Thread: Heaven and hell?

You are taking metafores far too literally.

No one will ever be able to reach heaven or hell in the material world just by driving.

...I mean when people die...

Heaven and hell are ideas provided by the bible. They are used together to try and keep us bound to the two. Hell is made out to be a bad place with fire and pain, so you should live a good life in order to get into the more attractive heaven. Its just an idea that got blown out of proportion and eventually taken literally by many people in the world. Hell controls us by fear and heaven controls us by our greed.

Simple as, non exist, and to be honest, we went up into the clouds many a time and found nothing. Center of the earth is just a red hot molten core, not hell.

Don't let these ideas control you.

^
Talk about intolerance, total ignorance of the beliefs of others.

Even Richard Dawkins doesn't take that attitude that "non(e) exist", he admits that he is only 99 percent sure.

And you call yourself English, a country based on tolerance of the beliefs of others.

Originally Posted by psychology student

^
Talk about intolerance, total ignorance of the beliefs of others.

Even Richard Dawkins doesn't take that attitude that "non(e) exist", he admits that he is only 99 percent sure.

And you call yourself English, a country based on tolerance of the beliefs of others.

I weep for you.

Originally Posted by Carôusoul

I weep for you.

Thank you

Originally Posted by psychology student

^
Talk about intolerance, total ignorance of the beliefs of others.

Even Richard Dawkins doesn't take that attitude that "non(e) exist", he admits that he is only 99 percent sure.

And you call yourself English, a country based on tolerance of the beliefs of others.

Maybe you should consider that if you looked in the sky, there is no heaven, if you check the center of the earth, there is no hell. Just because there is an idea of this does not mean that we should automatically believe in it. To be honest with you, why believe in something that drives you by using your fear against you.

And don't use the whole Richard Dawkins thing, he is very intelligent, but it does not mean he is right about everything. I have drawn my own conclusions and that is simple as, i choose not to believe in heaven and hell, and through thinking i have decided that heaven and hell are very improbable ideas.

Oh, and for your information, just because i live in the UK, doesn't mean that i have to follow every fucking norm of society. You might want to because your obviously thinking yourself perfect, but don't drag me into it.

Originally Posted by Lucid Seeker

Maybe you should consider that if you looked in the sky, there is no heaven, if you check the center of the earth, there is no hell. Just because there is an idea of this does not mean that we should automatically believe in it. To be honest with you, why believe in something that drives you by using your fear against you.

Who says Heaven is in the sky? And I fear nothing, fear does not drive religion. Faith does!

Originally Posted by Lucid Seeker

And don't use the whole Richard Dawkins thing, he is very intelligent, but it does not mean he is right about everything. I have drawn my own conclusions and that is simple as, i choose not to believe in heaven and hell, and through thinking i have decided that heaven and hell are very improbable ideas.

But that is not scientific, the concept of God is doubtful, in science, but not 100% wrong. So you just don't believe in God?

Originally Posted by Lucid Seeker

Oh, and for your information, just because i live in the UK, doesn't mean that i have to follow every fucking norm of society. You might want to because your obviously thinking yourself perfect, but don't drag me into it.

Tolerance is a norm, and I follow it because I'm normal, not perfect, everyone is a sinner. Tolerance is synonomous with not racist, not prejudiced, not discriminatory among other things; a trait of a normal person.

Originally Posted by psychology student

Who says Heaven is in the sky? And I fear nothing, fear does not drive religion. Faith does!


But that is not scientific, the concept of God is doubtful, in science, but not 100% wrong. So you just don't believe in God?



Tolerance is a norm, and I follow it because I'm normal, not perfect, everyone is a sinner. Tolerance is synonomous with not racist, not prejudiced, not discriminatory among other things; a trait of a normal person.

I would love to reply, but it is blatantly obvious that this argument could go on for days until you had the last word. So, i won't give you the pleasure of doing so. Oh, and don't be so cocky next time around.

Jerk.

Originally Posted by Lucid Seeker

I would love to reply, but it is blatantly obvious that this argument could go on for days until you had the last word. So, i won't give you the pleasure of doing so. Oh, and don't be so cocky next time around.

