This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays of Triablogue entitled
Recently I was listening to philosophical theologians give bad answers on hell.
You should have recognized their bad answers likely implied they have been previously warned at least twice against their error, and accordingly you should have obeyed that part of the bible that tells you to avoid them, see Titus 3:9-11.
I've probably discussed most of this before at one time or another, but it may be useful to summarize them in one place. By way of preliminary comment, the primary reason Christians believe in hell
Speak for yourself, it should be obvious to a smart guy like you that not all Christians believe in hell, unless you use that doctrine as a test of orthodoxy. Can a person be genuinely born-again while adopting annihilationism, yes or no? If yes, then couldn't it be argued that every bit of time you spend arguing peripherals, the more you sin by taking away time better spend defending essentials?
is because they believe what the Bible says about hell.
Well gee, so do the Jehovah's Witnesses and the 7th Day Adventists.
It isn't necessary to provide an independent, philosophical defense of hell.
Especially given that such would be impossible, lest you look a little too consistent in your Calvinism and admit you worship a sadistic lunatic.
It's useful in apologetics and evangelism to be able to do that, but the warrant for believing in hell doesn't rely on that.
There's plenty of good warrant for ascribing error to the NT doctrine of eternal conscious torment.
1. Infinite God
i) A typical objection goes like this: how can a just God mete out infinite punishment for finite sin? How can the sins of a lifetime merit infinite punishment? The typical reply is that a sin against an infinite God is infinitely culpable, and merits infinite punishment.
Except that God's justice against sin in the OT is very often FULLY satisfied by decidedly temporal means of atonement, such as animal sacrifice. Hell, the master who rapes his slave-girl is automatically forgiven simply by donating one of his rams to the priests, no repentance or change beyond this is expressed or implied:
20 'Now if a man lies carnally with a woman who is a slave acquired for another man, but who has in no way been redeemed nor given her freedom, there shall be punishment; they shall not, however, be put to death, because she was not free.
21 'He shall bring his guilt offering to the LORD to the doorway of the tent of meeting, a ram for a guilt offering.
22 'The priest shall also make atonement for him with the ram of the guilt offering before the LORD for his sin which he has committed, and the sin which he has committed will be forgiven him. (Lev. 19:20-22 NAU)
Sometimes Leviticus is more specific than we might expect an ancient Hebrew author to be, to make sure the reader recognized how
completely animal blood expiated God's wrath against sin. Concerning Yom Kippur, or the once-yearly animal sacrifice:
29 "This shall be a permanent statute for you: in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall humble your souls and not do any work, whether the native, or the alien who sojourns among you;
30 for it is on this day that atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you; you will be clean from all your sins before the LORD. (Lev. 16:29-30 NAU)
Gee, really? Steve Hays would probably trifle "in what sense did they become clean before the Lord?"
Well gee, in the sense that "The Lord viewed them as clean"?
Sort of like, if you barged into Steve's house and said "your mother was just murdered!', he would probably trifle "in what sense, after all, 'murder' can be used by modern American persons in a variety of different ways!". Obviously, this text was intended to be read aloud to the mostly illiterate Israelites, and such people would not likely have conjured up the stupid semantic trifles in their mind that are conjured up by Steve Hays...and his concern to make sure the NT book of Hebrews continues being held up as inerrant.
That's a popular answer because it's compact and uses the same principle as the critic, only turning that principle against the objection. But as it stands, it's a bad argument:
Thanks for the honesty.
ii) It equivocates over the nature of infinitude. The objection is to a quantitative infinite punishment. A temporal infinite. Everlasting punishment. For finite, discrete sins.
However, to say a sin may be infinitely culpable swaps in a qualitative concept. An infinite degree of badness. I'm not sure if that's even meaningful.
Skeptics like me will use such concessions from Christian apologists to straighten out the idiots that warm the pews every Sunday. Half of the atheist bible critics' plight is in simply getting the "Christian" to correctly understand their own book.
In addition, what does it mean in this context to say that God is "infinite." In what morally relevant sense is God infinite in this argument? Perhaps what is meant is that God is infinitely good, so that a sin against an infinitely good God is infinitely bad, meriting infinite punishment. "Infinite" in the sense that God is as good as anything can be. Indeed, better than anything else. The uppermost maxima of goodness or exemplar of goodness. Something like that.
When you try to unpack the argument, it gets messy. I don't think this is a good argument as it stands.
Again, thanks for the honesty.
It does, however, contain a grain of truth, so I think it can be rehabilitated in some respect:
iii) There is a moral principle where the same action may be worse depending on who you do it to. It's worse to betray a friend than a stranger. It's worse to mistreat your elderly mother than to mistreat the telemarketer. So there can be degrees of culpability, not due to the action itself, but who it's directed to. Taken to a logical extreme, the argument is that we owe the most to God, we have the greatest obligation to God, so sinning against God is the worst kind of sin.
