Right, now on to the doctrine of hell and eternal punishment. What you posted is another misunderstanding that I addressed earlier in the thread. Here it is.
Firstly, you aren't addressing my points. I didn't only talk about how awful God must be for consigning us to hell - I pointed out that C.S. Lewis' sixpence analogy failed for a number of reasons. It's not like a child asking for sixpence, because you cannot ask to be created. Moreover, while a child can decide that the terms for using the sixpence are unreasonable and return the money, you are not permitted to decide that the terms by which you have to live your life are unreasonable - or that the state of the world is intolerable - and commit suicide.
Good question. I assume you don't have kids, so maybe it's hard to understand, but even I, as an imperfect human father, am not looking for ways to punish my kids. I'm not sitting there with my notepad, jotting down every time they do something wrong and then open it up in the evening and dole out whippings based on how bad they were during the day.
So our perfect heavenly father, who's a much better parent than me, and loves his children more than I love mine, wants what's best for us too, not to punish us based on how bad we've been.
Non sequitur. The second paragraph does not follow from the first. You've said that you are a loving father, and then concluded that God is also a loving father. This is
the very idea I am attacking, so by simply re-asserting it you are begging the question.
Now that doesn't mean that the doctrine of eternal punishment is a lie. It's right there in the Bible all over the place, but the way I see it, and the way some other Christian philosophers have seen it, is that "the gates of hell are locked from the inside." Meaning, it's not God who condemns us to an eternity apart from him to suffer in the lake of fire, but the sinner himself voluntarily shuts himself away from God. I don't know if there's really a lake that's on fire all the time lol, or if that's just what it feels like to be separated from the source of all good in the universe, but there's no doubt that some people will be there. Look at some atheists. Not saying it applies to you, but they have such a hatred of God that I can honestly believe that even if he were right in front of their face, saying, "Okay, you wanted proof, here I am," they would still spit in his face, so to speak, and reject him.
Okay, so a tiny portion of humanity would spit in God's face and therefore go to hell. What's your point? Most atheists aren't like this, not least because
they are atheists, and therefore can't hate God because they don't believe in him
. Most of the hatred you're seeing is hatred for Christianity, which is a very different affair. The closest to hating God an atheist can get is hating the
idea of God - and what with his many,
many flaws - outlined in depth in The Bible - what's not to hate?
Also, how on Earth does anyone "volunteer" for hell? The vast majority of people consigned there either don't believe in it, or quite reasonably think their actions don't warrant the absolute worst punishment possible.
Finally, God doesn't have to be actively pushing us off to hell to be a monster for letting us end up there. If someone's about to fall in front of a train, and you have the power to easily rescue them,
but you don't, you're still an asshole.
The incentive for doing right then is just that we love our father and want him to be pleased with us, just like children do for their human father, and we trust that it's true when he tells us doing right is good for us just like when I tell my daughter to not spin while standing on a chair. Also, I'm sure I don't have to tell you, but choosing right over wrong makes everyone feel better all around, including the person who's refraining from doing wrong.
Even if hell is the natural state of things, the incentive to do good is still mainly to avoid this terrible fate. Given no action, the natural state of things is that we starve to death, so we eat to avoid this consequence. The natural fate of a human thrown into a lake is to drown, so we swim ashore - the incentive to swim ashore is to avoid drowning. How is doing good to avoid hell any different?
Now, as I mentioned before God is forgiving, and as Suphy said the Christian doesn't have the weight of sin hanging over his head. And I'm sorry to keep drumming on the father-child analogy, but it really makes sense to me now. God wants nothing more than for his prodigal child to repent, just like when my daughter does something bad, I only want her to repent and do right from that point on. If I feel she needs punishment to achieve that end, I'll impose it. I don't do that perfectly, because I'm only human, but our perfect heavenly father knows just what we need. Perhaps just thethreat of hell is what we need. I'm not sure, but I do know that God isn't looking for ways to punish us, like is depicted in the classic "sinners in the hand of an angry God" sermon, but he's calling us to repentance.
Well, he obviously doesn't know just what we need, because there are awful people all over the place. In fact, he often appears to be going about things in exactly the wrong way; he made such a cockup of Sodom and Gommorrah that he had to level the entire cities and execute everyone in them.
So, my point is that hell is not something God threatens to do to us if we don't do what he says. Hell is the natural state that we will be in if we don't. There is no other option. To be apart from God is hell.
I posted this in that regard:
Look at it this way: God is goodness. I don't mean that he's a good being, or that he does good things all the time, (though that's true too), but he is the embodiment of the notion which we call goodness. The people who will be condemned are those who willfully choose to separate themselves from goodness. There is no other source of goodness anywhere. He is it. Imagine this analogy. Suppose there were a single star in the entire universe with a planet revolving around it. Some people say, "We don't like this star. It's too yellow/hot/whatever," get on a spaceship and leave to live on some barren husk in the outer darkness. Would they then have any right to complain that they couldn't see because it was dark?
You seem to think God is some kind of policeman, sitting there with his radar gun looking for someone to chase down and give a ticket to. In reality he's our father, calling us to come over and live in the home he's made for us. Some people refuse and would rather sit in the outer darkness than enjoy his companionship. They have no right then to complain that they don't find anything good apart from the source of all goodness.
This explanation is not only condescending, but intellectually dishonest. Firstly, you implicitly assume in both analogies that atheists can plainly perceive God but are actively rejecting him, which is absurd, because an entity's existence is ontologically prior to its perception, and it is God's existence which we dispute.
Secondly, you are conveniently overlooking the fact that God isn't
just calling over for us to bask in the warm glow of a star; he provides a series of pointless rules that must be obeyed in order to gain entry into the proverbial house, such as that one must not commit homosexual acts, or eat shellfish, etc. (Also, he makes people sit outside the house for completely arbitrary periods of time before allowing them entry - some die in their first few years, and some live to triple figures.)
Finally, and most importantly, you describe him as "the source of all goodness". Well, he absolutely isn't. If The Bible is to be believed, he is completely evil, and certainly not deserving of worship. Every atom submits to his will, but there are countless tragedies of completely natural origin that cause vast suffering, and they strike utterly arbitrarily. He condones slavery, murder and rape. He has personally killed millions and by even your own rhetoric at best 'refuses to save' countless from literally the worst fate imaginable. To describe him, then, as the source of all goodness requires a complete suspension of rational thought. Incidence of atheism rises in people with better educations - i.e., in people trained to evaluate arguments for their truth content. And this is why.
The purpose is to benefit us, as I've explained above. We can only be made perfect if we are in the right relation to God. Just like the spokes on a wheel can only function properly if they're in the right relation to the hub and the rim. That analogy is imperfect though, because in a wheel, the hub and rim can't work without the spokes, but it gives you an idea of why we need to be right with God. Not for his benefit, but ours.
I concede that some of the teachings in The Bible would better us if we followed them ("thou shalt not kill" is a good one). How does God plan to better us by making us worship him (and threatening to fail to save us if we don't)?
I understand your confusion. That was vague. This is what I'm referring to regarding perfection:
Thank you for the clarification.
