That sounds like an argument for annihilationism.
Well - it is, in a sense. Evil gets annihilated. Otherwise it is co-eternal with God.
The attributes resulting from sin (evil acts and intentions) are purged from the soul so that he may be saved. Annihilation says the soul is destroyed. One may argue that if the person in question was lived such an evil life that he, as a person consisted only of evil attributes, the result would be annihilation. I am remined that repentance and baptism include the death of the sinful man and the rebirth/resurrection of the new man in Christ. Thus we need to be careful in deciding who may be annihilated. 
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Thank goodness it’s not up to us. One thing is certain, though. Evil cannot be tolerated in God’s presence. So if a person is inseperable from their evil, so much the worse for that person! Lord have mercy on us all.
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I recognize the argument as related to all the times I’ve been told my withholding belief is just so I can do all the thievery, murder and whoring that must surely be in my heart. I always find that such an odd reaction but it also makes me worry for the stability of the faith they think keeps their own dark inclinations in check.
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And once that false faith, that evil is removed, can that person survive? If all that is left is the impulse to unfettered evil? Remove that and they are consumed in the fire.
It’s down to God’s competence. All evil - nature - is in God’s presence. He is always fully present, evil never experiences that, even in His rare to mythic theophanies. We are such tiny, frail, ephemeral, inconsequential, constrained persons. Evil is nothing to God; He will wipe away every tear.
Perhaps not. Maybe that is part of the Christian narrative - that necessary death that Christ has made into a prelude for life for us.
Amen to that!
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I’m concerned for all of the discipling of Christians to think that people who don’t believe like they do just want to sin. That kind of teaching of religion does seem to be a behavior modification program for a preferred kind of society, one where Christians are perfect and special. I’m so sorry that people would say such things to you. I’ve also said similar things in my ignorance. I thought I was being a witness or something. Even if Christ has forgiven me, people have still been hurt by me and I think that they matter to a good, loving God too, and they deserve to be reconciled with and healed for their own sake, regardless of whether or not I can do anything about it other than asking Christ for forgiveness.
It’s all of the hurt that Christians have caused willingly or in ignorantly that I don’t understand how a whole group of people will go to Heaven while all the others go to a hell just because the Christians are generally nice in the name of Jesus. Sometimes I wonder if God just wants to see who is actually more like Jesus, being the best kind of human they can be, among all the people who have faith in him and those those who don’t.
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In my neighbourhood, like yours I’m sure, the very rare creedal Christians are no more generally nice than the Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Confucians and Christian culture agnostics-atheists. But they’re all damned obviously as they aren’t nice in Jesus’ name. I want to be with them. They’re naturally nice.
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It is almost as though the fear of a damnationist hell is used to incite the innocent to do what they might otherwise feel was in bad taste. What they do is a kind of violence and once they’ve done it too, they have a stake in justifying and perpetuating it. It reminds me of what I’ve read happens in street gangs where newbies are required to do real physical harm as part of their initiation.
I was just reading something related in Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Holy Envy which @Mervin_Bitikofer, @Kendel and others have been discussing on the Pithy Quotes thread.
It wasn’t until I began meeting people of other faiths in their most sacred spaces that I learned how bruised some of them were by Christian evangelism. Worshippers at the Hindu Temple returned to the parking lot to find Christians by their cars with pamphlets demeaning their holiday. Muslims were used to Christians saying malicious things about the Qur’an. Native Americans were tired of being asked what God they prayed to. The shared consensus is that Christian evangelists are not very good listeners. They assume they are speaking to people with no knowledge of God themselves. They are disrespectful of other people’s faith. [p148-9]
Gandhi had a lot to say about Indian missionaries, who not only annotated a kind of life they did not live, but who also dangled medicine, education and financial aid from the gospel sticks. … When Gandhi got his own chance to evangelize, he was quite brief.
“What would be your message to a Christian like me and my fellows?” an interviewer asked him once, to which Gandhi replied, “Become worthy of the message that is imbedded in the Sermon on the Mount, and join the spinning brigade.”There are many other ways that teaching Christianity has changed my practice of Chrtistianity, but the one that has taken me farthest from the center of my tribe is the conviction that Christians do not have sole custody of the only way to God. I am willing to accept that Jesus is the only way for a Christians. I am unwilling to accept that Christians get to decide he is the only way for everyone else too. According to the King James Versionof the Bible, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the father but by me”(John 14:6) As Huston Smith once said, everything hinges on what you think he meant when he said “I.” [pp152-3]
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First class analogy about initiation. Into the Christian gang. Apparently the reason JWs stand silently in pairs by a stand of Watchtower, being ignored by thousands, is to bind them to their group.
Not that this will make much difference to the doctrinally petrified. … but you might want to add onto Taylor’s quote above that she does not dismiss Christ’s “I am the way…” statement. She just doesn’t think it was supposed to be weaponized into some sort of universal acid against every other tradition out there.
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Er, it is actually. Along with the perichoretic rest of natural creation, and transcendent creation. They are all eternal. Only Islam says not.
Everything eternal will be eternal … in God. At least that’s the way I see it.
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Indeed, if God grounds being, He always has.
The one I included at the tail end of a way too long quote? Looks like she is content to read that as saying Christ is the way for Christians. But I haven’t read a lot further than that so we’ll see.
While we’re still on a Taylor quoting kick … (how long till you guess we have her entire book all on the forum?) … Here is another pertinent bit that I liked from p. 18 or so, and then skipping a bit.
Regarding a young prospective student who was checking out her “world religions 101” class…
…He had come to to a church-related college for a reason, he said. His faith meant a lot to him, and he did not want to put it at risk.
“If you really are a Christian,” he said, “then are you going to help us see what is wrong with these other religions? From what you have said so far it doesn’t sound like it, and if that’s the case, then I don’t think I can stay in the class.”
Bees started buzzing inside my head when he said that. I was not angry, exactly. There was nothing belligerent in his tone to warrant that. I was dumfounded instead, spiritually concussed from my sudden collision with such a solid wall of conviction about what it meant to be a Christian. As hard as I had worked to create a course that spot-lighted the wisdom of the world’s great religions, I had not imagined that someone might take it in order to unplug all of them but one. Yet there he sat - a reminder not only of my short-sightedness but also of a whole different way of being Christian.
I remembered meeting people like him when I was in college. They had fallen in love with Jesus and set out to prove their loyalty by dismissing any truth that did not hinge on him. Their job, as they saw it, was to come up with solid Christian answers to every important question and then to defend those answers against all rivals. When I fell in love with Jesus, I thought that was the only way to do it. Then after about two weeks of being told that I could only attend Bible study with other girls, not boys, and that if I wanted to argue about anything, I should be prepared to offer solid scriptural support for my view, I began yawning from lack of oxygen. I dropped out of Bible study and found another group of Christians, who were more interested in talking about all the right questions Jesus asked than in giving the right answers about him. Although I sometimes missed the fevered certainty of the first group, I never missed their constraint. God was too great and the world too wide to allow for so little curiosity.
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I didn’t mean to begrudge you the quote. It’s a good one. I just wanted to add.
And yes - we may both get into trouble on the length of these things. But until then … !
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For what it’s worth I’m sorry too for things I’ve said or could have said but didn’t because I did naively wonder if religion was all just a con job. On atheist websites I finally got to realize that the calm assurance everyone tried to embody about the irrelevancy of religion was unwarranted. But I couldn’t always say that. So don’t feel too bad, you’ve got company. The important thing is that isn’t who we are now.
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