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| Author | Topic: Will I see Hitler in heaven? | |||||||||||||||||||
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GDR Member  Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
jar writes: I believe the moral of most of the Bible, beginning with Genesis is that we know right from wrong, and that GOD expects us to do what is right, and to try not to do what is wrong. That is a basic expectation. The reward for that is that you build a better life here for you, and for those you come in contact with, either directly or indirectly. It has little to do with earning salvation. In fact, if the goal of doing good is to earn salvation, I would imagine that GOD would discount such works since salvation is already a given. I largely agree, but it isn't in my view so much about doing right or wrong. I believe it to be more about the condition of the heart. The Bible says, (paraphrasing here) that to whom much is given much is expected. A chile who is born with fetal alcohol syndrome and is abused as a child is more likely to make bad choices as opposed to a child who is genuinely loved. However the equaliser is that both children can make a choice between loving others or loving self, even though the first child is more likely to make poor choices about right and wrong in his/her life. CS Lewis writes, (I know I've quoted this before) that "in the end there are those who say to God, 'Thy will be done', and those to whom God says, 'thy will be done'. If our life on Earth is all about looking after number one we will have developed a mind set that will choose hell because we can't give up the things that we cling to. If however we develop an attitude of love for others and a love for all that is good we will have developed a mind set that is not of the self and will gladly choose heaven. So as to Hitler's final home, my guess is that he chose hell and is probably somewhat revered there. I suggest however that he is probably has about as much joy there as he had while he was here, which is darn little. There is far more joy in a life that works at bringing joy to others than there is in a life of trying to garner joy for the self. Everybody is entitled to my opinion. 
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
jar writes: Remember that the Second is a two part command. Love others as you love yourself. You MUST first love yourself, value yourself, respect yourself, what good for yourself, know that you are NOT condemned. Unless you have a high standard for yourself, you will not treat others with respect. The higher the standaard you set for yourself, the better you will treat others. Christ's message was all about love. He said to love others as He has loved us. He died for us. There are many, for a variety of reasons, who are unable to love themselves but still can love others. However, I do agree that God wants us to have good self esteem, and know that we as individuals are of infinite value to him. Certainly we should love ourselves in that sense but there is a difference bwtween love of self to the detriment of others, or loving ourselves enough that we can put the interest of others ahead of our own. Look at Mother Theresa. I'm sure she loved herself but she lived a life of joy by putting the needs of others ahead of her own self interest. Edited by GDR, : No reason given. Everybody is entitled to my opinion.
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
Brian writes: If He hated the Nazi's, why did He sit on his lazy ass and do nothing about them? Maybe he sent an army to defeat them. If there wasn't evil in this world then goodness wouldn't be able to exist either. Everybody is entitled to my opinion.
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
Brian writes: Aren't you assuming that we live in a dualistic universe? Not at all. I'm just saying that if evil didn't exist then the concept of goodness would have no meaning. It would be the same with joy and sorrow. If we didn't have the ability to know sorrow we couldn't know joy. The same with love and hate, like and dislike or hot and cold for that matter. Everybody is entitled to my opinion.
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
I'm hesitant to respond because you have thought about this deeply, and frankly I doubt that I can add anything that you haven't thought about previously. However it isn't easy shutting me up.
Omnivorous writes: Essentially, all the Abrahamic faiths root their answer in mystery, for there is no human justification for Job's misery or the misery of any child born into crushing poverty. If you look at the story of Job you can choose to take it literally at face value if you like. Frankly I find the literal story to be inconsistent with the God that I know of in the NT and well as the God that I know in my life. If however you take the story to be a metaphor for the fact that we will struggle and face sorrow and hardship, but that through it all we are still loved by, and valuable to God. It tells us that we should be people of courage, hope and perseverance.
