Hell is Separation from God

Hell is nothing more, and nothing less, than separation from God.

People who choose to be separated from God in this life, and make no effort to repair their relationship with God, will be separated from God in the next life.

What does separation from God mean?

God is love, so hell is a place where there is no love.

This is not fire and brimstone, it is something infinitely worse.

But no one can claim that God is unfair to send people to hell. Everyone in hell chose to go there.

 

A fear based doctrine.

 

Great post Blackroot. IMHO... absolute TRUTH.

 

How can you 'fear' something that you do not believe in? Are you also fearful of the boogie man that might be under your bed or hiding in your closet or waiting for you somewhere in the dark?

 

How is a God who gives you exactly what you want trying to scare you?

 

So, in my case for example, absolutely no different to how I am now?

That presumes it is possible to choose to believe in God (unless it's possible to avoid Hell without belief in God). I don't see how that is possible.

Also, what are you basing this very specific and detailed information on? Why does it conflict with concepts of Hell presented by other believers with equal conviction and confidence?

 

Define "God".

 

God is with you.

 

That's a bit creepy - I just came back from the bathroom.

It seems you're fundamentally disagreeing with Blackroot though since he's talking about people who choose to be separate from God while you're suggests he's with me even if I could choose to be separate?

As with Blackroot, I'm interested where your information comes from and why it differs from what other believers suggest (as you seem to have demonstrated for me).

 

OK...the idea that forsaking "God" is to live without love...is absurd.

but nice try...

 

There is no way you can convince me that humans would not be able to love without God, yet would still somehow be conscious or sentient.

The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that God gives you a new body and not the rest of us... which would leave the rest of us in nothingness. After all, without a human brain, there probably wouldn't be love... or any other human emotion.

This cannot be true. No emotional feeling would be worse than the physical pain of burning to death constantly. Imagine what that pain would do to your mental state.

The fear is for people who do believe or are targets for conversion (might believe), not those who don't believe. Non-believers are irrelevant to a religion, except in their ability to compete for followers.

By threatening to take it away if you don't do everything He says.
That seems pretty obvious.
God is an authoritarian parent. It's no wonder we are all so dysfunctional.

If God was absent, I would not suddenly stop loving. He would have to remove my capacity for love.

I understand that what Christians mean is some concept of Real Love that requires God. Completely unfounded concept. But, still, non-Christians would be without this in this life, as such would already be in Hell.

 

No, however I have explained this dozens of times and you have yet to understand a simple argument.

Should I attempt to explain it again, or leave you to drown in ignorance?

 

God designed the amazing human body--I don't think he's surprised by how it functions.

Are you in Hell? No. He's giving you an opportunity to change your mind about eternity before your last breath.

It comes from the Bible. The Western view of Hell is based on metaphorical/symbolic language of the Bible, and Dante Alighieri. What the Bible actually says is that we see "through a glass darkly."

 

What is "it?" If you reject God and he lets you reject him, how is that taking ANYHING away. It's giving you what you want--no God.

Blackrook is not talking about this life--he's talking about Hell--the AFTER life for those that don't want God. Don't shift the topic.

 

Guess 3/4 of the people on planet are doomed to hell then. What about the poor sods in faraway places who have never heard of God.
Sorry, I view that post as just another attempt at pushing religion down my throat.

 

This is the thing a lot of Christians don't seem to understand (probably because they imagine it goes against the dogma):
Atheists don't necessarily want life without God.
They just don't believe in God.

I want all manner of wonderful things to be true (some of the many versions of the Christian God fit into this). Wanting them to be true does not make them appear any more true to me.

That means that God is purposely ensuring that in the next life, our bodies are designed without the capacity for love.
This ruins Blackrook's argument that it's not punitive.

God could just as easily give us normal human bodies or just let us cease to exist.

 

We could be, I don't know. We've not establish how we'd tell yet.

But I can't simply choose to believe and even if I could, I don't see it's clear what I'm "meant" to believe.

How do you know it (and your interpretation of it) is an entirely accurate representation of reality?

 

A human seperation form 'god', would be 'heaven'.

 

What we "want" as human beings often is not what we perceive as good. We do many things that result in negative consequences due to the choices we make--some for good, some out of weakness, some out of warped desperation.

Rom.7

[15] I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
[16] Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good.
[18] For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.
[19] For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
[20] Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.

God is evident. If you persist in thinking He is not, that is your choice to ignore the evidence all around you.

I don't understand this point. What are you saying?

 

It's not entirely a fear based doctrine, though Blackrook's example does create a separation that doesn't make any sense. The "kingdom of heaven is within you" doctrine is one of forgiveness and unconditional love. It's the doctrine that the kingdom of heaven, or enlightenment or nirvana or whatever you want to call the oneness with the Is/God, is within you and that it's entirely your choice whether you open your eyes or not. It's a doctrine that can work for the non-theist as well as the theist. Fear-based doctrines describe Hell as a place and Heaven as a place, and that there is an angry sky-daddy or some other "supreme" being that judges you in the afterlife and then sends you to one of those places.

Those who understand that the kingdom of heaven is with in you may or may not subscribe to the afterlife, but hell is nothing to be feared because God (or the Is) is everywhere.

 

If God is omnipresent, then there is no place that is Hell, and even if one is separated from God, one can always come to God again.

Or, are you arguing that God is not omnipresent and therefore not entirely in control of his creation?

 

There is disagreement among theologians on this. Some argue that the souls of the (*)(*)(*)(*)ed are destroyed at the second judgement and so cease to be. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV2&byte=5591346

 

I don't understand the relevance.
Frankly I think the entire argument about atheists "wanting" God not to exist is some kind of projection.

The evidence around me suggests that the world is a consequence of chaos and that religion is a social construct.
Maybe you see something different in the evidence, most likely do to your perception being different than mine. This has nothing to do with choice.

Evidence is that, whether an undetectable soul exists or not, it's the brain that gives us feelings, thoughts, emotions, and perceptions. Without a brain, we would not have these things.
If a soul exists, I'm not sure what it actually contains-- must be something like software.

So without a body, I do not see how it's possible to feel anything, even if there is a soul.
The software requires some hardware to operate.
And the decision to place us within a body that is incapable of love would be God's decision (at least by Christian convention).

This is where your assumption of what "evidence" I'm ignoring doesn't make sense.
The available evidence suggests that there is no need for a soul to explain anything, but a body is required to be human.

 

Yeah, I don't get into fairytales. If there is a soul, and at some point some entity deems it wise and has the power to destroy that soul, what difference does it make to the present? One cannot change the past, and one cannot know the future. Only the present is real.

 

I think you're seeing "want" in the sense of "desire"--want is broader than that. "Want" is a deprivation of something--a "lacking" of something.

I think the odds of that being so are crazy. It may look like the "God of the Gaps" perspective, but....if I'm a betting man....my soul is with the reality of God.

What other creature has gods? Brain or not.

It doesn't need to be "must be" anything. It's something that is beyond our ability to know fully. Sure--that might be an analogy--even an insightful analogy, but it needn't "must be" anything.