Are you a Good Person?

[servant]

Take the test if you dare:



http://www.livingwaters.com/good/

[servant]

If one of the characteristics of your god is that he/she/it is eternal and unchanging then other characteistics would also apply. Before creation it was 'the god who had not created', after creation it became 'the god who had created'. Ergo not unchanging.

Re: omnipotence...

the act of creation either happened without god's input or happened as a result of its desire. Either way omnipotence is lost.

The characteristics usually attributed to a creator deity ensure its illogicity and therefore its non-existence.

Logic is not Reality no matter how you try and spin it. Give me evidence of someone real that has died, been dead for more than a couple of mintues or hours and came back to life again. Your trying to prove there is no God therefore, no Hell. This is flawed logic and will go nowhere.

[bernee51]

If one of the characteristics of your god is that he/she/it is eternal and unchanging then other characteistics would also apply. Before creation it was 'the god who had not created', after creation it became 'the god who had created'. Ergo not unchanging.

Re: omnipotence...

the act of creation either happened without god's input or happened as a result of its desire. Either way omnipotence is lost.

The characteristics usually attributed to a creator deity ensure its illogicity and therefore its non-existence.

Logic is not Reality no matter how you try and spin it.

You base this opinion on what? Logic?

Give me evidence of someone real that has died, been dead for more than a couple of mintues or hours and came back to life again.

AFAIK no such person exists or has existed. I don't quite get your point.

Your trying to prove there is no God therefore, no Hell. This is flawed logic and will go nowhere.

If the logic is flawed point out where. Just claiming it is so does your case no good at all.

[servant]

The characteristics usually attributed to a creator deity ensure its illogicity and therefore its non-existence.

Your using Logic not me.

AFAIK no such person exists or has existed. I don't quite get your point.

Not true. Jesus Christ did. He is the only person I know of that has died and rose again. He had a lot to say about the afterlife. Now you most likely dont except this happened but there is plenty of evidence that He was real, did die on that tree and three days later rose again (produce his body and you kill my believe).

So the burden is placed back on you. Prove He never was alive, prove His body is still in the ground and prove He is not alive today.

Just believing He is not real does not make it a Reality. You can believe all day that gravity will not work and you can't see it, but if you jump off a building you will experience it therefore, knowing it is real. My point - When you die you will experience the truth the reality of the afterlife.

I pray that your heart and mind be opened.

[stmw]

Like I said if you cannot tell me how many grains of sand are in the Sahara desert you cannot have 100% knowledge. Without 100% knowledge you cannot be sure there is no Hell. Just hoping, and that’s what your doing, does not make it so.

You seem to like this argument Servant. Let me draw your attention to the logical fallacy it purveys. Just because our knowledge is lacking in one respect does not mean we cannot be certain about a hold raft of other stuff.

And there is much else we can still be 100% certain. 2 + 2 = 4, ~(Ex).~Fx = (Ax).Fx, the speed of light is 299792458 m/s, and there is stuff we know pretty darn accurately e.g. the mass of the proton relative to the electron is 1836.15267..., 1/alpha = 137.03599971..., the magnetic moment anomaly is 0.001159 652 181 11. Though we cannot be absolutely certain of the accuracy of the nth digits we can draw reasonable conclusions with 100% certainty. For example 1/alpha falls between 137.035 and 137.037. We can also say with certainty the Jabberwocky does not exist, nor Hades, nor Thor.

Being uncertain about the grains of sand in the Sahara has no bearing on the degree of certainty we may have about anything else…including Hell.

Just because you know that 2+2=4 (and etc), you are certain that Hell does not exist? I think you don't know that you don't know.

[cnorman18]

Ok cnorman18 I will try to address your issues.

For starters, it redefines 7 of the 10 to mean things that were not intended at Sinai; but never mind that.

Please prove your point about 7 or the 10 being redefined.

Sure.

1. This Commandment says not to put other gods before God. It doesn't say you can't care about anything else at all by comparison.. Authentic faith and fanatical obsessiveness are not the same thing.

2. This Commandment refers to literal idols, not differing conceptions of God. Judaism has always been aware of God's differing attributes, and there is no one single permitted understanding of Him.

