this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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Atheism
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Just gonna say, as a Catholic, He never sends anyone to Hell, they send themeselves to Hell. Furthermore, the whole "Hell is the worst pain you can imagine" immediately makes one think Of a torture chamber. That isn't neccessarily what Hell is. Hell is simply a separation from God. It is being alone and miserable that is thgreatest pain.
The whole idea of God sending people to infinite torture because man is a depraved, wicked thing is a very harmful calvinistic idea.
Not trying to be a troll. I just want to set the records straight.
That's just moving around minutia of details and ignoring the skeleton of the argument, then re-stating a similar enough version of what the meme ridicules.
If god alone can fill the hole in your heart, why did he leave such vague instructions in a world full of grifters, with availability limited by geographical and cultural lottery, and expect us to believe this religion of others at face value?
I gotta say, ignorance being bliss is a true thing. All you have to do is look to "spiritual" (often just non-denominational pagan) people to see the same patterns of feeding themselves simple platitudes with a supernatural basis to fill the certainty and self-esteem needs they have.
If God created everything, he created evil. He created the possibility for separation and he is the one that made us fallible. What value is free will if the price is eternal misery?
Not only that, but if he is truly all powerful, he should be able to rebuild reality in a way of which a person could have free will completely, while never be at risk of hellfire. Either he chooses not to do this which makes him not all loving, or he cannot do this which makes him not all powerful. Either way, this just makes him a giant wad of holy fuck juice in my eyes with an ego issue, undeserving of my praise.
There's a work of fiction called UNSONG which posits an answer for this - essentially that God's purpose is to maximize the amount of good that exists, but at the level of abstraction he functions two identical things are really just one thing, one template. So he creates a perfect world, then ones with a single imperceptible flaw, then ones with two such flaws, etc. Eventually you reach ones whose potential for good is only a slight net positive, and that's more the neighborhood we're in.
See, but then there's the problem
that would make him not all powerful
And under that concept I see absolutely no reason to worship him.
The nature of hell varies wildly among different branches of Christianity. In some sects it absolutely is torture.
I personally think the idea of living separated from god with all the other people who rejected him sounds pretty awesome.
How do you know what hell is like?
I drove through it once.
Cool. I was born in Hell and lived my whole life there.
Turns out hellfire was the global warming all along
Just gotta say, also as a person raised Catholic and who has studied it's history a lot, your understanding of the teachings of Catholicism are very modern, heavily debated even today within the Catholic Church, and would not be supported by the church's teachings even 70 years ago. Just go look at the art in a Catholic church from more than 70 years ago, and you will find people being judged and sent to torture.
So heaven, nice
I'm a recently self-excommunicated Catholic, couldn't be prouder.
john Kramer from saw doesn't kill people, they kill themselves by not completing the trap! (ignore that John is the one who put them in there)
Though to be fair, his disciples were bad about intentionally making the trap unwinnable. Especially Amanda.
🤓
Hey, you gotta understand religion if you want to effectively argue against it, so thanks! Clarification is always welcome! I don’t see any trolling here.
The clarification is fairly stupid, that being said. "He doesn't send you there, you send yourself there" is a distinction without a difference when the all powerful god not only is the only reason hell exists, but supposedly created this world and the people in it knowing ahead of time specifically which people would go to the hell he created. It's like saying I didn't stab you, you just didn't get out of the way of my knife.
Their clarification is basically just a modern white-washing of their jealous, vengeful, and petty god's holy doctrine, since the traditional "god hates you if you're not just so" is working on less and less of the population
I do love a good fictional story! Tell us the one about the talking serpent…oh and the one about the (makes air quotes) virgin.
Okay okay, I troll…I troll…
"Stop hitting yourself" isn't even the worst theological argument.
There are so many to choose from, which one is the worst is very hard to determine. From completely insane nonsense like the ontological argument to those that just ignore that they would apply to every other religion equally like Pascal's Wager there is a lot of competition.
I guess that is bound to happen when all arguments are far from good, they have to cluster around the 'bad to worst' part of the spectrum.
When little baby mindbleach still figured the religious hypothesis deserved a fair shake, I bought and skimmed an apologetics book. I think the moment I gave up was reading 'the argument from magic' that said you can control matter with your mind. Namely: your hand.
There is a subtle but crucial difference between "come the fuck on" and "you've gotta be fucking kidding me."