Omnivorous writes: So, I find myself again looking at necessity and contingency and looking more closely at the third option--that the human understanding of God is in error. If I understand the theology of it correctly (my Southern Baptist roots didn't need much theology beyond an angry God, a bass guitar, and sex), Christian apologists usually come to rest at balancing the necesssity of evil with the necessity of free will, suggesting that God was bound by some sort of moral calculus that required that toddlers be raped and throttled. I still can't go there. Who can understand the evil that goes on in the world except the perpetrators and maybe not even them. I think one of the problems in our society is that we are made, through the media, acutely aware of acts of horrendous evil but we remain oblivious to the millions of incidents of love and charity. To try and bring it back to the OP, we can look upon Hitler and concentrate on the evil that he brought about and forget about the many acts done by people like Corrie Ten Boom. The OP is asking whether Hitler will be in heaven or not. The Bible says that we are not to judge the individual, but we are called to judge the actions of people. I would suggest that based on Hitler's actions that even if he were to find himself in heaven he would find it totally repugnant as he would have to face the evil of what he did for eternity. My guess is that he will find himself more content in hell. To get back to your post I repeat that if we can't know sorrow we can't know joy. Are you prepared to give up knowing the joy that you feel when, for example, you hold your new born child in your arms for the first time by giving up the sorrow that you feel when you lose a parent? I would suggest that even with all the sorrow in the world there is more joy. There are relatively few that choose suicide over life. When we look at the life of Christ in the NT we can also see that God suffers with us. Christ suffered for us. There aren't any easy answers but I have no doubt in my mind that my Christian God is a God of love who hates evil, and hates suffering. This of course begs the question of why doesn't He end it if He is all powerful and all I can say is that it would leave us an human beings who would be unable to choose to feel love, compassion or joy. What kind of existence would that leave us with? Everybody is entitled to my opinion.
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
Brian writes: Only when they are free from the restraints of an outdated concept such as theism, or even Christianity. These ideas put limits on the believer's thoughts. For example, a young earther doesn;t have the ability to think about an ancient universe. The thing is Brian it is your beliefs that puts limits on your thoughts. You have limited yourself to what science can discover and can't even consider the possibility of the metaphysical. The majority of Christians are not YEC. For the rest of us Christians we can wonder at the discoveries of science such as an ancient universe in the physical world, but we are also open to learn about the metaphysical. Even if you are right and there is no metaphysical, (which you're not ), then we still have no more limits on what we can learn than you do. Everybody is entitled to my opinion.
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
I've been thinking about your reply and as we are discussing things that there is no answer for in this life it is not easy knowing how to respond but I'll give it a shot.
omnivorous writes: However, in the context of your example, keep in mind that I am not objecting to human mortality. Our transience does suffuse the birth of new life with more poignant celebration, but mortality alone seems adequate to that task: it is not death that I object to but the free hand given to evil. I do not believe that free will must, from a creator's perspective, mean the unfettered freedom to spiral down into increasingly egregious acts of depravity against others. After all, there are evils aside from predating other human beings, and a god could sort us out on some basis other than spilled human blood. How do we know that evil is being given a free hand? Maybe there are restraints on evil, but from our human perspective we can't know that they exist. In the final analysis when we consider human history, good has triumphed over evil based on the fact that we are still here. As a Christian I also believe that goodness triumphs because there is a balancing of accounts in the life after this one. We see a great deal of evil in the world but that is by our measurement. Why is it that we are even able to recognize evil in a person such as Hitler and pass judgement on the degree of evil? You say that evil has a free hand but I think you're wrong based on the notion that if evil actually had a free hand, we would not see evil as evil at all. Although I agree that we can spiral down into depravity we can also aspire to and achieve great acts of self sacrifice born out of the gift of love that we have been given. Great acts of evil make headlines, but great acts of love usually go unnoticed. I think that if you disregard the media and just look at the world around you, the goodness that there is far outweighs the evil.
omivorous writes: Even supposing free will, we cannot reach up and brush the moon from the sky: if sexual lust in the heart alone identifies the sinner, so must the lust for blood. The sanctity of life could be built into the universe as fundamentally as gravity, distance, and other limits on our power. Given this, why would a benevolent God not do so? That central question brings me, again and again, to the questions of necessity I raised earlier. I see no necessary connection between free will and victimizing evil. In a sense sexual lust and blood lust are one and the same. They are both ways of using someone else for some hoped for satisfaction of the self. When it comes down to it, that is what I believe that we are all about. What we are is based on the choices that we make. Do we choose love of self, which is an adulterated love, or do we choose love in its pure unadulterated form. Again as a Christian I believe that God has built sanctity of life into the creation as I see physical life as only being the embryonic stage of our real life. As for the free will question I have to disagree. I don't see how we would be able to choose goodness and love if we didn't have the ability to choose evil and hatred, and be able to recognize the difference. Thanks for the reply and the chance to respond. Edited by GDR, : Left out a word some how Edited by GDR, : No reason given. Everybody is entitled to my opinion.