3. This Commandment refers to God's actual Name, YHVH in Hebrew, not the word "God" or the name of Jesus. It's hard to violate this one today, because no one knows how it was pronounced (it for sure wasn't "Yahweh").

4. This Commandment refers to certain specific laws regarding the Sabbath, that is, sunset Friday till full dark Saturday night; those are obviously not what is being spoken of here. You also can't just pick any day of the week.

5. OK, but it ought to be made clear that offenses by children don't count. Anyone who says that you're going to Hell because you said "I hate you, Mommy!" when you were two is not someone well acquainted with basic decency, let alone with God.

6. This Commandment refers only to actual, literal murder. Anger is not murder, even when it's unwarranted. Neither is hatred. For what Jesus said, are below under #7.

7. This Commandment clearly refers to the actual act of adultery, not lust. Lust is normal; if one felt no attraction at all to other women, one would feel none for one's wife. Acting upon feelings of lust are quite another matter.
Yes, I know Jesus said it.
First, Jesus often said things to indicate that no one is perfect and that pride is unwarranted. I never saw any indication that he meant that everyone who ever felt attracted to a woman to whom he was not married was going to Hell. Whatever else he may have been, Jesus was not insane.
Second, Jesus was making an obvious distinction between sinning "in one's heart" and literally committing the sin. I suspect that if he had been asked, he would have said that there is a bit of difference between anger and actual murder.
Third, whether he said this or not, the meaning of the Commandments in Exodus are very clear, and even if one accepts that he had the authority to do so (which I don't), Jesus had no intention of changing those meanings, nor did he ever claim to. On the contrary, he affirmed that the Law was to remain unchanged.

8. OK. Theft is theft, with the same caveat about childhood offenses.

9. This Commandment is completely restated, and falsely. It actually refers to "bearing false witness," and it refers to giving false testimony in a trial. Lying in small matters, particularly for "the peace of the home" or shalom bayit, is not a sin; this is proven implicitly by Abraham's lying by omission to Sarah about what God said about her to spare her feelings.

10. OK, but a distinction ought to be made between wanting one's neighbor's car and wanting one like it.

Revising the Commandments in order to render them virtually impossible for anyone to keep is directly against the instruction of the Bible itself in Deuteronomy 30:11-14: "11 Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. 12 It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ 13 Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ 14 No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe."

This test was nothing more than a dishonest exercise in unwarranted hyperbole and scare tactics. There are good, honest and decent arguments for Christianity--any book by C. S. Lewis is full of them--but they do not include manipulation and phony guilt trips and ignoring the burning passion that Jesus for the Golden Rule, which is totally absent here.

According to this, God made us prone to sin (or, if you like, so we must bear the guilt of a single sin committed thousands of years ago), and then set up a list of rules that He knows are impossible to follow; then demands that we not make the smallest error, even as children, on pain of eternal punishment in Hell.

It's called freedom. God did not want robots so He gave us free will. Sin (Evil) goes hand in hand with love (freedom). They are both in proportion with each other as it is the only good way for God to be fair. You can chose to sin (evil) or you can chose love (freedom). In God's goodness He does give us a way to be not judged. Later on that.

So you do not believe in Original Sin. That means you have set up a God to your own liking and ignored the teachings of the Church.

Look it up.

Whatever we do that is good is of no account whatever, so we ought not worry about doing good. That doesn't matter at all.

No one is good except God. If you took the test I believe you know that.

Confirming, again, that doing good is not important, in direct contradiction to a very great deal indeed of what Jesus himself taught.

Only by thinking certain thoughts--that is, by believing something we are told--and by reciting a magic formula, can escape this terrible and inevitable fate.

Thoughts have nothing to do with it. The demons know the truth but they will not see the Kingdom of Heaven. Only understanding who we are and acknowledging what God has done for us can spare our life from Hell.

How is that different from thinking the right thoughts? "Understanding" and "acknowledging" are both kinds of thoughts; they are certainly not acts.

Then, it doesn't matter what we have done, however depraved, evil, or murderous--everything is now OK and we get eternal bliss and reward. And it still doesn't matter if we do anything good, because now we don't have to; we are saved and OK and guaranteed a place in Heaven.