Except that in Steve Hays' very staunch 5-Point Calvinism, it is this infinite god who intended the sinner to sin the way he did, so that offending god by sinning is sort of like offending the person whom you gave a black eye to, because they took your hand and hit themselves with it. How the fuck could a Calvinist believe anybody could "offend God"? Is God offended when we manifest perfect compliance with his secret will?
Hays' displays his disturbing consistency by arguing elsewhere that God
secretly wills that people disobey his
revealed will, which while logical enough under his Calvinism, is viewed as shockingly heretical by most Christians. See
here.
Steve continues:
iv) There is, though, another complication to this argument. In what sense can we sin against God? We can't harm God.
Good point. And yet Malachi uses the word "yet" to duck the obvious criticism that it is logically impossible to steal from God, see Malachi 3:8. That's sort of like saying "Can a sinner make God go out of existence? Yet you have caused God to stop existing." Interesting how the little "yet" word can successfully shield an argument from deserved criticism.
It is, however, possible, to wrong someone without harming them. A thankless, malicious son can dishonor his father's memory. Suppose his dad was a conscientious father, but the son spreads scurrilous rumors about his late father that destroy his father's reputation. In one sense it's too late to harm is father. But there's still something terribly wrong about the action.
But according to Steve Hays, we only sin because God has infallibly predestined us to, and has secretly willed that we disobey his revealed will. One can only wonder whether our "wronging" god even makes sense under such a fatalistic system as Calvinism. Is it "wrong" to conform to God's secret will, yes or no? If yes, then God is a stupid sadist for blaming us for such wrong since he rigged the game to make sure we couldn't possibly deviate from "wronging" him. If "no", then god deprives himself of any basis to bitch, lest you serve a god who
condemns people for
OBEYING him? But because Steve is brainwashed, he will just blindly assume that the idiot who wrote Romans 9:20 rendered all objections frivolous.
2. Eternal existence
i) A basic reason hell is forever is because human beings are forever. If human beings have an immortal soul (not to mention the resurrection of the body), then whatever happens to human beings will last forever.
Except that there are plenty of Christians and Christian scholars who teach annihilationism. Probably because the "wrongness" of these doctrines are somewhat less obvious than the wrongness of 2+2=5... so that you can hardly blame them for adopting such doctrine.
They have an unending destiny because they have an unending existence. So whatever happens to them will go on forever. It continues because they continue. Annihilationists duck that by denying that human beings are naturally immortal.
ii) Now this is more of a necessary rather than sufficient condition for eternal punishment. In principle, it could be a argued that while whatever happens to them is never-ending, it needn't be the same thing forever. It can change. That's the contention of the universalist, as well as exponents of postmortem salvation. That requires a separate response.
It is, however, important to make the initial point that one reason damnation is inescapable is because existence is inescapable. Damnation never ceases because the damned never cease to exist.
Except that this is a philosophical objection, whereas Steve Hays' first commitment must be to the
bible, whose OT clearly indicates god's justice against sin can be, and often is,
fully satisfied by less than infinite means, such as animal sacrifice. See above. The reasonableness of that view is not going to be diminished merely because god's jailhouse lawyer can simply tack "in what sense?" onto everything they ever think of. Steve Hays doesn't get to dictate how much stupid pretentijous trifling the unbeliever must put up with in his apologetics before they become reasonable to just flip him the middle finger and walk away.
3. Apropos (2), a supporting argument is that damnation is forever because the damned continue to sin. An objection to this argument is that people have a capacity for change.
That can be true, but what causes them to change? In Christian theology, God's grace is transformative. If, however, God withholds his grace from the damned, then they don't get better. If anything, they get worse. More hardened.
Which denies the view of freewill held by most Christians, to the effect that we are just as capable of accepting Jesus solely by our freewill as we are capable of making a peanut butter sandwich by our own freewill. Attributing only the good in your life to "god's grace" and the sin only to "self" is just stupid inconsistency, which renders void the many biblical passages on god "rewarding" those who do good. If it wasn't us doing the good, then giving us a prize at the end anyway cannot rightfully be called "reward". If the good doesn't come from us, but only from God, then only God can logically be "rewarded" if at all.
4. Apropos (3), why doesn't God enable the damned to change? Why doesn't God grant them the ability to repent?
This goes to another principle in Christian theology: in terms of eschatological judgment, some sinners get what they deserve while others get better than they deserve (no one gets worse than they deserve).
