Isn't Ignorance Bliss?

[Aqualung]

Yeah, I definitely see that there a lot of whole is that religious view. but I still maintain that not everybody will stay ignorant (in fact, nobody will), and that everybody will be judged by how well they used what they were given.

 

[Jensen]

Well, that was the point of the thread. Keep everybody ignorant, so nobody sins. Except I think you're still sinning if you go against what your concience says is right.

Yes, I agree with you, and that is why I think that those that haven't ever heard the gospel but follow their conscience and do right can be saved. :bounce

But there are many that would disagree, sadly.

 

[jonny]

The preacher was discussing how people who had never heard of God, such as African pigmies, would go to heaven cause they didn't know any better. But people who knew of God and died with a sin they had not asked forgiveness for, would go to Hell.

This is pure speculation with no scripture to back it up, but is it possible that they had already proven themselves worthy prior to this life? I know that not everyone believes that our spirits existed before we were born, but I've had the thought lately that this is a possibility.

 

[dan]

Hey White Guy, I imagine you have one or two sins at some point in your life that you've yet to repent for (whether you remember them or not). Does that mean you're going to Hell?

 

[MdmSzdWhtGuy]

Dan,

I have more sins that have gone unrepented than you and I together could possibly count. I think you may have skipped some of my previous post where I came to the conclusion that the whole shooting match was malarkey and opted out of the system, so to speak.

Will I go to Hell when I die? Good question. I think my odds of going to Hell when I die are roughly the same odds that I will go to Valhalla, Narnia, Middle Earth or Flying Spaghetti Monsterland when I die. There is pretty much the same amount of evidence that any of those places exist as there is that Hell exists.

If you ask my Mother or Father, they will tell you without a doubt that I am going to Hell. If you ask my LDS friends, they will tell you I am not going. I don't know if either of them is right, and the odds are WAY in the favor that they are both completely wrong, but as for me, I am rooting for the LDS folks to be right.

B.

 

[michel]

Yes, I agree with you, and that is why I think that those that haven't ever heard the gospel but follow their conscience and do right can be saved. :bounce

But there are many that would disagree, sadly.

I wouldn't; I agree with you. No loving God could be that unfair.

 

[Ernesto]

It has been an on-going debate amongst my friends and I what happens to those people who have never heard of Jesus...how can they be saved?

You simply could not be more patronising if you tried.
We have all heard of Jesus, all of us Westerners have heard of Him, it's just that some of us - the ones who need to be, as you so narrowly put it, 'saved' - have the sense to use our raitonal brain and decide that, perhaps, Jesus didn't perform a lot of miracles and wasn't the son of God, and was, in fact, an utter fraud who is documented as being otherwise.

I'm sorry that not everyone wishes to believe stories pumped inot them from birth...
I'm sorry that not everyone wants to subject themselves to a religion which preaches brotherhood on sunday and practices it on no day,
I'm sorry that the disease hasn't quite spread that far yet,
I'm sorry that those of us who are uninfected by this disease haven't been 'saved'...


I'm so sorry.

 

[dan]

I'm sorry that not everyone wishes to believe stories pumped inot them from birth...
I'm sorry that not everyone wants to subject themselves to a religion which preaches brotherhood on sunday and practices it on no day,
I'm so sorry.

Ernesto. I had no religion pumped into me for my whole childhood. The first time I was ever inside a church was when I was twenty. My religion preaches and practices every day of the week.

Si tu has llegado a la conclusion de no practicar ninguna religion son tus negocios, y no estamos tratando de cambiar eso. Lo que has dicho no es la verdad, y apreciamos que no nos ataques porque tu no entiendes nuestra prespectiva. Esta bien?

 

[Ernesto]

Ernesto. I had no religion pumped into me for my whole childhood. The first time I was ever inside a church was when I was twenty.

Did I say I was talking about you personally? I can understand the misconception, though.

 

[Faint]

I'm sorry that the disease hasn't quite spread that far yet,
I'm sorry that those of us who are uninfected by this disease haven't been 'saved'...

I take it by "disease" you are refering to a meme-complex which has infected the world. But I'm wondering what makes you think that atheism is not in itself just another meme-complex that has done the same?

