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advancedatheist
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Future rebellions against god (January 6, 2005, 01:06:17 PM) |
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If there has already been at least one rebellion against god's authority in heaven (the myth of satan etc.), what's to keep that from happening again? Specifically, what's to keep christians from rebelling against god when they get to heaven?
Because christians explicitly assume that a rebellion has already happened, they have trouble answering this question, and I can tell that the thought of their becoming the next satan bothers them. In fact, you could construct a probabilistic argument that mirrors Pascal's Wager: If the probability of rebellion per unit of eternity is > 0, then no matter how small the figure is, it will eventually happen, so that "going to heaven" is ultimately self-defeating.
Mark Plus, Advanced Atheist |
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Franc28
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RE: Future rebellions against god (January 6, 2005, 04:46:55 PM) |
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It is nice to see you here Advanced Atheist ! As I wrote you on email, I will read your point on our next show on presuppositionalism.
As for your post, it is a very original point ! I never heard that before. However, a Christian would probably reply that God would not let sin exist in Heaven, therefore no Christian would desire to rebel.
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advancedatheist
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RE: Future rebellions against god (January 6, 2005, 05:27:03 PM) |
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quote:
It is nice to see you here Advanced Atheist ! As I wrote you on email, I will read your point on our next show on presuppositionalism.
As for your post, it is a very original point ! I never heard that before. However, a Christian would probably reply that God would not let sin exist in Heaven, therefore no Christian would desire to rebel. |
Christians can't answer this effectively because they don't have an explanation for the first alleged rebellion, apart from hand-waving about satan's "pride" and "free will," as if satan had the power to create psychological characteristics that god didn't foresee or lacked the ability to prevent. The whole angelic rebellion story raises so many questions that you have to wonder why christians want to go to heaven, sight unseen, when according to their own myth many of heaven's first inhabitants who saw it directly found something very wrong with it.
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Franc28
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RE: Future rebellions against god (January 7, 2005, 10:50:19 AM) |
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Good point.
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Sortion
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RE: Future rebellions against god (January 7, 2005, 05:27:17 PM) |
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Hello Franc28 and AdvancedAtheist,
This is a very interesting topic, and I suspect the more it is considered and discussed, the more problems in the Christian view we'll uncover. Very little about heaven is mentioned in the bible, so it seems believers are, for the most part, left to their own inferences from the threadbare references to heaven that are included in the bible. Beyond this, of course, is the believer's imagination, which can be quite ripe.
I don’t think I’ve ever considered the question that AA put to this thread before, but its implications suggest that whatever dilemmas man is supposed to face here on earth will also challenge him in heaven. If God's heavenly prophylactic against rebellion is to strip those who enter it of their free will upon admission, then it seems they enter heaven for the sake of becoming puppets. Who would want to live without free will after having already enjoyed it for a lifetime? And if they do not have any free will, how could their praise-singing and worship of God be genuine (or "from the heart")?
Having been brought up with at least nominal Christian influences as a child, I was always taught that heaven was supposed to be a place of pure happiness and peace, which neither hardship or troubling concerns interrupt. But that's always puzzled me. Suppose the believer makes it into heaven, only to find that some or all of his loved ones did not make it in, but were cast into hell. If he truly loved those persons, how could he be happy in heaven knowing this? I've asked many Christians to comment, and each one seems to have a different response. For instance, I've heard the following: "God causes us to forget our lives on earth" (or something along these lines). This seems to be saying that the transition to the "next life" constitutes an interruption in the individual's identity. If he were "caused to forget" all the details of his life on earth, would he really be the same person? I suppose the person who gave me this response had such little self-esteem that he would hope this is the case. Other responses suggest that God will give the believer strength to understand "God's plan" such that such knowledge would in effect not bother them. However, if I were a believer (I am not), and I truly loved my loved ones (which I do), I would find this answer not only unsatisfying, but completely troubling, and, as I understand it, heaven is supposed to be free of troubling concerns.
The implications at this point seem rather bleak for anyone who truly loves someone who happens not to make the grade. To maintain the premise that heaven is “heavenly,” it seems that the apologist has no alternative but to introduce some coercive factor on the part of God, such as wiping out one’s memory, disconnecting one’s love from the ones he loved on earth, hardening the heart, turning off love completely, etc. Meanwhile, we are told that this is a God of love.
