I’m gonna follow this thread, because I have the same question.
My difficulty is explaining - God loves us so much he gave us free will to choose. But is it really free if the only alternative to choosing God is torment. It’s like being forced rather than having a real choice. Many Atheists/Humanists are “good people” by human standards but in rejecting the idea of God through the free will given by God they suffer torment for eternity. I’m sure they are not choosing eternal torment they just believe existing/existence is possible without God.
If you did not have free will (free choice), you could not have made this thread. As to your question, read up on Saul Alinsky. An atheist who would choose hell, because people there suited him better.
Feel free to expand more clearly what I’m trying to get at.
How many of these atheists knowingly reject God? A great many do know of God. And they reject Him outright in this life. So why would they want to be with God in the afterlife. There is only two ways to go heaven or hell.
Well, we don’t merit any rewards on our own. We have our whole being from God. Just being nice and thinking it’s your own is like a child asking his dad for five dollars to buy dad a gift with and thinking its his own money. God doesn’t just call us to be nice. He calls us to realize we are bankrupt without him and that in him is true life which he wants to share with us and to transform us into something perfect. A nice guy has his temperament, history, his very being from God. Same with someone with a worse temperament. A dad doesn’t judge a child he gives ten dollars to as being better than a child he gives a dollar to just because the first child has more.
What an experience actually is not necessarily how it is perceived. Those that love good will not seek evil and the converse. So those that choose evil do not want to be around God, and do not know what they are missing.
We have the capacity to act in accordance to what we understand to be the greatest good. We have free will. Freedom does not have to do with doing what we want without consequence. It means that we are separate from the influences that affect us and that we can decide and act.
I wasn’t planning on it, because you explained it fairly clearly. But apparantly some people think the issue is free will. It is not.
It’s precisely because God declines to violently coerce our belief against our will that we have the option to choose Him or not. Heaven isn’t some cash reward or permanent vacation you get for being good. It’s participation in the His own divine life itself. If we want participation in the divine life, we’ve been advised how to conform ourselves to it so that we can receive it. But that’s precisely the issue. Since God does not force himself upon us, we need to open our souls to Him, to orient ourselves so that we are moving towards him. If we don’t, our end is not in God.
There is a choice, but not in the moral structure of creation. We do not choose what is right and wrong. We choose what to make of this one life we have for all eternity.
Give not just your money, but your all.
I think that reality is not black and white. I think that God is fair because we do even have choices in this life hence we will have choices in another life. I think that Christianity offers an odd picture of God.
The choice is real. The issue is that one lives in a comfy mansion and the other a hellhole, pun intended. But one should make the choice freely regardless of the comfort of the abode. A bare simple room in my Father’s mansion will do because I don’t think I can accept the company of the other, no matter how luxurious an apartment the other guy promises. Bottom line, one can be trusted , the other you can’t. The surroundings are mere auxiliaries. One is family, the other, I don’t know what word to describe it, but contains nothing good. He is not family, period.