No need to get hostile. I realize it may seem like I’m just trying to antagonize; apologies for that. I really am trying to reason things out.
God cares so much that He’d rather condemn us to hell [by removing our ability to choose at a time when we have not chosen Him] than allow us to vacillate?
The first thing you need to realize is that God is the one in charge; He is the one with all the power. You are nothing - He doesn’t need you for anything. So, you aren’t gaining any power over Him by waiting some length of time before choosing Him. He does not submit to tests. If you try to test Him with all this “how much do you really love me” stuff, He will just laugh at you and then move on. He doesn’t play that game.
It’s not God who is condemning you to Hell; it is yourself - and it is not God taking away your ability to choose after death - it is the fact that you have died (ceased to live; ceased to have the capacity to reason, and to make choices of various kinds).
You’re right, an infinite God would surely get tired with someone after almost a hundred years. That makes sense.
I’m asking how it makes any sense for a loving God to define death that way. You’ve said that it makes sense for God to give people some time and then leave them. No, it doesn’t. Not for an infinite being.
You make it sound like God just invented death on a whim, or that God is some kind of magical being that can cause things to exist or not exist, totally at random, and out of relationship with everything else.
The reason 80-year-olds aren’t concerned about the things you mention is that those are all worldly things, things that are totally in this life. If you’re saying every 80-year-old out there has made up his mind about God, I’d say that’s awfully far-fetched.
The point is that it is you who would get tired, or stuck in a rut, after all that time. How many 80 year olds do you know who are still trying to decide which career to follow, or what school to attend? Different kinds of decisions have their different seasons. The decision to follow Jesus is one that you make before you die (and in most cases, before you reach the age of seven), or that you never make at all.
Yes, because it’s totally consistent that an omnipotent God obeys some outside set of rules. It’s totally consistent that natural consequences are something an omnipotent God must follow. You can’t have it both ways.
By the time a person is 80, he is either a daily Mass attender, or an atheist - and not in the mood to have someone try to change his mind for him.
Reginald and Bibby (Statistics on Christian Practice) beg to differ.
“Omnipotent” does not mean “magical.” God follows the rules of the Universe that He has set up. He is not exempt from the laws of nature any more than you are.
This is flat-out untrue. I don’t really know what else to say.
Can you find any webpages or refer to any books on this? I literally cannot find anything about either. Are the authors “Reginald and Bibby” or the single author “Reginald Bibby,” who has done some research on religious statistics?
You can’t claim that God set up a universe and established its rules and is simultaneously free from culpability for what those rules caused. If God set up the rules of the universe so that free will is taken when someone dies, then He takes free will. Where is the flaw in that logic?
I have never met an 80-year-old who didn’t know what he believed in.
The authors are Reginald and Bibby. They do surveys about once every five years. Their most famous book is The Emerging Generation which is the one that records their finding that most people are in their life-long religion (or non-religion) by the time they are seven.
God didn’t invent the rules one at a time - they are all interdependent. Rather, by creating life, He caused there to be a possibility of death. Life was on purpose - death was not. Death is just the opposite of life. Death isn’t “created by God” as if it were a separate “thing.” Death is simply the absence of the thing that God created, which is life.
All of the 80-year-olds you’ve known have either been devout, daily-mass Christians or atheists?
Closest thing I can find is this, but again it’s by a man named “Reginald Bibby.” Is this what you’re referring to?
Again, this suggests that an omnipotent God is somehow subject to some set of “natural” rules that He had no hand in creating. The idea that life and death are the only two options seems wholly arbitrary.
It hardly matters - what matters is, if you want to be with God, you have to do it His way. Not because He is tricking you, but because that’s the way it is.
Still no reasoning as to how this makes sense - why “that’s the way it is.” Oh well.It hardly matters - what matters is, if you want to be with God, you have to do it His way. Not because He is tricking you, but because that’s the way it is.
If you try to wait until after you die before making a decision, you will find that the decision has been made for you - and you might not like it.
I leave you to it - I’ve had enough of this.
I guess I just don’t understand why being a happy atheist is possible in this life but not the afterlife. If God is infinitely loving, why is Hell - the place an atheist goes after death - so awful? It is possible to turn away from God’s love in this life without living in constant torment; why should the next be so different?
Because there are very few atheists who are actually atheists. A great deal of so-called “atheists” are actually people who regularly say ‘yes’ to God to the best of their ability, which is all anyone needs to do. So many people think that they reject God, when they are actually rejecting what they mistakenly believe to be God (and rightly so). Most of them regularly respond to the graces that are offered to them without even realizing it. They are, as we say, ‘anonymous’ Christians.