I guess that when Christians use the term ‘love’, they have something completely different in mind from what I have in mind.
Dawson
"...if you consistently practice a philosophy built on the primacy of consciousness, it will lead you to the same end as Jesus: willingly embracing a premature death." - Dawson Bethrick |
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Sandy
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RE: Future rebellions against god (January 8, 2005, 03:55:26 AM) |
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My answer to the question of where I get my morals if I am an Atheist.
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"If you are an atheist, what are your own moral values based on?"
I hear this a lot among religious people who seem to defy their own logical and rational brain functions. Come on, even animals have their own tribal rules to live by.
I decided at the age of 9 or 10 that my own word of honor was the best I had to offer the world. If I gave my word on anything I had better damned well know what I was doing. I was taken to the Temple in Salt Lake City and asked to make a commitment to dedicate my life to the church of Latter Day Saints and I could not do it! I refused to be baptized and never entered the church again.
I had been an addicted reader even at t he age of 9 and spent much of my childhood in our Santa Monica library reading about the people of the world and the laws they lived by. I spent a lot of time reading about the history of America and found little reference to God and I accepted the fact that America was a secular country and would accept anyone from any nation, religious or not. That was my inspiration. I knew my founders and I knew my bible and I found little influence of God in any of them. Oh, sure they used the words, but not the actions. Our founders were excessive drinkers, adulterers, slave owners in their private lives but all were organizers of freedoms not seen on the planet for thousands of years.
I began to see the hypocrisy of anyone claiming to be a Christian. Religion became a label instead of a way of life. I found myself putting distance between Christians and my own world. This included my own family members. We are all musicians and our religious celebrations are based around music and that was a delight for me. I would leave the table during the evening prayers and go to my room and read.
I developed a moral code based on my looking at my world, what was expected of me and what I expected of others. My father's family were all Catholic and I saw them completely ignoring the laws of the church and then heading for Sunday mass coming out cleansed from their confessions. This was absolutely not for me!!! It was cheating oneself to do this.
It became easy to see what I could reject as being dishonest and gathering up what was pure undiluted honesty. My own brain guided me into Atheism. I now consider God-fearing people as weak and unable to stand on their own moral values and in constant need of guidance from their clergy and now their President. That has been my biggest complaint about the religious right. They are demanding federal legislation to guide them as they have lost their ability to judge for themselves what is right and wrong.
I have no problem living by the laws of my city, county and state but the new laws being offered by President Bush are totally redundant and simply duplicates of our state laws. It is a push for power on his part and a magnet for the people of America who have lost their rational minds in following their God. I feel sorry for these people as they will never be able to live without their illusions that God is watching their every move. I simply step over these fools and feel sympathy for their weaknesses.
"In nature there's no blemish but the mind, none can be called deformed but the unkind"
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Franc28
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RE: Future rebellions against god (January 8, 2005, 08:23:29 AM) |
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Sortion : the points you raised are, of course, very relevant. But fundamental to any notion of afterlife is the necessary loss of identity. It is impossible, after death, for the person to go anywhere else, if his brain is extinguished. Even if the soul exists, it contains nothing that makes the "I". This is a major problem of all religions, and they have to do their best not to acknowledge "the details".
Free will, in that view, becomes part of the greater whole of personal identity that the believer feels free to discard at will to keep his hope of an afterlife. But I think that if he realized that "he" has no chance of such an afterlife, that he would change his mind.
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psycho137
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RE: Future rebellions against god (April 15, 2005, 09:42:58 AM) |
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Interesting idea. But as atheists, I thought we didn't believe in heaven or god in the first place. When you die, you simply cease to exist.
But as a recovering Catholic, I have heard the argument that god gave all the angels one chance to side with him or with satan. Once they made that decision, there was no turning back. An omnipotent god would give dead christians no choice to rebel once they made it to the so-called heaven.
I see no theological reason preventing a future rebellion in the so-called heaven. At church, questions like this were never discussed.
Kenneth Molles |
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