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
Hi Omnivorous. Thanks again. I basically see this as a discussion more than a debate but I would like to address this point that you make.
Omnivorous writes: I appreciate the tenets of faith you have outlined, but for the unbeliever (agnostic or atheist), they are inescapably circular--you answer questions about reconciling what we see of the world with belief in a particular sort of deity with your faith in that deity. Again, I understand that your faith answers those questions adequately for you, but to an unbeliever this merely begs the question. I did point out that I don't I can't see how it is possible that unlimited evil could exist based on things that are obvious to us all. In the part where I dealt with things that I believe I didn't present them as facts, but only opinion. We have come to a discussion like this based on our beliefs and if you are going to use that as a criterion then every discussion like this is circular.
Omnivorous writes: My central point here was that the freedom to will evil has been coupled with a largely unrestrained power to do evil to each other--which seems unnecessary for the theological purposes ascribed to free will. I'm not God. (I hope that this doesn't come as a shock. ) I don't pretend to know what is and what isn't necessary in order for us to have free will. Sure, it's back to mystery, but wouldn't we expect there to be mystery when we are considering an intelligence that is capable of creating us and the universe we live in. I think that there's a great deal that my dog finds mysterious about me and I didn't even create him. I don't understand why mystery is such an issue. We don't understand the true nature of energy but we believe in it.
Omnivorous writes:
If the expression of our sovereign will is so important, then why should one person's will to evil preclude other peoples' opportunity to express their own sovereign will? It is my contention that someone else cannot preclude me from expressing my sovereign will. My neighbour might be able to kill me physically but he can't kill the part of me that is real, which is my consciousness, soul, spirit or whatever one wants to call it. If you want to go back to infants then I'll agree. It's a mystery, but I do believe in a just God.
Omnivorous writes: As the topic title suggests, Hitler might have repented and been saved at the last moment, while many of the millions he killed were deprived of that chance at redemption. Outside of belief, it is difficult to reconcile that calculus. The discussion would have to revolve around the verb to "repent". I definitely do not believe that repent in the Christian sense means saying to Jesus I believe and by the way, please forgive me. In my view repentance requires a complete turning of the heart from one (in Hitler's case) that loved death, hatred, and evil to one who loves life, goodness and love. Although not at all impossible, I don't believe that change is made at all easily. Remorse because one loses the war as in Hitler's case is very different than remorse because of the evil that he committed.
Omnivorous writes: If we accept the premise of a Creator, then the human capacity to do evil--as opposed to the human capacity to freely choose evil--was prescribed by that Creator. The Christian view of free will seems to be that we must be able to choose Evil or our ability to choose Good would be meaningless. That does have a certain amount of theo-logic but it does not address the power to enact that evil. How can we freely choose evil without the power to enact it? My Christian doctrine tells me this. Christ understands our suffering as He lived it. As well, God has given us the pattern of how to live in a way that prevents us, if we follow that pattern, from hurting our neighbours and protecting our relationship with him. He has also given us the freedom to reject that pattern.
Omnivorous writes: How many infants' blood does a man need on his hands before he has demonstrated his choice? If sin is sin, if the will to evil, like lust in the heart, is already a sin, then why must so many people continue to suffer for what he has already demonstrated? What further purpose is accomplished? A murderer can freely enact his will to evil over and over, but one murder--or even his desire to murder--would seem adequate, theologically speaking. Our power has limits that our will does not. Those limits could have been drawn anywhere, but they were drawn to specifications that both permit great suffering and preclude the free choices of others. Thus, to accept the theological argument for the necessity of free will, it seems to me, merely moves the point of contention from the question of why God permits freely willed evil to the question of why God allows the enactment of freely willed evil and provided it such ample scope. When you note that there may be constraints beyond our ken, I again hear the reply of "Mystery." You say: "Our power has limits that our will does not." We cannot will ourselves to live forever. Physical death is the final comes to those who love goodness and to those that love evil. There are always limits on the good or evil that we commit. I’m also not sure that I agree that the limits could have been drawn anywhere. As I said, I’m not God but it seems logical to me that if evil is limited then so is goodness. I think I showed, (I believe conclusively) in my last post to you that the goodness in the world is greater than the evil. I suppose in the end, any Theist would have to say that without the creator there would be no life at all. Would it better that mankind had never come to be, as opposed to what is? Greg Everybody is entitled to my opinion.
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