If by "stands up to scrutiny" you mean "can be maintained by saying 'dunno' to the hardest questions" then sure, just about anything stands up to scrutiny :-). I don't think you've given any reason to think it's reasonable to suppose that human sins justify eternal torment. That's not what I mean by stands up to scrutiny. I don't think Christians have complete answers to some questions, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. What I find more telling is that when people say things like "Hell is clearly wrong because I feel like it's wrong" they're relying on 'common sense' which I don't think is reliable when applied to things this far removed from our common experience, or when they say "Hell is clearly wrong because it is an infinite punishment for a finite crime" you find that when you open that up a bit it becomes clear that we have such a sketchy view of all of these things that you can't state that dogmaticly - how can we tell from our vantage point how bad sin is or what the correct way of determining a punishment for it would be?
From the perspective of God not being real all this stuff is not going to be convincing. I don't think it should be. I don't expect to argue a really strong positive cas about hell just from hell. I think if you come Christianity from other angles, become convinced that God is real, then it is reasonable to say "I don't entirely understand this, but I trust that God who is much greater than me has got it right".
Clearly Christians continue to disobey God (by which I mean: do things that are against what they consider, and what most people would consider if they took Christianity as premise and went from there, to be the will of God). So if you hope to escape hell then hell can't be a necessary consequence of disobeying God. Hold on - this doesn't make sense. The argument Christians make is two stage. First that our sin means we deserve punishment. Then that because of Jesus' death on the cross this escape route is open to us if we choose to accept it. Your argument is locked in stage 1, but that's not what Christians believe.
I agree that it could still be true that getting out of hell requires (e.g.) that one make *at least one* genuinely unforced choice, which God couldn't interfere with without making it not work any more. (Though I have never yet heard any really coherent account of why that should be. It's easy to argue that your position is sound when you're allowed to invent constraints that supposedly apply even to God, without any actual evidence that he is under any such constraints or any good reason to think he should be...) ... and it's easy to argue that God is wrong when you presume to understand the mechanics of how salvation must work and how God could have better designed the world without any actual evidence of these things.
If, as appears to be the case, you agree with me that (assuming, as before, that Christianity is right) providing really good evidence would suffice to make the great majority of people become Christians of their own free will Err, no, I don't think that :-) It might be the case, but I don't think so.
Anyway, as I said - I don't think God is obligated to provide us with salvation or knowledge of salvation. We're rightly judged guilty even if we choose to do things that we know are wrong but don't know we're going to be punished for them. As I said in my example of the criminal who does not know of the existence of police or a legal system. That God made any effort to save any of us is breathtakingly amazing and loving, it is not something we deserve.
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That's not what I mean by stands up to scrutiny. I don't think Christians have complete answers to some questions, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. What I find more telling is that when people say things like "Hell is clearly wrong because I feel like it's wrong" they're relying on 'common sense' which I don't think is reliable when applied to things this far removed from our common experience, or when they say "Hell is clearly wrong because it is an infinite punishment for a finite crime" you find that when you open that up a bit it becomes clear that we have such a sketchy view of all of these things that you can't state that dogmaticly - how can we tell from our vantage point how bad sin is or what the correct way of determining a punishment for it would be?
From the perspective of God not being real all this stuff is not going to be convincing. I don't think it should be. I don't expect to argue a really strong positive cas about hell just from hell. I think if you come Christianity from other angles, become convinced that God is real, then it is reasonable to say "I don't entirely understand this, but I trust that God who is much greater than me has got it right".
Clearly Christians continue to disobey God (by which I mean: do things that are against what they consider, and what most people would consider if they took Christianity as premise and went from there, to be the will of God). So if you hope to escape hell then hell can't be a necessary consequence of disobeying God.
Hold on - this doesn't make sense. The argument Christians make is two stage. First that our sin means we deserve punishment. Then that because of Jesus' death on the cross this escape route is open to us if we choose to accept it. Your argument is locked in stage 1, but that's not what Christians believe.
I agree that it could still be true that getting out of hell requires (e.g.) that one make *at least one* genuinely unforced choice, which God couldn't interfere with without making it not work any more. (Though I have never yet heard any really coherent account of why that should be. It's easy to argue that your position is sound when you're allowed to invent constraints that supposedly apply even to God, without any actual evidence that he is under any such constraints or any good reason to think he should be...)
... and it's easy to argue that God is wrong when you presume to understand the mechanics of how salvation must work and how God could have better designed the world without any actual evidence of these things.
If, as appears to be the case, you agree with me that (assuming, as before, that Christianity is right) providing really good evidence would suffice to make the great majority of people become Christians of their own free will
Err, no, I don't think that :-) It might be the case, but I don't think so.
Anyway, as I said - I don't think God is obligated to provide us with salvation or knowledge of salvation. We're rightly judged guilty even if we choose to do things that we know are wrong but don't know we're going to be punished for them. As I said in my example of the criminal who does not know of the existence of police or a legal system. That God made any effort to save any of us is breathtakingly amazing and loving, it is not something we deserve.