There is no sin or evil thing anyone can do that can stop the Creator of everything from forgiving us if we truly come to the understanding of how much we have transgressed God's Holy Law and sincerely are sorry for it. You cannot continue to live in sin with no regard or fear of the Lord and have true salvation. If you did it would be a false conversion.

The torturers were very certain indeed that they were serving God and doing His will when they were burning Jews' genitals with red-hot irons and breaking their joints on the rack. Are they going to
Hell because they were mistaken, or to Heaven because they believed in Jesus? How were they supposed to know they were wrong? Were they wrong?

How do you know your own approach isn't wrong right now? There are many fine Christian scholars and clergymen who think it is, and profoundly so.

Good deeds don't matter at all, either way. Only mistakes count, every single one of them, and if we hold the right thoughts, then they don't matter either. Only the right thoughts matter. Nothing else.

Again thoughts have nothing to do with it. There is a great saying maybe you've heard: We can not stop the birds from flying over our heads, but we can keep them from making a nest in our hair.

That is about temptation, and it's a non sequitur in this context.

Right thoughts will do no one any good when they find themselves in God's Holy Courtroom. You will have to give an account for what you have done in the outwardly ways and your thoughts. God knows everything.

(emphasis added above)

So one is saved by works and not by faith? That's fine with me, but that's not what this "test" is saying, and that isn't what you've been saying up to now.

Oh, yeah; and if your people have been slandered, persecuted, beaten, tortured, exiled, and murdered en masse for centuries, by Christians, explicitly in the name of Christ, to the point that you would never even consider adopting their religion, you have to go to Hell anyway--while their tormentors are rewarded with bliss in Heaven because they thought the right thoughts and said the right words.

Again as I have already stated, we cannot blame God for the evil things people do in the name of any Religion.

And as I said before, no one ever blamed God for this. The question is, did the torturers go to Heaven? They believed in Jesus.

Everyone will have to give an account for their life in front of the Holy Judge of the Universe. The one and only True Living God. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

So believing in Jesus as your personal savior isn't enough. I'm okay with that.

You still haven't answered the question, though; did they go to Heaven, or not? It's "yes" or "no." Very simple.

Sorry. I believe in God--but not that God.

You have just broken the 2nd commandment. You have created an image of God in your own mind that your more comfortable with.

The Second Commandment, as I said and as the Bible makes clear, is about actual idols. Show me anywhere in the entire Bible that anyone is condemned under this Commandment for having an actually erroneous conception of God, let alone a merely different one.

In any case, I think that whoever wrote this "test" has made up a new God. I have already proven that the meaning, and in one case the actual words, of the Commandments has been deliberately distorted for the purpose of making them impossible to keep--which the Bible itself says they are not. Who's trying to understand the real God of the Bible, and who is making up a God of their own and deciding whom He will condemn and to whom He will show mercy?

If you can explain to me why a Christian, who believes in Jesus as his personal savior, and who pours molten lead down the throat of a Jew who refuses to convert in an effort to force his watching family to do so, gets to go to Heaven while his victims go to Hell because they do NOT believe in Jesus as their personal savior--well, make me believe that that is God's justice, and I will believe in that God.

See above comment it applys here.

No, it doesn't. Answer the questions directly, yes or no, and stop appealing to dogma and hoping you won't have to.

All people have transgressed against God's Holy Law. Everyone will be judged fairly as God is the perfect Judge. God does not force His ways on us. He gives us freedom to choose. Anyone that could do something as horrible as you noted above will be judged for murder. Just calling on the name of Jesus does not save you. God will not be mocked this way.

But they believed that they were serving God and trusted Jesus to save them. So that wasn't enough? You claim that it's possible to know exactly how God will judge is, so answer the question directly: did they go to Heaven, or to Hell?

You have not even bothered to mention the fate of the Jews they tortured. Heaven, or Hell? If you're so sure you know how God judges, which is it?

If you admit that you don't know, you're agreeing with me to leave it to God.

Which is it?

And while you're at it, convince me that black is white, up is down, and pigs can fly backwards.

This I cannot do but one day when I am with the Lord I will have complete understanding and knowledge. I pray that I see you there.

That's the first thing you've said here with which I can agree. You claim to know the mind of God and how He will judge. I don't. One day, if there is a life after this one, we will know. Not till then.

