Lasereth

I was wondering a couple of things. Firstly, did all of the native americans go to hell before Christopher Columbus discovered them and Christianity started to spread through North America? Isn't it a little unfair that they went to Hell for not believing even though they were never given the chance?

Secondly, why did the Indonesian Tsunami happen. Approximately 300,000 dead. That really sucks. God is omnipotent so he caused it so I would like an explanation because 300,000 people dying sucks.

Also, there are around 5,000,000,000 people in the world who aren't Christian. They believe that their own religion is right, and that Christians are going to their Hell for not believing in Their gods. Are those 5,000,000,000 going to Hell because their parents told them to believe in their religion that has been going for thousands of years?

All of this seems sorta fishy to me.

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"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

telekinetic

What perspective are you asking these questions from? A Christian, questioning things that don't mesh with his beliefs? An atheist, wanting Christians to question their beliefs? An atheist making semi-sarcastic observations?

Without knowing this I don't know how to respond, other than with a couple quotes:

"If the Bible and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree?" - Robert G. Ingersoll

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?"
-Epicurus

Edit: Based on your signature closely matching mine, I think I get a hint of your perspective, but then perhaps you should address your questions to believers, asking them how they rationalize these issues away.

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twisted no more

Lasereth

I just want flat out answers. It doesn't matter what my perspective is. I would like to hear it from anyone's point of view.

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"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

inBOIL

You could argue that all of these things are just, and humans simply lack the capacity to understand.

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And you believe Bush and the liberals and divorced parents and gays and blacks and the Christian right and fossil fuels and Xbox are all to blame, meanwhile you yourselves create an ad where your kid hits you in the head with a baseball and you don't understand the message that the problem is you.

Urban Caveman

From the point of view of a former theist who now just does not give a damn. (Note that all I say below is my own opinion and I'm entitled to it. So if anyone doesn't like it, they better suck it up.)

Firstly, God's people say that if you didn't get the chance, it's too late and you're going to hell. Serves you right for your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather choosing to serve the Earth rather than a metaphysical super-being that really does nothing for anyone.

Secondly, God don't like them chinks.

Thirdly, all religions are right and everyone's going to hell. No exceptions.

Now, to be serious, shit just happens. Children die everyday in Africa, and "God" is not helping them. Why? Religious people won't say it openly for fear of being branded racist, but they think they deserve it. (Bear in mind, I mean the hardcore religious people here.)

The Native Americans didn't go to hell. And they didn't go to heaven. When they died, their neural functions stopped, their brains turned off and their bodies slowly decomposed. End of story. No great redemption afterwards, no hope for a better life. Just plain old nothingness.

And if all this religious crap turns out to be true, I sincerely hope that the apple Eve took from the tree gave her orgasms for days on end and was totally worth it, because apparently, we're still paying for that one sin.

Daniel_

I was taught that the Church accepts that people who never heard the message of Christ can go to heaven provided they lived a good life.

Anyone that had heard of Christ can only go to heaven if they follow the teachings.

I once asked my Vicar if his goal was for more souls to go to heaven. It was.

I asked if he believed any good person who had not heard of Christ could go to heaven. He did.

I asked if he believed that a good person who chose not to follow Christ having heard of him could go to heaven. He said he did believe that.

I asked him if he realised that the logical answer to his desire was to ban teaching people about Christ, as that would mean ALL good sould were saved, rather than only those people who were good AND observant.

He was not impressed, and I scored very poorly on his RE exam that term.

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╔═════════════════════════════════════════╗
Overhead, the Albatross hangs motionless upon the air,
And deep beneath the rolling waves,
In labyrinths of Coral Caves,
The Echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand;
And everthing is Green and Submarine
╚═════════════════════════════════════════╝

telekinetic

*clap clap clap*

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twisted no more

northstar

1. Hell does not exist. Hypothetically, if it did, then a merciful God would not send innocent people to hell regardless of their opinions or knowledge of Jesus.

2. While I am agnostic, I am convinced there is no such thing as a personal God that effects everyday events on earth. As a Jewish person who studied the holocaust when I was younger I find the insinuation that God chooses which innocent people to torture and which innocent people to bless is simple preposterous.

3. If God does exist, he will understand the perspectives of people of all faiths and non-faiths who follow a righteous path. If God were that fascist, he simply would not be a benevolent being and I personally would want no part of him.

boink

I think Daniel is correct, somewhere in the bible it mentions something about people who hadn't gotten the message yet get a free pass.

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when you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain't the way.

asaris

1. I'm sure there's a thread somewhere in here about the problem of evil.

2. I believe that we don't know what happens to people who never heard the gospel. (And by we, I mean relatively orthodox Christians). Here's what I think we know:

God is just, and would be justified in sending everyone to hell (and by everyone, I mean Everyone -- you, me, the pope, Mother Teresa, everyone)
God is merciful, and doesn't want anyone to go to hell
If you believe in Christ and trust in him alone for your salvation, you won't go to hell.

