What do you guys believe about salvation? I Read articles such as http://biblereasons.com/salvation-and-being-saved/. This is really getting to me. I've been thinking about life and the afterlife lately. Does Jesus save us? Has anyone else thought about this stuff? Looking for opinions. Thanks for anything you can share.
well, first and foremost I believe that dead people are dead, and neither suffer nor anything else. There is no heaven.
Putting that aside, the bible's view of salvation is more or less incoherent. No sin I could possibly commit would give any good person the justification for eternal tourment, even if they thought it deserved punishment.
Consider this: If I were a person born who had never heard of Jesus, would it be justifiable to punish me eternally for that? Would it be reasonable to damn me for all time for the time and place of my birth?
I'm going to assume you think that isn't justified; they've had no chance to be saved, after all, and it would make god a bit of a jerk to punish them for it.
But then: I, by being born and *having* heard of Jesus, am being punished. I am made - and god necessarily knows in advance - in a way that I am not a believer. Should I be punished for this? With eternal tourment? Seems sub-par.
Should I be punished for this? With eternal tourment?
There is no finite crime (and by necessity, anything a human does is finite) which is deserving of infinite punishment. That isn't "justice".
As far as salvation in the Bible goes, it's all over the place. If you take the Bible at its word, you can be saved by everything from "doing absolutely nothing" to "getting tortured", and several of the options are contradictory.
Be a good person. If when you die you find out that Heaven exists and being good wasn't enough to meet the cover charge, it wasn't a club worth getting into anyway.
The Bible can't even decide on its way of salvation. Some verses say we are saved by faith(one explicitly saying it's not of works) and others by works and by faith, so which is true.
In the absence of evidence, being saved by faith in the absence of evidence as a precondition I would say IS immoral. If I were God, I would either give them evidence, or just let anyone go to heaven whether or not they believed in me in their lifetime.
If atheists go to hell, do babies that die young go to hell because they never believed that the Bible was true? If those babies go to heaven, do atheists go to heaven? That would be my challenge.
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Here's the thing. Even among christians there are different opinions about what the bible means. Who's to say who is right and who is wrong? The most actually helpful verse in the bible about this would have to be Philippians 2:12. It says to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling before god. In other words it's between you and him. Don't let anybody else tell you what to think. You have to work it out between you and the most unthikably powerful being imaginable. That's a rough road, but it's the way that works. Pray.
The only answer that can actually be accurate really is "we don't know". We can certainly argue about things like near death experiences and all sorts of other things, but at the end of the day no one is going to be able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt what the afterlife is like if it exists.
Granted I think logically speaking that it makes no sense, while I believe in an afterlife/spiritual things the way it's set up within Christianity is rather absurd, but the "we don't know" still applies.
What do you guys believe about salvation? I Read articles such as http://biblereasons.com/salvation-and-being-saved/. This is really getting to me. I've been thinking about life and the afterlife lately. Does Jesus save us? Has anyone else thought about this stuff? Looking for opinions. Thanks for anything you can share.
Fortunately, there is no compelling reason to believe that an afterlife exists. All our experience indicates that a person's mind and identity is dependent on and determined by their physical brain. You don't exist before your brain develops. Taking brain damage can radically change a personality. You can lose a limb and keep on living, but destroy the brain and it's all gone.
We're pretty clearly software and the brains are our hardware. Destroy the hard drive of a computer and ask if the data that lived on it goes to an afterlife. Obviously there's no reason to think so, and it would invalidate our understanding of how things work.
This shouldn't be troubling, unless you live in terror of your memories of how it felt to not exist for billions and billions of years. I personally don't remember that experience as being too troubling.
What do you guys believe about salvation? I Read articles such as http://biblereasons.com/salvation-and-being-saved/. This is really getting to me. I've been thinking about life and the afterlife lately. Does Jesus save us? Has anyone else thought about this stuff? Looking for opinions. Thanks for anything you can share.
Fortunately, there is no compelling reason to believe that an afterlife exists. All our experience indicates that a person's mind and identity is dependent on and determined by their physical brain. You don't exist before your brain develops. Taking brain damage can radically change a personality. You can lose a limb and keep on living, but destroy the brain and it's all gone.
We're pretty clearly software and the brains are our hardware. Destroy the hard drive of a computer and ask if the data that lived on it goes to an afterlife. Obviously there's no reason to think so, and it would invalidate our understanding of how things work.
This shouldn't be troubling, unless you live in terror of your memories of how it felt to not exist for billions and billions of years. I personally don't remember that experience as being too troubling.
The fear of dying is not just about not existing though- it's about stopping existing. That doesn't happen around you being born, but it does happen when you die.
The fear of dying is not just about not existing though- it's about stopping existing. That doesn't happen around you being born, but it does happen when you die.
