techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Ganondox wrote:
To equate refusing salvation with a mere lack of belief is a pervasive nonsense, obviously it's clearly immoral, and anyone who believes in that should be ashamed. To truly refuse salvation, one must be perfectly aware of what they are doing.
Two problems here:
1) You'd need to define what it is to refuse salvation.
2) You'd have to prove that there's such a thing as libertarian free will to refuse said salvation - unless you're a Calvanist at which point that's not a concern but does equate to quite a pessimistic outlook on the inherent justice of the universe.
These are both non-issues. All the matters is the free-will is a key concept of most Christianity, so if is possible to refuse salvation, then God would not be evil by forcing someone to accept it. The how doesn't matter as long as it's an informed choice, and if there is no such choice, then it's just a hypothetical situation.
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Ganondox wrote:
It should be noted that the modern concept of hell is mentioned NOWHERE in the bible. Sheol and Gehenna are mentioned, but neither are places of damnation.
I would have to agree with that at least in the old testament, in the new testament you have something along these lines in the story of the rich man and Lazarus - it got massaged somewhat by mainstream orthodoxy into broader concepts like a two compartment hell where the one was just for righteous souls born before Jesus came to earth.
Lazarus and Divers is a parable, so it's not meant to be taken as doctrine, but rather as an example.
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The only thing I can think of in terms of perdition as mentioned here or in Revelations that's sensible with regard to is complete dissolution of a soul back into its raw materials. That and the idea of the worm that never dies feasting on someone sounds like their structure is being rattled apart by their own energies and the ways in which they've trained them (ie. toward nihilism, perversions and thus destructive/dissolving activities vs. integrative activities). A truly ice-cold libertarian universe would just let people do that regardless of what they know or don't know, a slightly more self-aware universe that could at least emotionally register the value of destruction of participants would probably take as many steps as it could to make sure that the person at least knew they were committing absolute suicide and that complete dissolution of their being is what they really wanted in the long term. Some people suggest the outer darkness as one being ejected from the consciousness range of deity - I haven't swam deep enough to consider whether there are examples in the outer world which signify that sort of activity in the universe but I'm guessing you'd need examples in nature of certain things that are harmful just vanishing or ceasing to be; I think that would make the headlines in how profoundly it would break the appearance of energy conservation. The other thing, from what I have experienced, there is at least self-aware energy in the system and something of a breeze of endorsement or rebuke that can hit you at the oddest of times. Even with as terribly as felt about life back in my early 30's I did receive an intervention and I'm not sure whether that's something that would just happen for everyone who really thinks they want it or whether it's a more universal activity.
That said I think the idea of amoral destruction could be possible, less out of any sort of divine judgment other than perhaps just a cold sort of physics in what it seems to take for consciousness to hold together outside of a body and suggestions that I've heard that most things that stick around this level or in the case of deceased people end up just seeing darkness and deep reds and want to get back into a body as fast as they can (ie. possibly the narratives of attachment and obsession) because they feel like the media they're in is constantly threatening to rip them apart. If they were *really* getting repulsed by their own substance I could see the possibility of them getting sent right back to the quantum foam or something like it quicker than they could react.
I don't believe eternal oblivion is even possible, but if a soul is made of some more basic elements, then it ought to be able to be broken down into those elements. If so, I don't see anything inherently evil about such happening unless the soul doesn't want to be broken down and it's existence isn't a threat to the well being of other souls.
19 Dec 2016, 6:42 am