Jerk.

Well done, jerk

Originally Posted by slayer

Correct me if I'm wrong...but hell is supposed to be in the center of the earth and heaven in supposed to be in the clouds?

Lets look into the future...sometime in the future the earth is going to be destroyed in some way. Same goes with the clouds and the center of earth. So does that mean that there would be no heaven and hell? The only way they could exist is if their in some kind of paradoxed world or something.

I guess it could also be possible that, if were dead, then we wouldn't need oxygen or anything to live. So I guess we could just float off into space or whatever...

Your thoughts on what I said if theres anything to talk about?

Hell was man made by some bored people thousands of years ago, same goes for heaven. You can't deny it was made by man, it's true.

Originally Posted by psychology student

I fear nothing

I bet you do.

Originally Posted by Carôusoul

I bet you do.

Well God, but not hell.

Originally Posted by psychology student

Well God, but not hell.

Wait... you fear God and not hell... isn't it supposed to be the other way round? If your God is supposed to be compassionate, then why must you fear him? It makes no sense!

The locations are just metaphors so that in simpler times it was more easily understood. Obviously at the time they didn't exactly have the theories of alternate dimensions and the like so as it is written in the words of man, who had never been to the center of the earth( we haven't been to the core but we have a pretty certain idea of it's make up.) or above the clouds( apart from on a cloudless day, but we must assume heaven is like that Japanese film about the walking castle,basically it is situation on a large band of cloud and teleports to other clouds when they dissipate), so they were areas of mystery at the time. A perfect place for supernatural realms.

Now if you were to publish a more up to date edition of the Bible. I suppose you could say " in the dimensions beyond us" or " In a galaxy far, far away(lol)".

Originally Posted by psychology student

Well God, but not hell.

yes that is a little puzzling, maybe some elaboration?

Originally Posted by bluefinger

Wait... you fear God and not hell... isn't it supposed to be the other way round? If your God is supposed to be compassionate, then why must you fear him? It makes no sense!

Its kind of fear out of respect, like a disciplined child fears his father.

I just don't fear Hell, maybe that will change if I end up there, but I don't.

Originally Posted by psychology student

Its kind of fear out of respect, like a disciplined child fears his father.

I just don't fear Hell, maybe that will change if I end up there, but I don't.

So you believe in God then, so thats why you were getting defensive in the argument before. Don't worry, i forgive you, i once thought like you. You'll realize what i mean one day. Until then, just try to fight that fear

Originally Posted by Lucid Seeker

So you believe in God then, so thats why you were getting defensive in the argument before. Don't worry, i forgive you, i once thought like you. You'll realize what i mean one day. Until then, just try to fight that fear

Don't worry Seeker, I once thought like you: plagued by the perpetual pointlessness of my existence; the black hole of life (see what i did there). But then I realised the truth.

Well, apparently the current Pope contradicts the one that was before him on the subject.

Originally Posted by news.com.au

Source

HELL is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, Pope Benedict XVI has said.

Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, the Pope said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to "admit blame and promise to sin no more", they risked "eternal damnation - the inferno".

Hell "really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more".

The Pope, who as cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was head of Catholic doctrine, noted that "forgiveness of sins" for those who repented was a cornerstone of Christian belief.

He recalled that Jesus had forgiven the "woman taken in adultery" and prevented her from being stoned to death, observing: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

God had given men and women free will to choose whether "spontaneously to accept salvation...the Christian faith is not imposed on anyone, it is a gift, an offer to mankind".

Vatican officials said the Pope - who is also the Bishop of Rome - had been speaking in "straightforward" language "like a parish priest".

He had wanted to reinforce the new Catholic catechism, which holds that hell is a "state of eternal separation from God", to be understood "symbolically rather than physically".

Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a church historian, said the Pope was "right to remind us that hell is not something to be put on one side" as an inconvenient or embarrassing aspect of belief.

It was described by St Matthew as a place of "everlasting fire" (Matthew xxv, 41).

"The problem is not only that our sense of sin has declined, but also that the world wars and totalitarianisms of the 20th century created a hell on earth as bad as anything we can imagine in the afterlife," Professor Bagliani said.