While loss aversion is significant, I don't see an appreciable difference. I'm still comparing the experience of not existing to existing now. While I'd rather continue existing at present (put me in a bad enough situation and non-existence will become preferable), I don't view the experience of future non-existence to be terrifying.
It's also not really correct to think in terms of what you lose, because you aren't existing consciously in a state of nothingness. You aren't conscious either, you can't be aware of a sense of loss to begin with. Or a sense of boredom.
It has been commented that the original post was likely an adbot. Given the perfectly reasonable discussion going on here, I'm going to let it slide. Continue on.
I think that many people have insecurities as to whether or not they have done enough in life, hence fear of death.
Life without the hope of salvation or something more is a sad existence and ultimately meaningless. We exist only to repeat the cycle of "life" as our fathers, and their fathers. For what? Life needs salvation, a hope for a better tomorrow, a better future for ourselves and those around us. Otherwise, we all might as well be Nihilist and disregard moral laws and the value of human life.
There is no god, no afterlife. People don't have invisible spirits that live inside their bodies and go to some magical paradise after they die. Religion was something that was invented by very primitive people to explain to themselves a world that they could not understand. Now that we know better, it's time to get rid of religion for good. No other force in the world today causes as much death and destruction as religion. How many people over the years have died prematurely because of some stupid religious conflict who otherwise, with the proper schooling and training, could have made substantial contributions had they not died, like finding the cure for old age. If humanity is ever going to really succeed, then we need to finally rid ourselves of these primitive superstitions and work with reality as is.
Life without the hope of salvation or something more is a sad existence and ultimately meaningless.
A finite life which will be followed by an infinite afterlife is a sad existence and ultimately meaningless. Nothing is meaningful when compared to infinity.
If you drop the expectation of an eternal afterlife (even ignoring the question of salvation), this life literally becomes infinitely more valuable.
Life without the hope of salvation or something more is a sad existence and ultimately meaningless.
A finite life which will be followed by an infinite afterlife is a sad existence and ultimately meaningless. Nothing is meaningful when compared to infinity.
If you drop the expectation of an eternal afterlife (even ignoring the question of salvation), this life literally becomes infinitely more valuable.
Compared to this world with it's suffering, war, and depravity, eternity with the most powerful being in existence doesnt sound too bad.
If it existed and that being was actually benevolent, sure. But we don't know that it exists, and the "evidence" we do have (ie: the text of the Bible) paints a pretty ugly picture of god.
Life without the hope of salvation or something more is a sad existence and ultimately meaningless. We exist only to repeat the cycle of "life" as our fathers, and their fathers. For what? Life needs salvation, a hope for a better tomorrow, a better future for ourselves and those around us. Otherwise, we all might as well be Nihilist and disregard moral laws and the value of human life.
This is just a bargain sale of unrelated arguments. Several of them are actually outright contradictory. Mortal lives gain value when there is no promise of an infinite afterlife, this is why you have apologists arguing that it doesn't matter that god lets babies die because they're going to be happy in heaven.
This is the kind of absurdity that comes with people starting with fears and flawed premises. Just a collection of unrelated attempts at rationalization. Do you enjoy living at all? Do you enjoy warm sunshine or a tasty meal? Do you enjoy friends, family, playing MTG? Do you find your life preferable to an endless, dreamless sleep? If so your life absotootly is worth living, heaven or not. And if the only reason you don't murder babies is because you're scared god will be mean to you later, you're a much worse person than I think you are. But you can still be afraid of life in prison I suppose, if you really are a closet serial killer waiting to snap.
I think you guys misunderstood me. I simply meant, without some higher being, any and all laws have no grounding or weight, and no one has any right to say what is right or wrong in the end. I'm paraphasing C.S. Lewis's Moral Law argument that humans have some internal bearing as to what is right or wrong. This compass, if you will, is in his (and my) opinion, a sign of some higher authority.
In the end, I know I'll never win this debate, especially not on an internet forum.
To the OP, I simply ask you look for yourself. Speak to people in your life that fall on both sides of the debate and have an open mind. Your decision in the end is entirely up to you.
I think you guys misunderstood me. I simply meant, without some higher being, any and all laws have no grounding or weight, and no one has any right to say what is right or wrong in the end.
Why would this be true?
I'm paraphasing C.S. Lewis's Moral Law argument that humans have some internal bearing as to what is right or wrong. This compass, if you will, is in his (and my) opinion, a sign of some higher authority.
Except this argument that "God is the source of all morality, therefore the sense of morality in us is proof of God" is problematic for a few reasons:
1. It's begging the question. You're presuming that God is the source of all morality from the onset, and then using that claim to prove itself true. Demonstrate this to actually be true. Why does morality necessarily need to come from God, and what is your evidence that it must come from God or not at all?
