The amount of time served or passed does not make the action any less wrong, but it does mean the person has paid some debt for their actions. If you murder someone you should be punished but that punishment should fit the action. The Eastern conceptions of hell are at least based on your finite actions, what you do determines how much time you will spend in it. It really does not make sense for someone to have to suffer eternal punishment for something as trivial as not accepting Jesus. You’re right though the Christian God can do whatever he pleases after all he is God, but that does not make him just.
We do not believe that not believing in Jesus is what sends a person to Hell. WE are not fundamentalists. It is the rejection of Christ and God which sends a person to Hell. A lack of knowledge is distinctly different from a rejection. Murder, as an example, is a definitive statement that you have no regard for God or his will. No amount of time passing will change that declaration, only true repentance can. Since no amount of time can change that declaration, the punishment is eternal.
By my estimation of justice.
So your human, limited, conception which is completely incapable of comprehending the entirety of the flow of human history, and completely devoid of knowledge of the future results of the actions of individuals. This is a justice prone to change and subject to whim and fancy; a justice which can be influenced by whatever you happen to be feeling at the time. This is not a true justice.
Because logically it makes more sense.
It may make more sense to you, but you lack the requisite knowledge to know if it is actually just or not, as you are not omnipotent and have severe lacking in your understanding of the whole of reality, as do all created beings.
So you mean to tell me children, babies still in the womb, the sick, and the elderly deserved to be punished as well?I find it nearly impossible for all of humanity to have forsaken God. Regardless of that though God could have found a way more suitable means for punishment. He for instance could have simultaneously caused all the evil doers to drop dead. Flooding the entire Earth not only wiped out the wicked but punished the innocent as well. The difference with your computer analogy though is the fact that it deals with human beings. The Christian God is an all powerful being; he can fix whatever.
Your inability to comprehend it doesn’t make it any less true, nor does the fact that you don’t like it make it any less just. Surely there were some innocents who died (young children for example) However, he would not have forsaken those innocents to eternal torment, he would have welcomed them to Abraham’s Bosom since they were sinless (Abraham’s Bosom is the biblical name given to the place of the just dead, those who had lived in accordance with the Law, or who had sought God with pure hearts, if not pure knowledge of him). Your mistake here is assuming those children were worse off for their deaths, which doesn’t hold up in Christian theology. I would much rather be with God in eternity than alive here on Earth, as would every Christian. As for making all the evil people fall down dead, he did, in a manner he saw fit.
God’s not punishing us for their actions but the whole of humanity has to bear the consequences of their deeds? We have to deal with death and sickness which didn’t exist prior to the fall, but he’s not punishing us though? The Christian God is unfairly punishing humanity for the deeds of two human beings. Your and I were not there to make the same decision as Adam and Eve so why should we have to bear the consequences? Shifting punishment to others is simply unjust.
For starters, a lot of it deals with if you take the creation account to be literal. I do not. Death did exist prior to the fall, but only physical death. Adam and Eve introduced spiritual death to humanity, the potential to be eternally separated from God. As for sickness, I have no well thought out response, so I can’t speak to it, having never really considered it before. My apologies.
As for not making the same decision as Adam and Eve, we do, every time we sin we make the choice to put ourselves before God, and therefore are just as deserving of punishment as they were. You system would only hold true if the rest of humanity never sinned, which is decidedly -not- the case.