In 1999, pope John Paul II said heaven was "neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but that fullness of communion with God, which is the goal of human life".

Hell, by contrast, was "the ultimate consequence of sin itself. Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy".

In October, the Pope indicated that limbo, supposed since medieval times to be a "halfway house" between heaven and hell, was "only a theological hypothesis" and not a "definitive truth of the faith".

This somewhat relates to my topic about religious inconsistency.

Originally Posted by psychology student

Its kind of fear out of respect, like a disciplined child fears his father.

I just don't fear Hell, maybe that will change if I end up there, but I don't.

I respect my father, but I do not fear him. There's a clear distinction between the two, one I do not let mix. So why should one who respects God fear him? If one truly believes and respects him, then there's no need for that fear.

Originally Posted by bluefinger

Wait... you fear God and not hell... isn't it supposed to be the other way round? If your God is supposed to be compassionate, then why must you fear him? It makes no sense!

Being feared brings power, so hell must be WAY MORE powerfull then god. Hell is the place to go, let's all go to hell.

seriously though...if your spirit is like your human form being in hell burning forever would be like...unsettling and not a real place because if you know what getting burnt is like, or dieing in a fire imagine that x's 100 but every second of every day, noway could a spirit survive hell if it feels like a person feels...i can't even imagine it. It's pretty mind boggling, and if you think about it noway would you be allowed by your creator to burn in hell for the end of time, IT'S BEYOND PUNISHMENT, and it shows inperfection from something that's supposidly perfect, and you could pretty much turn god into a normal human being with flaws and stuff. It's impossible to imagine hell, that's a fact.

edit- BTW if there is a creator it doesn't mean anything really....maybe there is a creator but the fact remains we are still small and insignificent to the universe if you seen how big it is, and we have not even found the end yet...creator just means it created this, and moved on like a human makes something then makes something else, doesn't mean you go to a heaven, or a hell (, it just means you were created by something, and he watches over it's creation, or moves to it's next project. Creator just means it's another species who maybe did it's science expieriment making us up, and giving us and everything all this stuff. Maybe we are just an expieriment whatever it is decided to create, it's beyond our understanding making it impossible to understand what it understands because our brains are not able to understand what it is, because we are just a CREATION, maybe 1 of many. What does GOD mean? absolutly nothing, just a word for a scientist who creates things that is beyond us, like us trying to think of the future and how to create a small version of us giving them an even less understanding of how everything really is. We will never know, but this is 1 possibility of "god", who cares what we do? it's meaningless in the end, because nothing matters when your dead, right? if nothing matters then why fret over our beliefs of how "god" will punish, or not punish us. I just made an example of a different kind of god nobody talks about, since everyone seems fixed on all these other religious gods because people before them believed, and people before them, etcetcetc.

Does a house you created go to heaven or hell? no, but you created it, so it must go to an afterlife, right? no, it's just a house created by things around, but then you can say humans and things on this planet were created by "things around" and then evolved, but then a house evolves in a way when you add to it, not the same way we evolve but you can argue adding things to a house is like say humans evolving. Last i remember evolve means change, add something to a house and it's changes, you made your house evolve just like we change and adapt and evolve, like we are just people, and small and insignificant in the universe, sorry for using human created stuff, only thing that came to me. BTW you might argue logically that humans are not created by humans (unless cloned) so what i said does not fit, you will have a case for yourself as a house is created by a human, but a human is not created by a human. But like i said...house was created by "stuff", just as people were created by "stuff".

As i stated you can logically argue about things untill your black and blue, it doesn't mean your right, nor does it mean you're wrong. I bet you guys can do it better then i can, i'm not well edumacated in things like 'evolution", "religion", "god", except what i hear, i'll admit i can and am ignorant in lots of subjects because things don't add up to me, then other people. Gotta love it how we are all different, or we would all agree on 1 thing. You can agree on 1 thing, though. THIS STUFF IS COMPLACATED!!!!!

for lucid flanders

Originally Posted by aceboy

for lucid flanders

Took me a while, thoughts kept popping in and out of my head, so edit, after edit, after edit as per usual.