2. The argument about conscience necessarily demonstrating God is not one I believe holds water, as it implies the moral code espoused by Christianity is a perfectly natural thing. But I would argue the exact opposite. I would argue that the ethic of "love your enemies as yourself" and "turn the other cheek" are are not natural human responses.
3. Here's the biggest problem I have with the argument. If God is the source of all morality, then everything God does or is must be moral, correct? But then how do we judge that? Meaning: if everything God does is moral, do we alter our conception of moral to fit our conception of God, or do we alter our conception of God to fit what we believe is moral?
Because the fact of the matter is that God as expressed in the Bible is not a - well first of all, not a consistent being, certainly. The Bible is composed of many separate books authored by numerous peoples over many, many time periods, each having their own beliefs and traditions, and the beliefs and traditions naturally contradict.
But also, there are numerous instances in which God does things that would contradict the very moral code he seems to espouse later. Do we proclaim this to be good, or do we say this is not the truth about God, because God wouldn't do these things because they're not good?
Essentially we're getting at a variant of the Euryphro dilemma: Is it good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? I've yet to find a solution for this one.
In the end, I know I'll never win this debate, especially not on an internet forum.
See, here's the thing: it's one thing to not win in an internet argument because people are just being trolls responding with all of the substance of a child saying, "NUH-UH!" but people here are pointing out issues of substance in your argument.
I think you guys misunderstood me. I simply meant, without some higher being, any and all laws have no grounding or weight, and no one has any right to say what is right or wrong in the end. I'm paraphasing C.S. Lewis's Moral Law argument that humans have some internal bearing as to what is right or wrong. This compass, if you will, is in his (and my) opinion, a sign of some higher authority.
Is morality that which god likes, or does god like moral things?
If the former, then morality is arbitrary, and god can change what's moral on a whim. One day murder's bad, the next day it's good.
If the latter, then god isn't what defines morality. This means it is ostensibly possible for us to discover what is moral on our own, without the need for god.
This is essentially the Euthyphro dilemma from Plato around 400 BCE.
Good summary. Also "morality" is just a fuzzy concept the way most people present it. It implies that good actions and bad actions must be externally validated in some way. Things clear up a lot when you ask "good for what?" What are good ways to behave when our behavior affects others?
Once you start thinking of the result we care about it, the result we'd like to achieve for how society operates, it becomes pretty clear why a god isn't necessary to determine that murder is bad. Murdering other people for no reason, or just for kicks, has some pretty obvious negative consequences for the people affected.
Putting that aside, the bible's view of salvation is more or less incoherent. No sin I could possibly commit would give any good person the justification for eternal tourment, even if they thought it deserved punishment.
Consider this: If I were a person born who had never heard of Jesus, would it be justifiable to punish me eternally for that? Would it be reasonable to damn me for all time for the time and place of my birth?
I'm going to assume you think that isn't justified; they've had no chance to be saved, after all, and it would make god a bit of a jerk to punish them for it.
But then: I, by being born and *having* heard of Jesus, am being punished. I am made - and god necessarily knows in advance - in a way that I am not a believer. Should I be punished for this? With eternal tourment? Seems sub-par.
As far as salvation in the Bible goes, it's all over the place. If you take the Bible at its word, you can be saved by everything from "doing absolutely nothing" to "getting tortured", and several of the options are contradictory.
Be a good person. If when you die you find out that Heaven exists and being good wasn't enough to meet the cover charge, it wasn't a club worth getting into anyway.
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In the absence of evidence, being saved by faith in the absence of evidence as a precondition I would say IS immoral. If I were God, I would either give them evidence, or just let anyone go to heaven whether or not they believed in me in their lifetime.
If atheists go to hell, do babies that die young go to hell because they never believed that the Bible was true? If those babies go to heaven, do atheists go to heaven? That would be my challenge.
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Protection from Will-O'-the-Wisps, Ali-from-Cairos, and Uncle-Istvans
Legendary snow landwalk
---------------------------------------
On the reserved list: Wizards won't remove it. Only we can. In other words: Play Modern, Pauper, or No-RL Eternal.
Granted I think logically speaking that it makes no sense, while I believe in an afterlife/spiritual things the way it's set up within Christianity is rather absurd, but the "we don't know" still applies.
Fortunately, there is no compelling reason to believe that an afterlife exists. All our experience indicates that a person's mind and identity is dependent on and determined by their physical brain. You don't exist before your brain develops. Taking brain damage can radically change a personality. You can lose a limb and keep on living, but destroy the brain and it's all gone.
We're pretty clearly software and the brains are our hardware. Destroy the hard drive of a computer and ask if the data that lived on it goes to an afterlife. Obviously there's no reason to think so, and it would invalidate our understanding of how things work.
