Hey Hey!!! I'll go along with that!
And I believe dinosaurs really did exist!

 

He must have read Moby Dick in high school.

 

man i don't know.... if he did then his post would be over 10 pages long.

britt

 

No, I didn't read moby dick...

Come to think of it, I dont remember reading anything in highschool besides the Anarchist Handbook.

 

And if you're wrong, you burn in Hell for all eternity...


Why do I have the feeling that we are on the better side of the enigma here?

It's called Pascal's Wager for all of you guys who just skated by in High School...

 

Ya know what is amazing to me?

A couple of years ago an artist got US tax money to put a cross in a pile of elephant poop and call it art, but if you flush a Koran and the muslin world riots! Muslims worship a book instead of the words in it?

 

Oh yea, the other classic of an all knowing, loving, caring god.... you dont follow its whims exactly, you go to a very bad place "forever"

Ok, say there is hell and I go there when I die. Then what? Feel sorry for myself and pout and accept the punishment? Cuss, fight back and get used to the heat? what happens when Hell gets tired of my attitude? Its pain, you get used to pain. Your not going to DIE, your just going to anger someone.

 

One problem with your theory, hell is like wrestling with a pig in mud. You are gonna get smelly, dirty, and wet, and the pig likes it.

 

I am a sound believer that you will either get used to it, or go crazy and not care. either way, you can irritate anything if you try.

besides, playing in the mud is fun..

 

would I be better off in believing in the happy hunting grounds? or budda? or a viscious cycle of human to cow to monkey to bug?

Afterall, we cant all be right? can we?

 

In short what it all means is

Do onto others as you would have them do onto you

 

I didn't say anything about 9/11 and Iraq. Peddle your misconceptions and strawman arguments elsewhere.

I'm not sure why you're talking about the Crusades. Is that the most recent example you can find of Christians acting like barbarians?

I'm only defending Christians because unlike some other religions I can think of, they HAVE learned a few things in the last 600 years. I'm an atheist myself.

 

(Just skip the stream-of-concious ramblings and read the third from the last paragraph to get my point...)

It is man's own duty to save himself; yes, God allows for it to happen, but it is man's job to make the decision to follow God and Jesus Christ's example.


Now I'm not a very good source for this since I made up my own religion back in High School, but here goes my philosophy which has helped me through life...

Since our ancestors screwed up and due to the prescence of the Devil on Earth, it is inheirently human to sin.

The Devil is greed; economics, selfishness and competition is all a sin, and is absolutely instinctual for humanity as well as all of the critters on the planet. Self-interest is sin. As long as a man is living for himself, then he is living in sin and cannot be allowed to enter into Heaven.

A human may be freed of sin through one way alone- living for another rather than himself. This is love, which is an ubiquitous emotion amongst all of humanity. So a human must live in love in order to be freed of sin and be eligible for entrance through the pearly gates.

Love was the gift Jesus gave to man as he died on the cross. To love is divine. Analyze love, the exact same thing which all humans have experienced at one point in their lives, and you begin to realize how unique it is. Love is completely illogical, uneconomical, unnatural and inhuman- what else causes a human to abandon self interest? Nothing else; everything else a human does is for himself somehow, be it a concious or subconcious decision.
But love isn't- while it is ultimately powerful and infinitely beneficial, humans do not love in order for profit. Human's don't make the decision to love at all; rather, love is Jesus's gift to humanity, the possession which humans must have to reach heaven. Love is totally unavoidable actually; all that must be had on the human's behalf is respect for it.

And I trully believe that love is heaven on Earth (this is where I catch flak from most people); ask yourself what can be better than love. What can be happier? How can love, how can your wife or your children, be any better? Love causes humans to see their loved ones as perfect, inhuman, sinless and divine; logically they are not, but can they be any better? They are perfect; in a human's eyes; his loved one's are angels. And in loving, he himself has abandoned human sin and become divine himself, just as Christ was when he was crucified. (Remember, "Christian" means "like Christ".) While he lives on earth he is still in the prescence of sin, so he is still simultaneously sinful. However, humans in love percieve themselves to be in the prescence of divinity. And what is the presence of divinity but Heaven? While it is not genuine heaven, humans can experience the same infinite bliss on Earth through love. However, it is only for a temporary time.

Still, living in love and heaven on Earth is not sufficient to reach heaven; absolutely important yes, but one additional prerequisite remains. A human in love, which is the entire human population of the globe who respects the Lord's gift, must acknowledge God in order to reach true heaven. (While love results in infinite joy on Earth, heaven would be an infinite amount of infinite joy, which is still uncomprehendable by humans but undoubtedly infintiely more blissful...)


So in the end God has given us the one way out of Hell, which is Earth... (Although Hell is infinitely worse than the infinite suffering which is Earth already...) Jesus essentially forced love on humanity- there's no avoiding it. However, we must respect the love and maintain and nurture it; as long as we live in love we are free of sin (while simultaneously sinners; yes, it is a paradox) and therefore allowed into heaven. However, we must meet the prerequisite of "faith" first, which is more of a trivial (yet infinitely important) footnote...


So in summation Hell is the abscence of God, which is self-inflicted by humans. God was infinitely generous in supplying humanity with Love, which allows humans to reach Heaven on Earth if the gift is respected. However, while a human may experience infinite joy on Earth as a result of love, he is still in the prescence of sin and therefore must have faith in God before he can enter the eternal infinite joy which lays in the Heaven off of the planet.

And then there's Hoss' favorite, the Great Commission, which states why humans in love still act as though they are economically motivated... But since I'm sure nobody's still following this (Gob bless my eternal eloquence ) I'll save that for a later date.


Now this is where the theology majors with too much time on their hands come and tear me apart...

 

no... but would it make any difference if i gave you a bunch of other examples?

have they?

well there's something you and i have in common.

britt