Atheists DO Go to Heaven

I'm just doing by what the Boss has to say.

Matthew 5:22

But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.

God: Hey, I'm gonna make youse an offer ya can't refuse.

See, folks, this is how he turns his actions around to "I'm the victim here!"

What if the ignorant sinner is a stand up guy and whose only sins are speeding and being lazy sometimes.

Victim?

I'm not a victim.

I think you completely missed the point.

Uh, at the time of the Abrahamic covenant, "the people who became the Jews" (meaning: the descendants of Abraham through his legitimate wife, Sarah) did not exist and could not exist, since Sarah was barren.

It is a common error to think that God "chose one nation out of them all" to be the means through which he would show salvation to the world, but that just isn't the case. If you believe the Biblical account, he raised up a people who otherwise would not have existed, and never gave them a special place in salvation anyway. They were merely the ones through whom he revealed his plan of salvation for everyone. (That is the clear teaching of Romans 3:1-2, as explained by someone who had spent his entire earlier life believing that the Jews were somehow a better people, or "God's favorites" or something, until he actually studied it out and realized that that was only the result of selective reading because it allowed them to think they were superior to everyone else.)

That last bit seems awfully familiar...

Maybe, maybe not. The Bible teaches very clearly how to be saved, but is much less specific about how to be lost. We don't actually know what tricks God may have in mind to give an absolutely fair chance to those who never heard, or whose minds have been so twisted by religious propaganda or anti-religious propaganda that they have almost no chance of accepting the truth when they hear it.

All I can say with certainty is that a God who loves lost sinners enough to become a man himself, and die horribly in order to make their salvation possible, is very hard to reconcile with the traditional concept of a God who very willingly lets the vast majority of people go to hell when he could do something about it.

And I do not believe in salvation for those who choose knowingly and deliberately, to the very end, to continue to live in sin. That is contradictory to the very definition of salvation: "You will call him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." Not "save them from the condemnation for their sins" but "save them from their sins." "Save" means "deliver." If salvation means being delivered from the very state of being a sinner, and you prefer to live in sin, then you don't want salvation, period. So someone who continues to live in sin (which can be shown from the Bible to mean, in practice, a lack of caring about the well-being of others, which is what the Bible calls "love") has, by definition, rejected salvation. That has nothing to do with whether or not said person "believes in Jesus."

How about a good and hearty "Go fuck yourself!"?

Is an idiot and a lunatic.

He's God, he could snap his fingers like Q, and just poof the sin away.
Or, shit, why not just go "yeah, what the hell, I forgive everybody"?
That would've taken no magic expenditure at all.
Why go through all the bloodletting bullshit?

And vicarious redemption is just bad moral logic.
It stinks.
And wonder why early Catholics thought up scapegoats, and sin eaters.
Or, why Muslims today figure a suicide bomber instantly takes care of the mojo of their whole family.

When it's their bullshit, it's bullshit, when it's nailing up Jesus "ohhhh, it beaautifulll! ".

Something I can agree with you on.

Of course, I believe that there is more (a lot more) to being saved that "being nice to people".

I have a suggestion: Why don't you become God? You have all the answers, you know the simplest and best way to do everything, there are no subtle complications (like free will) that elude you and mean that sometimes the messy way is the best way...

I can see the film already: Diacanu Almighty!

True. Very true.

But there is never less to it than that.

Diacanu as god? Good grief, like he doesn't have enough trouble believing in himself already.

Matthew is not considered 'the Boss'.

Heh, I know this one! Matthew is Aramaic for Bruce Springsteen.

Isn't it obvious? Matthew's a total badass.

Blah-blah-blah. Look, anything that helps those who've embraced Christianity to be decent human beings on Earth is fine with me.

Can you imagine how these people would behave if they didn't have some moral parameters?

Waving your magic dickynoo and turning them all into atheists isn't going to make them better people.

Given that the morals of Christianity are often seriously deficient, it just might.

I'd have to disagree. Granted, the aegis of religion does allow some people to rationalize incredibly evil behavior, but for the majority of believers, in my observation, the perception that there's some overarching moral code to which they will be held accountable has a mitigating effect on their actions.

Some of us don't need the "God is watching you" factor in order to live moral lives; others do, IMO.

That argument struck me as horseshit even when it came out of Ben Frankllin.

He said a lot of wise things, but he had some bombs too, and that's one of his whoppers.

I think good religious people are good in spite of their religion, not because of it.
The proof is in how they cherry-pick.

And rotten stinko people like Dayton will always find loopholes around their religion to justify what they want to be anyway.
If you think religion keeps him in check, you're the dreamer, not I.

Salem Witch trials.
Religion made those okay.
Ostensibly good people committed those acts.
Take away the invisible boogeyman, there's no excuse.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

The "mitigating effect" leads them to adopt positions wholly incompatible to human wellbeing on all sorts of issues - homosexuality, contraception, abortion, education, murder, war - the list is endless.
We refer to people who do not possess an innate morality as sociopaths. There are some of those around, but I would certainly not include the majority of Christians among their number, and they would get along just fine without threats from fictional characters derived from Bronze Age mythology to keep them in check.

What are you on my case for? I rarely do anything overtly bad and strive to avoid committing sins of omission.

The stinkos will be stinkos no matter what. Religion may be the only thing that keeps them from robbing liquor stores or raping their neighbor's daughter. Unfortunately, the stinkos get more attention than the people actively doing good or simply minding their own business.

Why is it your business whether people do good in the name of innate decency or in the name of something you don't believe in? Or, more to the point, how would you make the stinkos into decent people, with or without religion?

Your schtick always begins and ends with "destroy all religion." You never have an answer to "And then what?" That's not materially different from saying "I accept Jesus as my personal Savior. Let Bill Gates take care of the poor."

You really think there were no exclusionary atrocities before there was religion? Remember fifth grade? What religion made some kids the Kewl Kids and others the targets?

The perception of the Other goes back to the cave...or further, if we believe Arthur Clarke.

That's a huge fuckin' "maybe".

Who do I have to be?

Then you fix the rest of it.
Nothing else will budge until you un-jam the superstition clog.
Nothing.

You can try as well as you might, but you can't get out of the basic argument behind Diacanu's post -- omnipotence coupled with creation will get you every time.

The messy way is better? God could have made it so that the messy way isn't better.

Free will complicates things? God could have made it so that everyone has free will without complicating things.

The very rules of logic disagree? Who made those? Oh, they're stronger than God's law? Then let me ask again, but in a louder voice: Who made those laws that bind the alleged creator of everything?

I'm perfectly happy to state that I believe in God's sovereignty en toto.

He did everything the way He did exactly because it pleased Him to do so. It's none of my business how my creator chose to run His world.

I don't have to worry about that "free will" nonsense messing up God's plan.

That'd be fine if God told you this stuff in person, but what you're really taking en toto is what some other human being told you.

6 pages in and you're still getting nuttier than fruitcake.