This shouldn't be troubling, unless you live in terror of your memories of how it felt to not exist for billions and billions of years. I personally don't remember that experience as being too troubling.
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The fear of dying is not just about not existing though- it's about stopping existing. That doesn't happen around you being born, but it does happen when you die.
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While loss aversion is significant, I don't see an appreciable difference. I'm still comparing the experience of not existing to existing now. While I'd rather continue existing at present (put me in a bad enough situation and non-existence will become preferable), I don't view the experience of future non-existence to be terrifying.
It's also not really correct to think in terms of what you lose, because you aren't existing consciously in a state of nothingness. You aren't conscious either, you can't be aware of a sense of loss to begin with. Or a sense of boredom.
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I think that many people have insecurities as to whether or not they have done enough in life, hence fear of death.
If you drop the expectation of an eternal afterlife (even ignoring the question of salvation), this life literally becomes infinitely more valuable.
That's demonstrably untrue, since I have hope for a better tomorrow for myself and the people around me without an expectation of salvation.
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Compared to this world with it's suffering, war, and depravity, eternity with the most powerful being in existence doesnt sound too bad.
Salvation from ourselves. Humans suck. Turn on the news or look at history.
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This is just a bargain sale of unrelated arguments. Several of them are actually outright contradictory. Mortal lives gain value when there is no promise of an infinite afterlife, this is why you have apologists arguing that it doesn't matter that god lets babies die because they're going to be happy in heaven.
This is the kind of absurdity that comes with people starting with fears and flawed premises. Just a collection of unrelated attempts at rationalization. Do you enjoy living at all? Do you enjoy warm sunshine or a tasty meal? Do you enjoy friends, family, playing MTG? Do you find your life preferable to an endless, dreamless sleep? If so your life absotootly is worth living, heaven or not. And if the only reason you don't murder babies is because you're scared god will be mean to you later, you're a much worse person than I think you are. But you can still be afraid of life in prison I suppose, if you really are a closet serial killer waiting to snap.
Remaking Magic - A Podcast for those that love MTG and Game Design
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Sig-Heroes of the Plane
In the end, I know I'll never win this debate, especially not on an internet forum.
To the OP, I simply ask you look for yourself. Speak to people in your life that fall on both sides of the debate and have an open mind. Your decision in the end is entirely up to you.
Except this argument that "God is the source of all morality, therefore the sense of morality in us is proof of God" is problematic for a few reasons:
1. It's begging the question. You're presuming that God is the source of all morality from the onset, and then using that claim to prove itself true. Demonstrate this to actually be true. Why does morality necessarily need to come from God, and what is your evidence that it must come from God or not at all?
2. The argument about conscience necessarily demonstrating God is not one I believe holds water, as it implies the moral code espoused by Christianity is a perfectly natural thing. But I would argue the exact opposite. I would argue that the ethic of "love your enemies as yourself" and "turn the other cheek" are are not natural human responses.
3. Here's the biggest problem I have with the argument. If God is the source of all morality, then everything God does or is must be moral, correct? But then how do we judge that? Meaning: if everything God does is moral, do we alter our conception of moral to fit our conception of God, or do we alter our conception of God to fit what we believe is moral?
Because the fact of the matter is that God as expressed in the Bible is not a - well first of all, not a consistent being, certainly. The Bible is composed of many separate books authored by numerous peoples over many, many time periods, each having their own beliefs and traditions, and the beliefs and traditions naturally contradict.
But also, there are numerous instances in which God does things that would contradict the very moral code he seems to espouse later. Do we proclaim this to be good, or do we say this is not the truth about God, because God wouldn't do these things because they're not good?
Essentially we're getting at a variant of the Euryphro dilemma: Is it good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? I've yet to find a solution for this one.
See, here's the thing: it's one thing to not win in an internet argument because people are just being trolls responding with all of the substance of a child saying, "NUH-UH!" but people here are pointing out issues of substance in your argument.
If the former, then morality is arbitrary, and god can change what's moral on a whim. One day murder's bad, the next day it's good.
If the latter, then god isn't what defines morality. This means it is ostensibly possible for us to discover what is moral on our own, without the need for god.
This is essentially the Euthyphro dilemma from Plato around 400 BCE.
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Once you start thinking of the result we care about it, the result we'd like to achieve for how society operates, it becomes pretty clear why a god isn't necessary to determine that murder is bad. Murdering other people for no reason, or just for kicks, has some pretty obvious negative consequences for the people affected.
Remaking Magic - A Podcast for those that love MTG and Game Design
The Dungeon Master's Guide - A Podcast for those that love RPGs and Game Design
Sig-Heroes of the Plane