I suspect that if you hear the gospel, and reject it, you're going to hell. But that's for a fairly broad definition of 'hear' -- someone who was molested by a priest at a young age, say, probably hasn't heard the gospel.

So where does that leave people who never heard the gospel? I don't know. I don't think anyone else knows either. The speculation I've heard that makes the most sense is you get to hear the gospel after you die, and can make a choice there. This would potentially be available for people who rejected the gospel during their lives as well. The Great Divorce actually gives a decent picture of how this might work.

As Daniel points out, simply being 'good' can't be correct on the Christian picture, since missionary work of some sort is crucial on the Christian picture. I'd argue that since we *know* that Christians are saved, it still makes sense to proselytize. I'd also argue that just being good isn't enough. Christianity teaches that salvation comes from a submission of one's will to God's, and it seems to me that it's possible, at least in the short run, to be a decent human being without this.

I want to expound on that last point, but this isn't really central to the point of the thread. Humility is a virtue, and since there is a unity of the virtues, it is impossible to be virtuous in the long run without humility. But in the short run, and we're only here on earth for the short run, it's possible to exemplify one or several virtues without possessing all of them. So one can be 'virtuous' without possessing the virtue central to salvation.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

roachboy

uh...first off there aren't flat-out answers to any of these questions.

1. christian theology--taken in a non-protestant sense, and so including catholicism--was once alarmingly consistent on this question. that's why the story of the harrowing of hell was fashioned--you know: while jeusus was dead he went on a road trip (i like to think of it as happening in a wood-panelled station wagon, but that's just me) to hell to get aristotle and plato so that christian thinking had some hope of making sense. it was hardly plausible to have these folk burning there when their work stood at the center of christianity itself. traditionally, xtianity has been kinda merciless toward the Outside.

think of it this way---for a certain population, the advent of the popiel pocket fisherman was a lifechanging event. but it could only be life-changing if you knew about the popiel pocket fisherman. if you didn't, too bad for you.

there's alot of conflicted business about native americans in earlyu euro=accounts of their colonial adventure in north america. before things like king philip's war, there was a tendency to describe them as children, presumably so they could be sent to limbo, which apparently wasn't so bad, an eternity of wandering around, compared with roasting on a spit or being upside down in ice.
this isn't so far from aquinas, really.
the outside is the outside and so is beyond our control---the Problem is the border: once you've heard about the popiel pocket fisherman you're in a position to buy it or reject it, and if you choose B then you're a Problem.
but the outside--beyond the reach of the infomercials of salvation--that's another matter. so limbo, i'd think.

2. shit happens.
there was a vaguely interesting debate about this concerning a earthquake that hit lisbon in the early/mid 18th century.
most of the positions that are still rehearsed now were rehearsed then.
voltaire, rousseau, all those cats played the game.
read that.

3 is a version of 1. there's a joke in there somewhere about the trinity, but i'll leave it to your imagination. it's probably funnier that way.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Zeraph

Not my answers as I'm not religious. But I've thought of these questions and asked religious people out of curiosity and had long, long debates about it.

The Indians that died or anyone else in a similar situation, still had a chance to believe in JC we just don't know what it was. Maybe god personally went to each of them (most christians would argue that the holy spirit, i.e. god's love does just that.) They may not know the english words for it, but the holy spirit gives everyone a chance.

As to pretty much all the other questions, the answer is simple: free will. God loves us, so he gave us free will, but with free will comes suffering. If he abolished all suffering then there'd be no free will, and we'd cease to exist in any real sense.

levite

Out of order, just for the ease of answer length.

1. Can't help you: don't believe in either Hell or Jesus.

3. I am not a Xian, so I can't say what their answer is. As a Jew, I can say that the overwhelming trend of Jewish thought historically is that one does not have to be Jewish to be a righteous person, and non-Jewish righteous people can and will enter the World to Come.

2. Theodicy:

OK, so this is my opinion. Some other Jews I know of believe similarly, but there is certainly no general consensus in the Jewish community, historically, about the answers to the theodicy question.

My opinion is that for whatever reasons, God created this universe, and not a different universe. Therefore, there must be some good reason-- which I admit I don't know-- for the rules of this universe being necessary. And this is a universe which cannot function without the elements of chaos, entropy, and evolution. To ask why God does not intervene to save people from natural disasters is to ask why God created this universe and not one that functions differently. Which may be a valid philosophical question, but to me makes no pragmatic sense. This is the universe we live in. We presume, among those of us who believe in religious teachings of one sort or another, that God had good reason to create the universe, even if we don't know what it is. If this is the universe we live in, we have to accept that it is the best that God could arrange for us. Nature is dangerous, yes, but it is also beautiful, and necessary, and its danger is not from malice. If you want to blame God for suffering from malice, that's not Nature, that's human free will.

