by freeing myself from materialistic desire.
Damn I can’t believe the guy you’re responding to us trying to get everyone to fuck their sister. Lol, what?
“God forgives all” I ain’t sweating.
Have you tried blaspheming against the holy spirit, that fake piece of shit?.. Let’s see God forgive that.
Imagine a club where you can rape and pillage your entire life, ask for forgiveness on your dying breath and you’re in.
Notably, you’re not asking for forgiveness from your victims. So you get to rape them, never apologize, and then still get to say “Welp. It’s already been forgiven by some other guy!”
Imagine a club where everyone is okay with that scenario. Imagine these same people think this is normal.
repenting involves hating and turning away from your sin
As long as you don’t intend to ask for forgiveness in the first place
Right. You have to have genuine remorse. Still dumb though.
I dunno, I guess I think punitive justice is an inherently fucked up concept. When I was a kid, adults used to say two wrongs don’t make a right. At first I thought they were full of shit, but as I grew older, I learned how horrible prisons are and how they don’t make people better.
In Christianity, you have to mean it. People can’t turn their beliefs on a dime like that, meaning it takes work. You have to have done the work. Anyone who’s successfully sacrificing Jesus would basically be capable of giving a meaningful apology to the victims and rehabilitating themself.
Still, heaven isn’t for Me. It’s just not My aesthetic. When I die, I’m going to Ninuan.
Sure, they can be forgiven, by God, after they suffered a horrible death themselves.
We don’t even have to execute them, just denny them any services or any companionship from society. Anything not a basic need, and they will wish they died.
just denny them any services
Don’t send them to Denny’s. That’s just cruel.
After all the Deans being posted on Lemmy, I think I want to talk about Community.
After Chang kidnapped the Dean and took over the school and was defeated by the study group, he showed up claiming to have Changnesia. Changnesia is a ridiculous lie and nobody believes it at first, but they decide to give him a chance, because we’ve all done bad things.
Over time we get confirmation that Chang faked his Changnesia, and the characters end up pretty sure of it too. But still, they don’t expose him as a fraud and they don’t send him to prison, where legally, he belongs. Because prison doesn’t solve problems.
Nobody ever trusts Chang again. Everyone knows he can’t be trusted. He can’t be given power. He’s evil. But he also has feelings, and he deserves happiness, as long as his happiness doesn’t involve hurting anyone.
May we all have our own redemption, even if it must come from something as absurd as Changnesia.
The one-true-and-perfectly-good has tried to genocide all form of life by drawning them under rain (fishes got very affraid)… but so yes, you won’t get in his club without at least trying to be a bit as him…
well I don’t think that person care about being in or out anyway
You can also ask how to spell you’re
|You can also ask how to spell you’re
Dear Grammar NAZI. I am disabled and use voice to text. If I pause while talking which I often do, it spells incorrectly about 1 time out of 100. It is not perfect and neither am I. I appreciate you for pointing out my shortcoming that has effected your life to the point that you had to reply on a forum to correct me. Send all your future complaints to Dragon Naturally Speaking. TY
Fuck off. You do not get a pass to call people nazis no matter what your personal circumstances are
Nein, leider nicht.
Are you too disabled to proofread?
Are you perfect? Do you criticize people to feel good? Internet muscles 🙄
I’m not perfect but I strive to better myself. Everyone should.
Don’t try to score pity points. Take valid criticism and improve your ass instead of attempting a weak counterattack. Taking responsibility for your failure is the first step toward improvement.
Get a life. Blocked.
SEE??? PROOF.
CHECKMATE, ATHEISTS
The odds of gettin the right religion (if any god exist at all) is so fricking low that i may aswell live how i want instead of following a religion;
Heck, i’d like to be religious but every religion seem to be quite shitty, the only ones who basically convinced me are Wiccas, which i may join in the near future
If you were doing it based on odds, you’d probably want to find the common denominators of all of them to give you the best odds. Like you’re gonna wanna get into kids more, that’s a pretty common theme regardless of deity.
When the Christian friend convinces you into religion, but it turns out God hates belief in false gods more than non-belief (you picked the wrong religion).
you picked the wrong religion
There is no way that most people didn’t pick the correct religion. Even if all Christians were “correct” enough to get to heaven regardless of denomination, that still leaves 71%+ of the world who aren’t Christians. And that is best case scenario as Christians are the largest religious group by population in the world currently. And even within the Christian community, there are plenty of in-groups and out-groups that consider one another to be cultish and blasphemy. No matter what you are betting, your chances aren’t great and the majority of the world is still “wrong” and will face whatever consequences come with that fact.
Personally, I’m happy to just not believe rather than to force myself to conform to some oppressive dogma, dump my time and money into a church, and live with shame just to hedge my bets for what would still be bad odds anyway.
It always impresses me how Christianity = evangelicalism in the mind of most Lemmynauts. Outside evangelicalism (and even partly within evangelicalism), going to hell or heaven has nothing to do with being theologically correct or not. I mean, even the Catholic church, which is both by far the biggest one and absolutely not one of the most open ones states with an absolute clarity that non-Christians can go to heaven too.