 

[Ernesto]

I take it by "disease" you are refering to a meme-complex which has infected the world. But I'm wondering what makes you think that atheism is not in itself just another meme-complex that has done the same?

If atheism is, indeed, another meme-complex, it is at least a far less destructive one! At least with atheism, you are more likely to have more personal strength, as you will not be placing any faith into some higher, only-percieved-conceptually being which may never help you. I think in general atheists fall back on themselves more. Not that I'm against people believing in God for that same reason, it's just that it seems to me that God doesn't do the job half as well.

 

[Faint]

If atheism is, indeed, another meme-complex, it is at least a far less destructive one! At least with atheism, you are more likely to have more personal strength, as you will not be placing any faith into some higher, only-percieved-conceptually being which may never help you. I think in general atheists fall back on themselves more. Not that I'm against people believing in God for that same reason, it's just that it seems to me that God doesn't do the job half as well.

I agree.

 

[dan]

Did I say I was talking about you personally? I can understand the misconception, though.

I apologize. I often just read the last post, and most of the time it is addressed to everyone, so...my bad.

 

[dan]

If atheism is, indeed, another meme-complex, it is at least a far less destructive one! At least with atheism, you are more likely to have more personal strength, as you will not be placing any faith into some higher, only-percieved-conceptually being which may never help you. I think in general atheists fall back on themselves more. Not that I'm against people believing in God for that same reason, it's just that it seems to me that God doesn't do the job half as well.

But in my experience, people who fall back on faith report, without exception, being strengthened in ways they never could on their own. When my ex-girlfriend died I was without a doubt strengthened. It was contrasted against the grief of an athiest friend who (ironically enough) lost her fiance a week later. She turned to alcohol, had some idiot dude move in with her, and completely lost control of her two kids. I never saw her again save she was in a drunken depressed stupor. Granted others fair much better on their own, my faith turned my life around for the better, while her lack thereof destroyed it.

 

[pandamonk]

But in my experience, people who fall back on faith report, without exception, being strengthened in ways they never could on their own. When my ex-girlfriend died I was without a doubt strengthened. It was contrasted against the grief of an athiest friend who (ironically enough) lost her fiance a week later. She turned to alcohol, had some idiot dude move in with her, and completely lost control of her two kids. I never saw her again save she was in a drunken depressed stupor. Granted others fair much better on their own, my faith turned my life around for the better, while her lack thereof destroyed it.

Don't blame her lack of belief or faith for the way she reacted to her loss. Everyone reacts in different ways, in different situations. I'm not religious in the slightest and i came through cancer a stronger individual. It has, i believe, nothing to do with a belief in a god.

 

[Katzpur]

This occured to me as a little kid, maybe aged 9 or 10. I was sitting in church, being told I was going to Hell because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and all that sort of fun stuff.

The preacher was discussing how people who had never heard of God, such as African pigmies, would go to heaven cause they didn't know any better. But people who knew of God and died with a sin they had not asked forgiveness for, would go to Hell.

I immediately felt ripped off. These naked pigmies can run around doing whatever they want. They get to sleep in on Sunday mornings, they don't have to listen to this boring crap every Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday night, and they are guaranteed to get into heaven, while I sit here suffering through all this, only to probably slip and say a curse word as I am dying? Nice. I jump through these impossible hoops. Then I slip on my deathbed and go to Hell anyways.

I'm impressed that, as a child of 9 or 10, you realized how totally illogical this reasoning was. Obviously, God would not be very just if He were to punish people for having had the misfortune to be born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Your preacher's attempt to find a loophole for God was not only unnecessary, but it actually makes God a liar. What kind of God would He be to tell us that we must believe and be baptized in order to be saved, and to then just disregard that statement when it comes to literally billions of people?

In my opinion, the only doctrine that makes sense -- allowing God to be both merciful and just -- is the LDS doctrine. I apologize to anyone here who sees this as being narrow-minded, but this is one doctrine I feel 100% convinced is true: Everyone who has ever lived will have the opportunity to believe and be baptized (some by proxy) either during their mortality or in the Spirit World between the time they die and when they are resurrected.

