Fellow Christians, I have questions

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Really? If Hell is on Earth what are its GPS co-ordinates.

If Hell is in the sky, Specify the direction in which one would point a telescope to see. State the direction in standard astronomical mode.

If it is underground state the depth and approximate latitude and logitude of the point on earth that it is under.

ruveyn

I'm sorry if you feel you are being attacked here, but that's simply not the case. I may not LIKE the attacks upon my beliefs by the atheists on this forum, but they are no less free to judge and rule on what I say. I have no right to stop them, but I DO have the right to correct errors and to expose false assumptions just as much as they do. I can also choose to respond in kind by mocking their assumptions, or I can present an uncolored refutation and provide evidence. I cannot do that unless there is some Authority to guide me in that exposition. And by what Authority may I make those claims? God Himself, through the Holy Spirit. But if we were to, for the sake of argument, assume there is no Holy Spirit, what authority is there? The written authority, or the Bible. That is something we can trust to be written by those closest to the Source of scripture, those who knew Jesus in the flesh and learned at His feet, unlike us who at the present time can only know Him in spirit/Spirit.

The Bible, being the inspired, written word of God cannot err. If the Bible contradicts itself, then it has no authority. But since a close examination of the Bible reveals its authority and non-contradiction, we may believe it.

The Bible informs us, according to Galationas 1:6-10--I am amazed that you are so quickly turning away from Him who called you by the grace of Christ, and are turning to a different gospel--not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are troubling you and want to change the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than what we have preached to you, a curse be on him! As we have said before, I now say again: if anyone preaches to you a gospel contrary to what you received, a curse be on him!

Now, in context, this refers to false teachers who were trying to add Jewish requirements such as circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath keeping as necessary for salvation. The TRUE Gospel of Jesus is that faith alone is sufficient, and teaching anything else is not the gospel of Christ. That can be applied across the board to any questionable theology as requisite for salvation. It also applies to other distortions of the message, such as there being no intermediary state between the physical death of the believer and the resurrection. And I've already posted Biblical text as evidence for the resting-place of the soul in heaven or paradise.

You accuse me of being deceived, but my source is the Bible and the Spirit, not the "laws of man" or the "laws of men." While I was reading through Galatians, I found this in 3:10-14--For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, because it is written: Cursed is everyone who does not continue doing everything written in the book of the law (Deuteronomy 27:26). Now it is clear that no one is justified before God by the law, because the righteous will live by faith (Habakkuk 2:4). But the law is not based on faith; instead, the one who does these things will live by them (Leviticus 18:5). Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, because it is written: Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree (Deuteronomy 21:23). The purpose was that the blessing of Abraham would come to the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, so that we could receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

In this passage, we see that, once again, that faith alone in Christ is the true gospel and fulfills ancient scripture. The OT contains some 600 or so commandments (as opposed to the 10 most people know about). But to understand "the law" as opposed faith, you have to consider that the 600+ commandments were expanded into the "oral law." This oral law based on the Torah eventually became linked to Moses, the truth of which is questionable. It may have come about with the best of intentions when the system of Levitical interpretation and application was established, but there is no documented certainty that Moses was the initial author nor that the "laws of men" had divine inspiration. The oral law was eventually written down as the Mishnah, and was THEN later expanded into the Gemara. Both of these works were compiled into the Talmud, and the Babylonian Talmud is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 million words. I've had trouble enough over the last year deep into my own personal study of the Bible only having just now made it to the Epistle to the Ephesians. I can't even BEGIN to imagine the time and effort involved in getting through the Talmud!

Similarly, I wonder where you get your information from. So much contradicts the Bible. 1 John 4:1 says: Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to determine if they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

So rather than just being content to rest on accepting someone's authority, why not rather trust in the Authority and examine the scriptures for yourself? If you don't believe that what I've said is true, test it against the Bible. And if you rather believe what someone else says is true, discern between whether you believe their authority because it is convenient and you've you've been deceived or if their authority is valid. There is only one reliable written source, and that is the Bible. If challenges to faith are offensive to you, ask "Why?" There is a wide gulf between what "people" say the Bible is and what it REALLY is. You can't accept parts of it and discard the rest. It is either authoritative in it's entirety or it's entirely false.

As always, I will constantly encourage you in the Lord and pray for you that God will grant you wisdom for understanding.

We're talking about two different things here. I'm not limited by physical boundaries. Even kxmode will acknowledge the existence of a spiritual plane of existence, something we probably won't disagree about.