Catholics do not believe that non-Christians go to heaven. Best case scenario, righteous unbelievers go to purgatory. Same with unbaptised babies.
Also, I grew up going to baptist and pentecostal churches. They 1000% do not think my atheist ass is getting into heaven no matter how righteous I am, even though I got baptized for that matter. Unless I repent at the 11th hour and “accept Jesus into my heart as my savior,” anyway. There are certainly plenty denominations that are not all about preaching “hellfire for the unbeliever”, but even plenty of those still believe that is true even if they’re not boasting about it. There are some that allow for people to be saved through ignorance of Jesus (which makes missionary work kind of fucked up when you think about it that way). But even that is not the norm.
Jesus’ sacrifice saving humanity from eternal damnation is a key tenet of nearly all denominations. And most of them also say that you need to actually accept it and turn your life over to him to qualify for the get out of Hell free card.
Source: 37 years of life in the Bible belt as both an active churchgoer and apostate.
Purgatory is a step that leads to heaven, not a final destination. It’s a step that a lot of Catholics will have to take too, according to the catholic church so it’s not something that separates believers and non-believers.
Baptism and Pentecostalism are categories of evangelicalism. So yeah, they believe that. But they’re a minority within Christianity.
Jesus’ sacrifice saving humanity from eternal damnation is a key tenet of nearly all denominations.
Yes.
And most of them also say that you need to actually accept it and turn your life over to him to qualify for the get out of Hell free card.
No. Only in evangelicalism.
I was grown myself as a Catholic. And no, what you’re saying is false.
It might be sort of the “official stance”, even though contradicted from one document to another (in the catechism it says that not believing is a cardinal sin, for example, which means that just by consistently refusing to believe, you go to hell, for example), but even if so, most of practitioners just believe that atheist or agnostig = dangerous, criminal, ill and will and SHOULD go to hell, and even worse if you critisize religion.
It will depend on your parish. Catholicism is not a monolith. But the Catechism is clear :
[2125] Since it rejects or denies the existence of God, atheism is a sin against the virtue of religion. The imputability of this offense can be significantly diminished in virtue of the intentions and the circumstances. “Believers can have more than a little to do with the rise of atheism. To the extent that they are careless about their instruction in the faith, or present its teaching falsely, or even fail in their religious, moral, or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than to reveal the true nature of God and of religion.”
Atheism is taught to be very serious, but the circumstances have to be taken into account. People reject the Church because the believers fail in their mission, either because they wrongly teach or because of their actions which contradict the teaching. In this case, the imputability of the sin of atheism is diminished, so it’s not anymore a cardinal sin. God only can make the difference.
I’m no Catholic myself, but their teaching is clear. That members of the Church believe differently, especially in America where Evangelicalism seems to have win the religious cultural war is not surprising, but the teaching stays.
Edit : I may be wrong, as always, but show me one Catholic official text that says that atheists go directly to hell, without the same kind of limitation as the Catechism. I think I’ll wait a long time.
But that doesn’t negate what you experienced as a child. It’s just that these people were not in accordance to the actual objective Catholic teaching, just like JD Vance. Religion in America is sick, and evangelicalism is the cause.
No. Only in evangelicalism.
That is not true. Lots of Christian denominations believe that as well. Most of them in fact. You are just Americentric in your belief that Evangelicalism is automatically meant, when that is not really a large denomination outside of the US.
I’m not American. I know no denomination outside evangelicalism which teach that. And in France, even evangelicals does not teach that for a large part. Catholicism does not. Mainline Protestantism does not. I don’t know well Eastern Orthodoxy, but as far as I know, they do not either.
Well, consider me brainwashed by evangelicals then. Non-evangelicals really need to step up their PR game.
Yeah, that’s what cults do. I’m very sorry, and happy for you you found a way out. It’s better to be an atheist than jailed in a cult, and I know God will understand.
No. Only in evangelicalism.
False, not only in evangelicalism. The words of Jesus Christ disagree with you. Do you need me to quote the “Narrow Gate” to you? You should be very familiar with it if you’ve read the Bible.
I’m old enough to remember when kids started taking their new flip phones to public school and secretly recording their teachers berating their muslim or atheist students. The recordings stopped when teachers realized any student could be recording any conversation.
I’m also coded enough that bigots test the waters with me to see what I’ll agree with. I don’t exactly trust quiet christians. They’re very polite when they assume you’re also religious and things can go quickly downhill if they find out you’re not.
Sure they do! That’s because they’ve become more moderate over the centuries in their long decline since The Great Mortality. This allows them to continue their parasitic ways in a secular society.
However, they spent many more centuries claiming the exact opposite, because the Bible says that most will burn in Hell. Repeatedly. Throughout.
The “absolute clarity” is in direct opposition to what they falsely claim is The Word of God. It’s absolutely clear that they are a cancer on the Earth.
Jesus actually uses two different words which get translated as hell: Sheol, and Hades. This makes sense, because most of the people around where he lived were Jews or Hellenists. Sinful Jews go to Sheol, where their souls are cleansed by a purifying fire and they cease to exist. Sinful Hellenists go to the bottom level of Hades, Tartarus, where they’re punished forever.