 

[Lindsey-Loo]

I'm back, and ready for debate!

As I have said many, many times before, Jesus went to the spirit world to teach the gospel. No matter whether you hear it when you are living, you will hear the gospel. And you will have the opportunity to get baptised as well, through baptisms for the dead. Paul showed us that the early church baptised for the dead in 1 Cor. 15:29; "Else what shall they do which are baptized for te dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for te dead?" Thus, everybody will have the chance to hear of the gospel, accept it, and then accpet a baptism, either by being baptised themselves, or by accepting a baptism someone did for them.

And I quote from a church lesson:


I hope that this will be helpful, though I must warn you that is very hard to understand. (Well, it was for me, anyway. I had to read it through several times.)

http://www.franklinchurchofchrist.com/sermons/date/2004/htm/20041212PM.htm

 

[Aqualung]

Christian girl. Who said that quote? could you lable your quotes (by saying

or whoever) because I can't remember who said what.

 

[Katzpur]

I hope that this will be helpful, though I must warn you that is very hard to understand. (Well, it was for me, anyway. I had to read it through several times.)

Hi, Christiangirl.

Thanks for posting that article. I'm sure it won't surprise you to hear that I don't agree with it. However, it does present some points that will be interesting to discuss. Since you didn't actually post the article itself, but rather a link (which was the correct thing to do, incidentally, due to the length of the article), I won't be able to actually quote from it in my reply. I'll have to paraphrase it instead, so I hope that will be okay.

Let's start by quoting the verse in question: "Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?"

The author (a minister, I am assuming) starts out by making an assumption which, in my opinion, has absolutely no basis whatsoever in scripture. He contends that in 1 Corinthians 15:29, Paul is arguing for the reality of the resurrection. He is trying to convince his audience that. like Jesus Christ, we also will be resurrected someday. I agree with him on that. However, he goes on to say that Paul was referring to "some false teaching found in Corinth." Why in the world he would say that, I don't know. There is not one shred of evidence in the Bible to support the notion that proxy baptisms were a "false teaching." Not one.

Paul was relying on a well-established fact -- one that his audience would be familiar with, and that he would not have to explain -- as the basis for his argument in favor of another not so well-established belief. Why on earth would he have used a false doctrine to support a true doctrine? Would you do that? I know I wouldn't.

He then goes on to try to guess who Paul was referring to in using the word "they," and once again projects his own beliefs on what the scripture actually says. He insists that if he'd been talking about "all Christians" or even "all the Apostles," he'd have said "we." And then, amazingly, he jumps to the conclusion that the individuals who were being baptized on behalf of the dead were Christians at Corinth who did not believe in the resurrection! This, of course, makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, it goes counter to his argument.

He goes on to further complicate the issue by presenting seven possible meanings of the word "baptize." One -- but only one -- of these is baptism for the dead. Using this reasoning, he argues that, since we don't know enough about this use of the word, we need to assume that it couldn't possibly be legitimate. He goes through each of the possible meanings of the word "baptism," methodically eliminating each of them as a possibility. He even describes "the baptism of John," as a baptism that "was no longer practiced." Baptism by water no longer practiced? That comes as news to me!

Well, that's probably enough for now. The second time he said, "Get rid of your assumptions!" I couldn't help but think it would be a good idea for him to take his own advice. His entire sermon, it seemed to me, was an effort to rationalize why his church doesn't accept this doctrine. Instead of taking it at face value, he seemed to be intent on trying to wiggle his way out of saying, "Well, it sure does appear that this doctrine was a legitimate practice in the early Church. I'm going to have to find out more about it."

Kathryn

 

[Ernesto]

But in my experience, people who fall back on faith report, without exception, being strengthened in ways they never could on their own. When my ex-girlfriend died I was without a doubt strengthened. It was contrasted against the grief of an athiest friend who (ironically enough) lost her fiance a week later. She turned to alcohol, had some idiot dude move in with her, and completely lost control of her two kids. I never saw her again save she was in a drunken depressed stupor. Granted others fair much better on their own, my faith turned my life around for the better, while her lack thereof destroyed it.

I'm very sorry to hear about that, but don't oyu think this could be merely an exception?