Now, if you're willing to get metaphorical--ANY place indicative of spiritual separation from God would thus qualify as hell. Thus ANY place could symbolically represent hell-on-earth if it is occupied by someone devoid of Christ's salvation. Likewise, anyone who has accepted the gift of salvation through faith is in heaven already. There's no need to wait for death and resurrection to understand what it means to live in God's presence while still on earth. Thus it is my OPINION that the physical universe is a temporary bridge between the redeemed and the condemned in hopes that more of those who WERE condemned (in the past tense) can cross over into the kingdom of heaven. My apologies if that sounds contrived or New-Ageish, but it's just my personal view. You're free to reenact a few scenes from "Flatliners" to test that out, but I'm content to simply understand it in its fullness when the time comes. If you reject the existence of a spiritual condition and connection with the natural world, there's not much of a way that it makes sense, nor are there any believers who fully understand it all or have all the answers anyway. Here I'm just being honest.

What do you mean theres no hellfire? The Bible says there is a lake of fire

double post

Last edited by Guitar_Girl on 13 Oct 2010, 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I just talked to my paster about this last week! lol! Thanks

Indeed. I would invite you to ask this of any Jehovah's Witnesses you meet. They may be able to sit down and help clarify your question.

see this is why jehovah's witnesses at your door are so much nicer than mormons at your door. they both believe what they're saying and really want to help you but the jehovah's witnesses don't start talking about satan's brother jesus being conceived by god physically having sex with mary behind joseph's back.

i really do like your logic on the ridiculousness of hellfire. angel's done a good job interpreting it out of his brand too. i don't think he understands that you don't want to engage in a critical discussion of your ideas and beliefs. i love ppr for the small changes it makes to my worldview. i like to believe that not everyone here is mindlessly pushing propaganda without any thought to what's inside other than what is discussed in their temple.

i'm constantly getting the "no true christian" copout around here, though, and that get's old.
and yet, here i am, looking at two christians with contradictory beliefs and they can't even talk about it?

silliness. just silliness.

Everything that really exists is physical. Your so-called spiritual plane of existence is an imaginary construct of your intellect and exists only as neural discharges in your brain.

ruveyn

No need for GPS coordinates to know there are hellish places on earth.

Many that really exists CAN manifest themselves in physical forms. You have no such physical thing as "morality" or "emotions," but we know those things to exist. You can observe human behavior to see how those things operate in a physical, real-world sense, but you can't put an "emotion" or a "moral value" on a scale and weigh them. You can argue that "emotions" are merely "neural discharges." But I'd hypothesize that the "neural discharges" are the physical manifestation of a pre-existing feeling--an internal kind of stimulus with no apparent physical source. That kind of argument could go on for days, but it still stands to reason that emotions do not exist in any kind of way that you could go to your local grocery and buy a pound of anger.

Morals are different. They don't even exist as neural discharges. Yet they do present what might even "feel" like a physical barrier to prevent someone from doing something they know they shouldn't do. If morals aren't real because don't physically exist, then there should be no problems with doing whatever you want to do. But you DON'T do just anything you want to do, or if you DO something you feel you shouldn't, you have to take the time and mental effort in rationalizing or justifying why you should do something that causes inner conflict. And that happens because of something that can't be said to physically exist.

So, logically, "invisible" and non-physical things DO exist, and since we can establish that those things exist, one may make conclusions regarding the spiritual plane, God and Satan, heaven and hell.

morals aren't much different than measurements. "right and wrong" "light and heavy" ... intellectual constructs aren't magic. emotions are chemical reactions. stop pretending that neuroscience, as far as it still has to go, doesn't/can't explain something just because it hasn't. scientific discoveries, unlike fictional stories, have to go all the way from hypothesis to conclusion instead of the other way around. patience and determination could help us discover the truth.

of course, we could always just make up "the truth" and hope we're right...

The practice of scientific inquiry is such that it denies anything for which there is no observed evidence. According to strict scientific empiricism, there is no such thing as, for example, logic. Yet most lines of inquiry do involve utilizing rules of logic. So why is it, then, that science declares all its conclusions as valid when the very thing necessary for its conclusions cannot be said scientifically to exist? The answer is easy enough--our understanding and implementation of science is not DESIGNED to explain those things. They still exist in one form or another. But science is not the place for discussing such things.

Psychology, on the other hand, IS designed to observe and draw conclusions regarding physical and cognitive behavior. It doesn't really "measure" emotions or attempt to explain where emotions come from, but it does make the connections between emotions and associated reactions to them.

Neurology, on the other hand, is not concerned with emotions at all. It might show that certain emotions reported by the person feeling them manifests itself in one area of the brain or another, and it may even show how abnormalities in neural pathways confuse how a person expresses emotions, but it cannot show anything at all about how emotions originate.

So science cannot show much about an actual emotion--it's not the JOB of science to do so. However, one MAY draw some conclusions about emotions from something like, for example, common sense.

