BEARDGANG

, I love you. Please spend eternity with me. Person Y says No, I don’t want to. Person X says, I wish you’d cagnhe your mind on this one. I am actually love itself. If you don’t spend eternity with me, you’ll be in a place (state?) that is not me.’ It is the complete absence of love.’ It’s a total bummer. Person Y says Stop threatening me. That’s the way I see it, an offer, at most a warning, not a threat per se. There’s some theology here that I’m not equipped to handle but it’s based on the God is love idea (and Trinitarian theology). God is inviting us to be in God (which is actually what humans were designed for). The threat (as I see it) is a warning about the alternative. The punishment is not being with God. Like the judgement of societies, it’s mostly self-inflicted. Or that’s how I worked it out so far in my half-chewed way. Christ died for our sins, for the world, is an unlimited declaration of God’s love that was not premised on people being Jewish, or the entirely nonexistent at the moment Christian. I’m not sure that I disagree with this. But I’m not sure I understand it. Love is given, the opportunity to be alive is the love of God around us every minute. If God required ‘proof’ in the form of mortal and explicitly temporal ‘faith’ before bestowing his greatest gift then no one would ever be born. I’m not sure I understand this. This might be another argument with sola fide people. As a technicality, if God ‘damned’ non-believers to hell then he might fail to prove there is a God at all. How do you prove to someone who doesn’t think there is an afterlife that hell isn’t all there is if that’s what they get? Again, I’m not sola fide and I fall back on invincible ignorance for some of the other part. However, I think I can address one aspect of this. As St. Paul says (OK, not in these exact words) there’s faith, hope, and love. But the final reality is love, and faith and hope won’t be an issue then (you won’t have to believe in or hope in the final reality because it will be upon you). Another side of that is that in the great beyond, belief or non belief will not be an issue, as everyone will be a believer of sorts. Heaven and hell are not as simple as people make them out to be when you dig into varying translations. Yes, I’m sure you’re right. You could indeed give a lot of helpful information on that as it seems to be something you’ve delved into. In fact, I just go on the assumption that virtually everyone has at very best an incomplete if not distorted picture of both not excluding myself by any means. That’s actually scriptural. Another too-lazy-to-look-it-up verse: No eye has seen, nor mind imagined, etc. etc. There are also people with personal visions of heaven and hell, and a portion of them apparently very sincere, but I don’t know what to make of such.