Feb17
Infinite Punishment for a Finite Crime!
7 Responses to “Infinite Punishment for a Finite Crime!”
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Everything Hell
Posted on:
February 17th, 2008 at 2:13pm.
Posted by: AJ
There's 7 comments so far.
Last comment was posted 10 months ago.
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Barry
Said this on February 18th, 2008 at 1:03am:I find the concept of an infinite punishment for an infinite crime hard to stomach. It doesn’t fit with the biblical concept of God as a loving deity. I subscribe to the idea of conditional immortality - immortality is the gift of God to those who believe, while those who don’t will “perish” (John 3:16), i.e. will cease to be.
More on my views on the immortality of the soul and our eternal destiny on my blog: http://tinyurl.com/2e6vlh
AJ
Said this on February 18th, 2008 at 9:31pm:Hey Barry: Thanks for this comment. I have taken a look at your blog on this subject and find your thoughts interesting – though, I follow a different path. I think I will engage with your post with a post to my own blog later.
Barry
Said this on February 24th, 2008 at 7:53pm:Oops - I meant, of course, “infinite punishment for a FINITE crime”.
Thanks for your comments on my blog, by the way.
Saint Peter
Said this on March 2nd, 2008 at 10:30pm:I take it that this cartoon is implying that a God that sends people to eternal hell is not worth being with, or worshiping? If that is the case then if someone doesn’t believe in such a nasty God they are obliviously nicer than God himself.
Of course, there is the notion that God doesn’t send people to endless damnation and that millions of people throughout the ages have been wrong. This though, would mean that those that don’t believe in such a punishment are far cleverer than those stupid evangelicals!
Mind you, we could always invent a doctrine that embraced both. We could keep the eternal happy stuff in heaven, and to avoid the endless pain bit we could get those naughty folk annihilated and do away with hell. That would solve it all. No more nasty God and no more screams of pain distracting us from singing ‘blessed be the name of the Lord’. This way both God and I can be proved very nice, merciful and just. The only problem here is that the Bible doesn’t quite put it like this…… I know we could always question what the Bible really meant when it said ‘endless’!!! Those bloody evangelicals, I’ll show them who the clever one is!
AJ
Said this on March 10th, 2008 at 8:07pm:Hey Saint Peter
I think you are right in your interpretation of this cartoon; certainly I do not want to spend an eternity with such an unjust god. It is not that I consider myself “nicer” than God, it is just that I take Genesis seriously when I understand myself to be made in his/her image. I believe any sense of Justice I might intuit ultimately derives from that more lofty aspect of our shared humanity, which I understand to be some form of reflection of the divine.
I do believe that millions of people are wrong concerning their understanding of hell just as millions of Old Testament believers were wrong to justify genocide / ethnic cleansing in the name of God. The only way I can make sense of all this is to accept some form of progressive revelation.
I am not certain how I unpack my understanding of hell but I will blog on the subject as my thoughts develop – watch this pace.
Saint Peter
Said this on March 11th, 2008 at 9:46am:You say ‘it is just that I take Genesis seriously when I understand myself to be made in his/her image’, I think it would be fair to say that all Christains would say this too. The person who did the cartoon would say this too.
I also ‘believe that millions of people are wrong concerning their understanding of hell’ but you write ‘millions of Old Testament believers were wrong to justify genocide / ethnic cleansing in the name of God’. Do you mean those that did the cleansing in the name of God -i.e. the Israelites (those ‘in’ the story) or those that read it today and believe it is right or teach it is a model to be followed and the best approach?
And…. is the ‘only way’ we ‘can make sense of all this is to accept some form of progressive revelation’?
AJ
Said this on March 11th, 2008 at 8:17pm:Hey Saint Peter, responding again to each of your points…
You write:
I did not mean to imply that I held this belief exclusively but more that it supplies me with theological resource for conclusions I intuit concerning God.
You write:
My point was to say that just because millions of people believe something, it does not make it true - I was referring to the Israelites in the story.
You write:
Hmmm… here you do not quite quote me correctly: I said the “only way I….” can make sense of all this; my point, to hint at how I begin to go about resolving some of these difficult issues in the bible. You should know me well enough by now to know that I don’t believe in “only ways…” for everyone else!