God created us, we find in Genesis, in His own image: "in Our image, according to Our likeness." The classical Jewish commentators are clear that this is nothing physical, but the power of free will. And we abuse it daily. The hurt that comes to people in this world is disproportionately from human evil. Either direct evil action, like murder and rape and genocide; or the evil of inaction, like wasting hundreds of billions of dollars a year on weapons, and pointless attempts to quash petty vices, and elaborate schemes to help keep the disgustingly wealthy and powerful disgustingly wealthy and powerful, instead of on helping people and healing them and housing them.

I think trying to blame God for the suffering in the world is a waste of time. I think before we go off blaming God, we should probably look in the mirror first. And if our problem is with Nature, I say that maybe a better question is, when hundreds of thousands of people die every year from natural disasters, how come human beings are spending such a disproportionately massive amount of their resources on better preparing to kill one another or pamper the super-rich? We are creatures of free will. We have the resources, the innovative genius, and the power to create systems or invent technologies to save most of the people who die needlessly on this planet, and instead, we fritter those gifts away on creating better fighter aircraft and larger volumes of guns and bombs, or on making sure the idle rich can stay that way.

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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)

Lasereth

Just so I have this straight:

God does not intervene in natural disasters or in any type of human encounter. So bad things happen to good people, and bad people get rich, etc. Ok, so why do people pray? If God doesn't intervene and we all have free will, then what is the point of Him even existing? Prayer means nothing if He can't act on it. I've always heard that people pray to God to save the lives of others, to hope someone gets better, to hope that fortune comes their way, to hope they make an A on their test, to hope their basketball team wins. Why?

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"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

levite

This presumes that the only purpose of prayer is to try to get God to perform specific actions; and only if those actions take place precisely in the timeframe, style, and methodology we envision at the time of prayer as ideal do we consider the prayer to have "worked."

Now, I cannot speak for Christians or Muslims, but I can say at least that in the Jewish tradition, we are taught that there are three kinds of prayer: Praise, Thanks, and Request. We emphasize the first two kinds in our formal liturgy, although the third is certainly abundantly present also. Praise is the most important, we are taught, because without God's actions as Creator, we wouldn't be here to ask for anything anyhow. God is the Ultimate Source of All, the source of all holiness, and should be praised for that, full stop. We say he should be thanked, too, for our lives and the world we live in. As long as we are alive we have possibilities; and the world, though dangerous, is also filled with beauty and joy and hope, and God should be thanked for those things, without "strings attached." We should certainly ask God for requests, but our liturgical tradition emphasizes communal requests of a slightly more abstract nature ("prosper our people," etc.), and although I cannot speak for other Jews in this, I at least was always taught that when I made personal requests to God, they might be answered in ways I couldn't recognize or understand, or they might be sometimes unanswered if that were what was best for me overall (which again I might not be able to recognize) or if they were unanswerable (i.e. I was asking God for something either entirely dependent upon my own free will or in conflict with the free will of another).

People pray because they want to commune with their Creator. Requests are only a part of it, and the educated pray-er will understand that their request may or may not be answered, and if answered, may not be in the time or place or style envisioned by the pray-er.

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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)

Willravel

Answers from my point of view:
Hell is the stick part of the carrot and stick of religion. Positive reinforcement isn't enough to keep people in line, so there has to be a threat of punishment. By my understanding, most Native Americans didn't have a concept of eternal punishment after death before Christianity arrived. They didn't go to hell, of course, they simply stopped being alive and decomposed.
The tsunami was caused by plate tectonics. Pressure under the plates caused the India Plate to slide under the Burma Plate by about 30 feet, which caused sudden and large scale movement of water. The water hit land and a lot of people and property were destroyed or damaged.

The modern god construct isn't consistent enough in religious texts to make a certain guess. Genesis or Qur'an god might have done it out of spite or punishment, NT god might have a "plan" which the tsunami fits into. Odin probably had nothing to do with it.
There are about 4 billion non-Christians and only about 2.5 billion non-Abrahamics. By most Christian and Muslim teachings, yes the remainder will be burning in hell for all eternity.

It doesn't bother me in the least that a majority of the planet thinks I'm going to be tortured for all eternity because I disbelieve the existence of god or gods.

prosequence

Lasereth, you have a lot of questions about God, have you ever asked him personally?

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And now here I stand because of you, Mister Anderson, because of you I'm no longer an agent of the system, because of you I've changed...

Willravel

I think that's the point, prosequence.

prosequence

I'm not sure if I see the point; Lasereth, are you: 1) A non-believer who looking for an arguement or 2)Believer who is honestly having a hard time "connecting" with God ?

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And now here I stand because of you, Mister Anderson, because of you I'm no longer an agent of the system, because of you I've changed...