Which reminds me: there is another question you have not answered.

Why do you think Jews who do not believe in Heaven remain faithful and observant Jews? Have you even bothered to think about that?

Ok wow glad I got through that. Now my wife said I am neglecting her so I must excuse myself for a time of unknown length. If I don't respond quickly please don't get anger with me.

Take your time; as you can see, you haven't "gotten through" this yet by a long shot.

"And the Lord was pleased with the sacrifice and said to himself, "I will never again curse the earth, destroying all living things, even though people's thoughts and actions are bent toward evil from childhood."

Original Sin again. You really need to make up your mind about that.

[bernee51]

The characteristics usually attributed to a creator deity ensure its illogicity and therefore its non-existence.

Your using Logic not me.

In my experience, lack of the use of logic is no uncommon in theists expressing their belief in there particular god concept.

I take it you cannot refute my objections to the existence of your creator deity?

AFAIK no such person exists or has existed. I don't quite get your point.

Not true. Jesus Christ did. He is the only person I know of that has died and rose again.

This knowledge is obviously not based on evidence.

He had a lot to say about the afterlife.

Nothing Jesus said is available - all that is available is hearsay.

Now you most likely dont except this happened but there is plenty of evidence that He was real, did die on that tree and three days later rose again (produce his body and you kill my believe).

I have asked on many occasions, of many believers, in this forum and elsewhere, for evidence of the resurrection. None has been forthcoming. Perhaps you can break the mold.

So the burden is placed back on you. Prove He never was alive, prove His body is still in the ground and prove He is not alive today.

Shifting the burden of will do you no good. It is you making the positive claims...you have not shown that he lived, did die and, most importantly, rose from the dead.

Just believing He is not real does not make it a Reality.

Believing he was real does not make it a reality.

I pray that your heart and mind be opened.

Why do you have to tell me you pray for this, doesn't it work if you don't tell me.

BTW I show by my words and my seeking, by the spritual journey I am on, that both my mind and heart are indeed open.

Now tell me, you who would claim to have the 'truth', how is your heart and mind open?

[McCulloch]

Just because you know that 2+2=4 (and etc), you are certain that Hell does not exist? I think you don't know that you don't know.

Are you certain that Hell exists? If so, how?
Are you certain that Jabberwocky does not exist?

Anyway, it all makes good sense to me.

God created humans in His own image. He put them into a garden and told them if they did a certain thing, there would be really bad consequences. He foreknew that they would do the bad thing and did nothing to prevent it. When they did exactly what God knew that they would do, He cursed them and all of their descendants to eternal torment. But He had a plan. He chose a nomadic tribe to be His people. He instructed them to take some land from some people who lived there and kill them all. And He gave them some rules to live by. They turned away from Him and His rules, just as He knew that they would, so he punished them by taking away their nation. But He promised them that through them, all of the nations of the world would be blessed. So He allowed them to return to their land, but under foreign rule. He then became a human in order that the other humans could kill him, thus appeasing His own wrath against the humans' sin. This act somehow provided the propitiation for sin for all humans, yet even with that, not all humans would be forgiven of their sins. They had to believe something by faith in order to partake of this unconditional forgiveness.

Am I misrepresenting anything?

[Goat]

Ok Goat you first.

am 100% sure.

Are you 100% sure that Nastrand doesn't exist, and if you don't believe in Odin you will be sent there?

100 percent sure of what Goat? Hell. How do you know? Have you died, been dead for longer than a few minutes or hours and came back? I am a simple man but I do know that there are things I cannot explain or have knowledge about. Lets take for example skydiving. Now I know what it feels like to have over 1000 skydives from 13k feet personally but unless you have jumped over 1000 times there is no way to personally know for sure what it feels like. You have to experience it to understand it. Or here is a tougher question about having 100% knowledge. Answer this question. How many grains of sand is there in Sahara desert. I mean if you have 100% knowledge you should be able to answer this question.

I am absolutely sure, because of my faith. There is no question in my mind that God would not make an eternal hell. This , in my mind, is backed up by the
Jewish scriptures.

[servant]

So...where is Hitler or Stalin?

[servant]

bernee51

there is plenty of evidence in the Bible. Whether you choose to except it as historical information is up to you.