Are you sad that I am going to hell, or have you pretty much come to terms with it?

[Godobeyer]

Does it bother anyone? If you know someone you think is going to hell, does it eat away at you, or do you learn to just learn not everyone is going to realize the 'truth' or whatnot? Are you supposed to feel bad for those people, or happy they are getting justice or something?

for me ,as muslims , i would not happy to see some one goes to hell .
it's God wish .

 

[InformedIgnorance]

Yet is it not true that believers hold god to be just? Thus that the judgements that god gives out and that we receive is just according to believers. Thus believers must hold that non believers going to hell is just.

 

[dust1n]

I'd come to a realization that the experience of heaven is a cop-out. It's a looking-out-for-number-one perspective, where it's completely devaluing the impact and power of oneself, saying one isn't worthy of salvation, and depending on a deity to save them regardless of how much they've hurt themselves or others. After I left the Christian community, I looked back at how much I absolved myself of responsibility to other human beings because I was trying so hard to beg for mercy from God and spreading the word to others who hadn't yet accepted Jesus as their lord and savior.

I think it's also a closed door to ever having the opportunity to help others and experience what the joy of generosity is like. If I were in heaven, with no pain, no suffering, and no cares outside of glorifying God, I would not know what it was like to give a full weeks worth of groceries to a struggling family, and seeing the look of utter joy and gratitude that they will be able to eat all because of that gift.

So, when it came to the realization that I was trying to experience eternal bliss, that I was putting my faith in a deity to forgive me, and to recruit others into the same club because I felt that no happiness could exist outside of "being a Christian and saved", it had me in a position where I was far more judgemental of people simply based on their professed religious belief and not at all on who they are as a person and what their life experience had been like up to that point.....none of that mattered at all, just as long as they were Christian.

I became a much more forgiving person when I left the Christian community, more so when I realized my lack of belief in a deity at all, and even more so when I stopped believing in an eternal heaven and eternal hell after death.

My answer is that when I identified as a Christian, dust1n, I know that I would have quietly thought to myself that I would hope you'd find your way to Jesus, but that I would celebrate in God's righteousness and justice for the rules and that non-believers would get their rightful punishment for not believing. IOW, I'd turn off any compassion and nod solemnly toward God being just.

Therefore....I would not have felt sad at all.

It still is a reason why I personally cannot identify as a Christian with the heaven prerequisites firmly established, because to cope with the reality of people I know and love being tortured eternally in hell would require that I stop opening my heart in compassion for them. I came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as an either/or false dilemma when it comes to compassion or justice. I have seen that forgiveness, understanding, and openness can be coupled with education, repair for past hurts, and resolve when knowledge and understanding are attained.

I have found that the latter is much more transformative than worrying about who is going to be smiling forever in heaven and who is going to be screaming in pain forever in hell. I've seen many more lives touched and transformed long term and positively when the Heaven and Hell Doctrines are never considered.

Thanks Mystic for your detailed response. I agree completely with you for the most part, on a personal level. I can't really remember what I would have felt like or rationalized my emotions thinking about hell. I can't even say I really ever believed in hell. But I noticed similar tendencies at the people I knew at church. That's not to say everyone, some helped people immensely. But the people who helped more often seemed, really, less concerned with... abstract notions of doing good and having a personal relationship with good, and much more concerned with people on a fundamental level. Of course, that's rare in any group of people.

The nail in the coffin for me was pretty similar, or at least, I could not never reconcile how God could create free agency if he knew in advanced what they do with their free agency, and that if free agency wasn't real, what was the genuine qualification for going to hell.

I don't know, ever since, it's become much more apparent to me how much of people is made strictly out of circumstances and luck and surrounding people's actions and just things that are not in our control but shape us immensely. It just never seemed right that same an advantage to find God and others didn't, and that being unfortunate in this case for you meant eternal damnation.

Just me two cents.

 

[dust1n]

LOL that's rich.

I do not expect people to have the same religious beliefs I do. But I want to help others regardless of their lot in life. To suggest that I reject heaven for the sake of helping others defines me as sadistic and insensitive is....peculiar.

I would rather find a way to help others who are suffering in hell than turn my back on those who aren't in heaven with me. This is why I cannot in good conscience identify myself as a Christian, and it's because I was more concerned about getting people to believe the exact same religious belief than I was concerned about what they were experiencing in the here and now.

I'm more concerned about helping others. What a shame you find that insensitive.

It's alright. It's difficult to look at the ethical delimmas of heaven and hell for what they really are, especially when so much is invested into the ideas.

 

[dust1n]

Speaking as an atheist, the doctrine of hell is our best recruiting tool.

The irony to saying that hell is the best recruiting tool is the fact that the most abundant religions which are Christianity, Catholicism and Islam both have a concept of hell within their doctrine. Is this coincidence or perhaps meticulous planned thinking?

It's a real deal maker and breaker.

 

[dust1n]

Religion is like triage. Treat the wound, move on, hope for the best. Man cannot come to faith entirely of his own free will, so stressing over one soul is counter-productive in the long run. I will say, though, that there is no shame in sorrowing over the sins of others, nor delighting in God's divine justice and His plans for humanity.

That's an understandable way of looking at it.



Cool, I think I've gotten a pretty good idea about the various ways people feel about. Thread: success.

 

[LuisDantas]

Does it bother anyone? If you know someone you think is going to hell, does it eat away at you, or do you learn to just learn not everyone is going to realize the 'truth' or whatnot? Are you supposed to feel bad for those people, or happy they are getting justice or something?

To the extent that I find the existence of a literal hell possible (admitedly a very little extent) I don't expect any fairness to exist in who is allocated to it.

That, I suppose, is sort of the point of any hell that might turn out to exist.

So I don't worry about it. Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of those Buddhist saints that devote their lives to be reborn in hell, though. It is the only sensible decision to make.

 

[dust1n]

To the extent that I find the existence of a literal hell possible (admitedly a very little extent) I don't expect any fairness to exist in who is allocated to it.

That, I suppose, is sort of the point of any hell that might turn out to exist.

So I don't worry about it. Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of those Buddhist saints that devote their lives to be reborn in hell, though. It is the only sensible decision to make.

Tell me more of these Buddhist saints.

 

[MysticSang'ha]

Tell me more of these Buddhist saints.

Ksitigarbha - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[dust1n]

Ksitigarbha - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sweet. Thanks!

 

[NIX]

The standard isn't: "treat everyone you meet the same". The standard is to: "love your fellow man, especially your enemies, like you love yourself". So you're telling me you've got that teaching down to a "T"?

What if you're not so good at loving yourself?

Anyway, essentially if you treat(love) everyone the way you treat(love) yourself you ARE treating everyone the same.

 

[Me Myself]

The hell with you!

D )