Neither of those is what Dante described in his fanfic.
Wrong. But I had this discussion with evangelicals 1000 hundred times it’s not interesting anymore. I’ll begin by citing theologians like Aquinas (13th century), you’ll answer saying “meh don’t care it’s not in the Bible” or, if you studied theology (but you probably didn’t), citing the one big exception, Augustine (which still wrote that God’s mysterious grace could be greater than what he himself thought). But with that I will have proved that no, it’s not a recent evolution of Christian theology, but something the churches hold still the beginning, with exceptions.
Then I’ll cite Romans 2:12-16, Luke 12:47-48, Matthew 25:31-46 or Acts 10:34-35, and you’ll do mental gymnastics that will grant you a place in the coming Olympics to reconcile this with the idea that only Christians are saved, using texts like John 3:18. And I’ll say, yes, the Bible contradicts itself on this subject like on most others, but my position is better established and coherent with the global message of the Bible, the church history, and the reason, while yours is not. And you’ll be shocked : “what? You don’t believe in biblical inerrancy? You’re not a Christian!” and I’ll answer “okay, bro”, like I do with disrespectful people on the net.
And we will both have lost a lot of time, and you will have push more people to hate Christ while you will feel oh so righteous.
You’re wrong, according to the Bible itself, repeatedly throughout. Anyone who’s read it knows that you’re wrong.
I have over 12 years of daily Bible studies, and don’t care if you took a theology college course(s), or even if you were a Catholic priest, or whatever your education was.
I’ll cite Matthew 25:46, too. It says “eternal punishment” for a reason (and also John 3:18 of course)… and “the righteous” is clearly defined… also, Isaiah 66:24, Matthew 13:50, Mark 9:42, Luke 13:3 and 16:23, 2 Thessalonians 1:9, Revelation 21:8, and on and on and on and on, there are many more.
Also, recall the words of Jesus Himself, which disagree with you. The gate is narrow, and few will find it. I won’t even get into original sin here, there’s no need.
Re Aquinas… he’s not relevant to this discussion, I’m not talking medieval philosophers, but the Bible.
Thank you for making up claims about my possible responses, as this clearly shows that you’re not really interested in an actual discussion, and would instead prefer to babble your lazy imagining as if it were applicable. All of your assumptions about me are wrong, your strawman arguments are wrong, and you are wrong.
If you consider this a waste of time, be silent. I quite enjoy it.
As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. ~Proverbs 26:11
Okay, bro.
Original sin, brah, take a course on that.
… and Jesus hates liars
I prefer the simple answer proposed by the Death of the Discworld: everyone is getting exactly what they think is coming to them. The final justice is that of your own conscience.
So pick a religion that aligns with your personal values and you’ll be alright.
I’m not sure I’ll ever get over how arrogant and simple-minded Pascal’s Wager is. The whole premise is either Christianity or nothing; it doesn’t account for any other religion. I just find it hilarious.
Don’t worry, Muslims will be overtaking Christians this decade based on current growth statistics
Not like there are any problematic denominations there either, right?
There is only one guy who guessed correct religion after particularly vivid mushroom trip, but he’s still in hell because he started doing correct things for the wrong motivation.
Turns out it was the Mormons who were right. Yes, they’re the only ones in heaven. Sorry everyone else!
When your friend convinced you to go to church and get molested and there is no God
Pikachu
when your friend finally convinced you to go outside and you get struck by lightning
Religion makes predators
Can’t do that face if you don’t have a face
Unrelated but please never imply “all {ethnic group} is {conventionally bad thing}”, that’s the weapon of the enemy and we don’t use it.
EDIT: just group, not ethnic
What ethnic group do you think was mentioned…?
The worst was when he said, “All Hispanics are 7:00 AM college courses.” (I actually have no idea)
The monsters i can never stay awake during them. this explains my extended family’s longstanding ethincally and racially based hatred, for which i must give no further explanation
You just stereotypically associated religious people (in general) with “molesting” and door to door conversion.
- that wasn’t me
- that’s not even unfair
- religion is not “an ethnic group”
- whoops
- So? Even if you think that, that doesn’t dismiss that it’s the weapon of the enemy.
- An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of humans who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Attributes that ethnicities believe to share include language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, religion, history, or social treatment. - The English Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia at en.wikipedia.org
Is your argument that because that definition includes the word religion then they are the same thing? Religion is rarely ethnicity and even less so in the west
Also in this case you really just equating white people to Christianity? The more I think about this, the weirder and grosser it seems.
You could think of it as a set of multiple groups combined, that’s worse. Also, I never mentioned white people or Christianity, you just pulled these associations out of your ass.
Love how this is getting downvoted. Like there isn’t a rich and storied history of Satanic Panic in the West. Or an active community of Epstein-brained conservatives who are doing blood libel on anyone who fails the Paper Bag Test.
It’s a non sequitur is the problem, and seems to buy into the whole christian prosecution complex that’s a huge problem in the US.
maybe they were “convinced from” a false religion, eh?
