The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Help, with this please

How would you counter these arguments?

religion-online.org/showarti … title=3554

How can a Christian be a Christian when they have no understanding of what they are being saved from? This quote in the next paragraph from that article shows just how devoid of truth some people are. Except often this isn’t out of ignorance, but willful decision as indicated by our Lord when he said in

Seriously, how can someone miss the boat this bad? I was once one of those who missed this boat. Scriptures make it clear what we are saved from. It’s that diseased called ‘sin’. It’s called rebellion and iniquity which leads chaos in our lives and the lives of others. It is the disease that ultimately causes death.

Those that think God needs to have a Hell to punish -That just indicates that they think His rules were arbitrary and not truly bad. Sin isn’t sinful enough of it’s own, so God had to create a Hell, lest he be mocked! No… Anyone who truly hates this disease (sin) that lives in them knows that living with this disease is Hell. That is what we need to be saved from, not some external arbitrary punishment. God forbid that he removes some said penalty and leaves the disease rotting in us. That would truly be Hell.

The arguments use, in large part, philosophical reasons to explain how we “need” hell, so I guess I’d use philosophical arguments to counter. There’s a lot here, and I’d be interested to know which arguments specifically seem difficult to you, to counter. That would make it easier to answer your question. While some of these arguments are valid and well-stated, those arguments that are the best, do NOT demonstrate the need for a never-ending place (or situation) of torment. They demonstrate the reasonableness of chastisement, yes–of never-ending hopeless torture, not so much. SOME of the arguments might easily have been made by Christian universalists with no danger of weakening the belief that God is universally victorious in saving ALL those He loves (which is to say, ALL).

I don’t know…I just don’t know…as you say, people are wilful…wilfully believe God is, for all intent and purposes, evil, that He torments people forever…I say wilful because there’s so much information out there, on the net, Biblically disproving eternal hell…yet many still believe in eternal punishment…I’ll be gracious and say they are simply ignorant…either wilfully ignorant or non wilfully.

the following is a quote from your link…

'Hell, formally speaking, is that despairing condition in which separation from God seems to be final and unending; in it, there is no faith, no hope, no love–only the agony of abandonment, the edgeless desert of dissimilitude to which you know you do not belong but from which you can see no exit other than the attempt at self-destruction.

*This you know, and have known since birth. It is the condition of the child separated from the mother and not finding her, and the despair of that hell is real to the child even if it occurs in the warmth of a loving home and does not last long–so much the more if it occurs at the hands of torturers and killers. It is the choking dry-as-death hopelessness of the adult whose idols have failed and who can, whether for now or for ever, see nothing beyond them. It is, in short, the condition natural to humans in this fallen world, a world so broken by sin that the most natural response to it is despair.

It doesn’t do to skip lightly over this truth, the truth of hell’s obviousness and closeness. If we, as Christians, do that, the gospel of grace is emptied and turned into a lie whose comfort is nugatory, like that of an empty chocolate Easter egg. We have something more important to say than that, but we can say it only if we both recall and talk about the reality of hell’. * --Paul Griffiths, who recently joined the faculty of Duke Divinity School

truly awful words…to say our loving Father God is content to leave people, whom He created, in such a miserable state forever, is almost akin to blasphemy in my opinion.

[size=150]Thank you, Gabe! Right on![/size]

Amen, Neil.

I think this one of the weakest argumentations I have read.

First of all I don’t believe in a choice, second if there is a choice, why not life or death as written in the Torah?

I didn’t read further, this argumentation lacks any reasonable arguments.

It seems a bit of a stretch, Sven, to proclaim an argument as “the weakest you’ve ever read” when you yourself go on to say that you didn’t read it.