General Discussion

WARNING - sensitive believers who do not want to be offended - STOP HERE. I have no quarrel with you and wish you peace and happiness in your lives. You live as you see fit and I will refrain from comment unless you try to use it on my children or grand-children. Keep it to yourself and your fellow congregation and ne'er the twixt our paths must cross...

PROCEED WITH CURIOSITY AT PERIL OF OFFENSE BEING GIVEN....

OK, I assume anyone proceeding is OK with what comes next...Save the preaching man, I just don't care.

I really don't and I mockingly reference McDowell, and the tools at the DI, because what you wrote above this reply could have easily come from either one or both of those entities at least 20 years ago. The same arguments in one form or another have been bandied about for millenia and if you are determined to believe, be my guest. You're sentiments are unmoving, your faith is unimportant and the reasons for your passion are wasted if your god is all-powerful and all-knowing and unable to intercede for justice but perfectly suited for smiting and eternal punishment of pesky mortals that question its existence in the first place.

God, if you're listening...I call on you to smite Donald Trump..(runs off to see if wishes do come true...disappointedly returns to the keyboard, unheard, unvalidated).....did not work again, oh well, maybe tomorrow for tomorrow is another 1/364.25th of orbit around the Sun.

Christian apologetics is tiresome and quite honestly boring already. How many times do you all believe that you can repeat the same unconvincing arguments and generate a response other than bemusement and mockery or more likely juist being tuned out or ignored as people worry more about dinner and the mortgage and less about strangers' lives?

Here's a different wager for ya, in the spirt of Pascal's well-worn nonsense of milquetoast ....I call it the Double Down Dichotomy (since everything is more plausible with a pithy name! LOL)

1) If "heaven" exists, it must be populated by the very holier-than-thou Christian preachy types...their eternal reward and all that jazz...
2) If "hell" exists, it is the place of maximum, eternal punishment for the temporal offense of "unbelief" (doubting the Holy Spirit is unpardonable according to Jesus...I don't remember chapter and verse, but I also don't care)...their comeuppance for not cheering for the right team during a temporary audition period on a random, moist pebble in the corner of a non-descript back water of the Milky Way galaxy.
3) It must therefore follow from 1 and 2 than for me, who CANNOT FUCKING STAND THE PREACHY TYPES that my heaven would be their hell and vice versa...they could no more abide my presence in their reward for eternity than I could stand being there in the first place. In such a horrible company, I would certainly be thwarted in all escape attempts by you vengeful deity, who could no more allow me to die than he could allow them to live...

Which means that if ANY of the nonsense is real, we all are going to have to spend eternity together in one way or another any way...so lighten up Francis...(yes, that IS an irreverent reference to "Stripes" circa Bill Murray 1980).

For their heaven would be my hell and their hell would be my heaven.
The reality is much more likely to be that we all return from whence we came - dust to dust for sure, but also non-conscious to non-conscious as well.

No man has memory preceding his father's ejaculation fertilizing his mother's ovulating egg - whether natural or artificial means, no sperm-egg union = no person (including Jesus of Myth, or Adonis, Hercules, Osiris, and all the other virgin births throughout human history and myth making.

When you die, your brain likewise reverts to its original state - non-existence. This will trouble you exactly as much as it troubled you before you were born - which is to say, not in the least bit. I'm betting heavy that you and I won't notice it any more than you can exactly pin point the instant you fall asleep or enter R.E.M. cycles and dreams. Your death is not an ending for the matter that composes your body, your mind or the electrons that flow from the biochemical reactions in your synapses and brain right now. That matter is either converted to energy and used or it is dissipated in heat loss and the process of decay, gone from its present form forevermore, but not leaving the universe at all. Reality is we live and we die and in-between we rent. We OWN nothing. we KEEP nothing and when we cease to exist, our consciousness returns to nothing from whence it sprang.

Tell yourself whatever you want to make believe that we exist beyond the veil of death. Luxuriate in the fantasy of "eternal" life being anything but a hellacious torture of unchanging agony in the 13 billionth year following your 80-90 year terrestrial life - unchanging and part of the eternal choir singing songs of praise to your maker, as if the first 12,999,999,999 years weren't ENOUGH to show gratitude.

If you need help sleeping at night, I begrudge no man any means to alleviate their own personal torment...just don't be fooled into thinking, or believing, that the rest of humanity outside of the conversation in your head gives any fucks at all about it and therein lies the peace. You go right on being saved and ignoring my existence and I will do likewise.

If I am right though, I'll see you in your heaven anyway...

Vaya con dios amigo.