And so may other conclusions be drawn about other things for which empirical evidence cannot be gathered, at least not in a physical sense. It just depends on what methods of observation one is willing to accept in determining what exists and what does not. Matters of the spirit can likewise be observable. It's just a matter of how willing a person is to accept it for what it is.

Logic is one of the -means- of science. It is not the -object- of scientific study. Since science requires that inference be drawn from hypotheses to produce predictions, how shall we draw these inferences? At random. By reading tea leaves? By studying bird dropping? No. We use logic both deductive and inductive.

ruveyn

My point exactly. My point is also that because it is one presupposition of science BUT not something that science can study, science alone cannot say that logic even exists.

With all due respect, ruveyn, I tend to agree with many of your views, but I find your apparent view of strict empiricism (assuming that to be true, perhaps I don't know you well enough) to be fundamentally flawed. In arguing in favor of empiricism, you rely only on one kind of knowledge--in your case, propositional knowledge. You aren't taking into account knowledge by acquaintance nor skill knowledge. In terms of how Christians relate to knowing God and Jesus, we really go more after all three kinds of knowledge. Relying on propositional knowledge, and empiricism exclusively, is no way to know anything.

Note I said "exclusively." You said "Everything that really exists is physical." Well, that's problematic because you can't physically know THAT, that is, "everything that really exists." So that claim is already false. But even if we COULD know everything that physically exists, there are good reasons to think that some things that we can know are non-empirical. Besides, beliefs that things exist that cannot be directly observed, such as love, the Holy Spirit, electrons, beauty, morals, and so on, work because we CAN infer those things from empirical observations. I can't "see" gravity, but I can throw an object and see whether it falls to the ground or not. I can also observe the relationships of planets to stars and to each other and infer that SOMETHING is going on. Knowing what God is doing or how God is active can be inferred from the physical world, and, as a documented example, people who observed Jesus to perform exorcisms, raise people from the dead, heal diseases and deformity, and so on knew Him to be who He claimed to be. And even if you didn't buy into the miracles, you have Jesus' claims to contend with. People who deny Jesus as the Messiah say He was just a reformer or great teacher. But we have a word that describes people who make those kinds of claims: Insane. Either Jesus was the real deal or He was insane. And based on the evidence of eyewitnesses (empirical evidence, by the way), we can reasonably conclude that Jesus had to be who He said He was.

Not only that, but we have non-empirical ways of knowing things, intuition being one of those. I'm not saying you'd go to a doctor who "believed" he could help you. But you don't need someone to tell you whether every single thing you do is right or wrong. I personally think that moral values have to be communicated from person to person, which does provide evidence for the existence of God. But some things that you don't "know" just "feel funny" based on some underlying principle. The conscience, for example is not some written or otherwise physical authority that spanks your hand, but somehow you just "know" that you should/shouldn't do certain things. That is based on intuition, not any empirical evidence or knowledge.

Therefore, it's easy to conclude on numerous grounds that empiricism is false. I think a more correct view would be something like moderate rationalism.

I know a few things from fictional works, so there you have knowledge that isn't emiprical. Really, the issue is the position that scientific empiricism is the best epistemological justification. compared to theology at least. And I tend to concur with that, there seems there is no better way to explain and get closer to reality than that. I mean, all theology can be conceived as just a bunch of made-up stuff out of necessity or that it is all unproved assumptions and ad hoc explanations for lack of empirical background to test things and explain life itself, because there was a need for it, given that there isn't much to examine some beliefs other than being ideologies.


It is false to you, because of your belief system, so you must reject his claim, in any case, if supernatural events that contradict the laws of physics cannot be verified empirically, there is no reason to claim to be factual with such a level of certainty, but rather it is reasonable to conclude that such events are unlikely a reality. Not only that, but what ruveyn said about only the physical exists has its value as that is the only thing that can be examined and observed, if something beyond exists out there, there must be evidence to support the claim of its existence, otherwise it is just speculation, people's imagination, thus the conclusion is highly questionable.


Such as?


Difference is that things like gravity can be measured and observed by empirical grounds, love is an abstract concept of what humans experience through emotions and cognition, which the source of all of it is physical, morality, religion and philosophy are abstract concepts, really you cannot justify God with the existence of love, as that leads to God residing only in the human psyche.


Documented, you mean the Bible? really you can't use the Bible to prove your point because the Bible itself is put into question, not to mention testimony from believers that they of course will support their beliefs.


Morality fails as an ontological argument, there is no need for deities to explain morality.


To know what is right or what is wrong is something that you learn, not something that you just know, and intuition is part of cognition, and intuition is unreliable about examine reality and come up with factual conclusions, so empiricism is better.


If empiricism is false, then we should have to reject all science, scientific discoveries, modern medicine, the process of the scientific method, because all is BS right? after all "empiricism is false".