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shmip t1_iybqd5m wrote

Reply to comment by Winnmark in For The First Time, Less Than Half Of UK's Population Is Christian: Report by khushraho

Hey it sounds like you know about this stuff, can you help me understand a question I've been thinking about?

Imagine a dad saying this to their kids: "If you stop loving me, I will make your life Hell."

That isn't love, it's abuse.

Why isn't it abuse when god says it to us?

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Winnmark t1_iybsj7k wrote

I'll bite, and only because you flattered me. What? I am vain as well. Caesar was, look how it turned out for him!

Right. These types of questions typically carry a few preconceptions:

  1. hell is the cartoonist's depiction of devils with whips and a never-ending fire
  2. there is an active decision made by God to put someone in hell
  3. a fundamental misunderstanding, or flat out ignorance, of the mechanics of sin 3.A) A fundamental misunderstanding, or flat out ignorance, of how sin affects our relationship with God
  4. a misunderstanding of love, in a theological context
  5. The idea that God chooses to love, or hate, people on the flip of a dime, or on a precarious balance read out of people's "good" or "bad" actions.

This is a MASSIVE oversimplification, but essentially, when we choose to sin we choose to replace God and make ourselves be deities, thus magnifying all of our positive and negative traits to their possible extremes.

If we choose to replace our creator with ourselves, thereby separating each other, then we cannot access the true love of the Creator The absence of true love then, would be hell

It's like saying I want to quit my job right now, but I still want to receive the paychecks. Or, renouncing your citizenship, but still feel that you should cast a vote in this or that election.

I encourage you to, should you actually be interested in this, further look into points one, three, and 3A. There are several religiously themed subreddits you may wish to explore, given that this post was specifically talking about Christianity, you might want to look at r/AskAChristian

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shmip t1_iybuioe wrote

Do you think a loving god would create a world that requires such weirdly complicated reasoning to explain why their love isn't abuse?

Seems like love should be pretty easy to recognize.

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Rusticaxe t1_iyc2xik wrote

God is a genocidal asshole that Christians pray to out of fear instead of love.

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GoogleOfficial t1_iybxlhe wrote

This is all based on nothing. Kind of sad that you are so far in the cult that you are spinning this nonsense as though it’s in any way intellectual.

You are not nearly as smart as you think you are.

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Winnmark t1_iye8w7u wrote

I just want to point out reddit's bigotry here. You're not actually making any arguments and instead attacking me as a person, and your comment has upvotes, but every one of my common has down votes.

It's a mixture of hilarious and infuriating. I worry about what you might do to me, and people like me, if consequences and anonymity were removed. Not just anonymity.

I need a drink

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GoogleOfficial t1_iye9bix wrote

Yes, the persecution fetish. Never mind the fact that the religious have been persecuting those who they don’t like for thousands of years.

Don’t drink too much buddy, otherwise you’ll burn forever.

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ThymeParadox t1_iybz3yy wrote

I take issue with 2, especially.

God is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent. Nothing happens that he did not foresee. And since he would be the first cause, everything that happens, happens as a consequence of his act of creation.

With those three traits combined, how can you going to hell be anything other than an active choice on god's part? God established the 'rules' for which afterlife you go to. God established the rules of causality that lead to your existence. And god has the ability to tweak the initial conditions of the universe in such minute ways to cause your life to play out differently.

If god is omniscient, omnipotent, and the first cause, it follows, as a logical necessity, that god absolutely makes an active choice and is directly responsible for the afterlife that every single person goes to.

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Maeglin8 t1_iyeqcf1 wrote

Not a Christian, but I can't help noticing that while God is posited to be omniscient and omnipotent, people are also posited to have free will. But, if people have free will, then God cannot, by definition, be omnipotent: if you have free will, you have some of the power, however small a sliver, and God does not have literally all of the power, which is what "omnipotent" means.

You can't solve a logic problem if the premises of the logic problem contradict each other.

If one treats this as a logic problem, and tries to resolve the contradiction in the premises by assuming that people have free will and God is only Really Powerful, not literally omnipotent, then it's entirely logically consistent to posit a universe where people can decide that they are going to go to Hell and God can't do anything about it.

Why would an omnibenevolent God set up a universe like that? I'm not a Christian so I'm not going to worry about it too much. But I will observe that any universe God creates where people have both meaningful free will and the ability to meaningfully affect each other, will be a universe whose people have the ability to make choices that are... suboptimal... for each other. And maybe you don't want some of the people who have shown that they consistently make choices that are suboptimal for each other going to Heaven. Especially since God's not legally obligated to scrupulously follow the descriptions of Hell in medieval literature when making it.

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ThymeParadox t1_iyer7gj wrote

I think, based on my understanding of Christianity, a Christian would simply say that god has the power to override your free will, but simply chooses not to, and as such god is still omnipotent in that he still can do all logically possible things.

But there are still lots of problems with the tri-omni stuff, a very obvious one, in the context of this conversation, being 'is god incapable or unwilling to give people that don't accept Jesus a pleasant afterlife?'

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Winnmark t1_iybzp5z wrote

He may have set things in motion, but he does not prohibit us from changing the outcome, if we choose to.

The rules are set, but we get to choose how/if/when we follow them.

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ThymeParadox t1_iyc10s1 wrote

So god, in all of his omniscience, didn't know what choices we would make from the first moment of creation?

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Winnmark t1_iyc14d6 wrote

He did/does.

He'll just never force anyone to do anything.

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ThymeParadox t1_iyc1m9m wrote

With omniscience and omnipotence, he could alter the initial conditions of reality in order to lead someone to make a different choice. By setting up reality the way he did, god is choosing to lead everyone towards the choices he knows they will in fact be making.

You can't have it both ways. Either god is not omnipotent and/or omniscient, or god is responsible for the choices that we make.

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shmip t1_iyd22hj wrote

Thanks for the indepth answer. I'm not trying to bait you by replying again, my other reply was more rhetorical, with this one I just want to make it clear what I see as the conflict.

I'm not trolling. As someone that grew up very christian, I'm interested in the ways that abrahamic believers think about love and abuse.

Abusers use complicated reasoning to explain how the damage they inflict is actually helping, how everything is done out of love, and how the rest of us don't see that because we're too dumb to understand the complexities so just stay out of it.

A loving god would never make the rules so crazy that you need to be a theologian to really understand them. That's the kind of crap an abuser does.

Love is simple. Control is complicated.

It's hard for me to see how such a complicated control structure is really about love underneath it all, especially when the control aspect is usually used for pain.

Thanks again for the chat.

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Winnmark t1_iye89qt wrote

Anytime. Next time maybe send me a private message, I lost so much karma, here because of the bigots it's not even funny lol

With that said, I also think it's not complicated at all. There's no abuse here. I simply think some people have already made up their minds before they look at any argument for or against something.

It's actually incredibly difficult to try and look at something objectively. It's very difficult to ignore our feelings, our goals in life, our experiences, so on and so forth.

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