Sort of like when both of your kids disobey you and each eat one cookie before dinner, you beat one of them with a rod (Proverbs 22:15) and ground them for a month, while you give the other one $50 to go blow at the mall however she wishes, with your blessings. Are you a fuckhead parent, yes or no? Or did you suddenly discover how wonderful god was for enabling his jailhouse lawyers to invent "ad hoc" excuses whenever expediency dictates?
The reason the damned never leave hell is because they don't deserve to leave hell.
That's right. If the 12 year old non-Christian girl who has done many good works of charity and gets good grades in school, should happen to reject the gospel invitation, then die in a state of unbelief in a car crash on the way home from church, God's righteousness permits no other fate for her except conscious eternal torment in "hell".
They don't deserve a better life.
You'd have been a bit more honest with your own doctrine had you specified that newborn babies do not deserve to be protected from death by rape. God was never 'required' to give them anything better, so when he leaves them to suffer, this is nothing short of god's righteousness in action, amen?
Of course this violates common sense, since if everything is covered by the sovereignty of god, then the fact that most babies are not raped to death makes it reasonable for any Christian to suppose that God feels a moral obligation to give such protection.
That's their just desert, and there's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, there's something right with God.
Sort of like if you came home to find your mom being raped by a whole gang, the fact that she is a sinner and the fact that God himself obviously wasn't doing anything to protect her, makes it at best ambiguous whether or not
you "should" do anything to prevent this crime. But I'm sure that if you found out this happened to some mother down the street, and her son just stood around solely by choice and not fear while his mother was raped. you'd feel better knowing that God secretly wanted the rape and this neglect to happen exactly the way it did.
Revealed will of God = "thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not murder", etc.
Secret will of God = "you shall kill that child, you shall obey that traffic signal", etc.
Is it morally good to act in conformity to the revealed will of God, yes or no?
Is it morally good to act in conformity to the secret will of God, yes or no?
Steve's Calvinism forces him to admit that Hitler's massacer of the Jews in WW2 was in perfect conformity to the "secret" will of God. So...was it morally good for Hitler to act in conformity to God's secret will, yes or no?
Or did Steve suddenly discover there's room in Calvinism for moral relativity?
Hopefully you have a better understanding of why biblical theology causes me, an atheist, to stay awake at night, all worried "what if I'm wrong and the creator really is a sadistic lunatic?"
In Christian theology, God doesn't treat all equally-undeserving sinners alike.
Which is precisely why it is reasonable to call him a sadistic lunatic. Just like if you didn't treat to the same discipline all of your kids who disobeyed you in the same exact way. When the punished ones cry out "why didn't you punish her too?", you'd be 'godly' to reply "my ways are mysterious, I don't have to explain myself to you, and since you are getting what you deserve, you have no right to complain if I let other persons, equally deserving of this punishment, off the hook." I'm sorry, but Steve is a fool to derive theology from Matthew 20:11-15...and so was Jesus for teaching such obviously unfair stupidity. How would the world be if all employers were
that arbitrary?
He draws a distinction. You shouldn't expect to get better than you deserve.
So because none of us "deserve" to have food, clothing and shelter, it can only be sinful and thus unreasonable motive why we seek these things. Steve, why do you seek for that which you don't deserve? isn't that sort of like the new inexperienced crew member at McDonald's wanting his starting wage to equal that of the crew members who have been there for 3 years?
Steve is also wrong biblially to condemn our wanting more than we deserve. If God sends his rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45), then our aquiring things we don't deserve is a routine that God is responsible for, and therefore god is responsible for this routine creating a habit and expectation in our mind that we should have some things we don't deserve.
Throwing dice to decide god's will is biblical (Acts 1:26), so you should expect to get more than you deserve through the inevitability of chance + time. Throw the dice often enough and they are bound to roll winner, and when they do, Calvinists will insist god wanted it that way.
In fact, Calvinists would say God is ultimately responsible for whatever defects in biblical and logical reasoning that you might engage in. Could anything have more powerful justification than "god wanted it that way"? No. If the most reasonable thing possible is conformity to god's will, then under Calvinism, beating children to death is equally as reasonable as saving a little girl from drowning. BOTH acts are exactly what God wanted, and by definition, God's will cannot possibly ever be "unreasonable".
To get just what you deserve is the essence of justice.
And for a justice system to decide for itself which among the two equally guilty criminals to let off the hook, and which to prosecute, is the
antithesis of justice, lest you stupidly insist that the justice meted out in American Courts every day for the last 200 years is a bad idea? (Conforming to God's secret will, as America's history absolutely must, is a bad idea?). Only in Calvinism could you get in trouble with God for doing exactly what he wanted when, where and how he wanted. Everybody else would call this sadistic lunacy, and Calvinists reply with "that's just human logic!"
Let's just say God infallibly predestined me to avoid joining the Calvinist cause, ok?
They don't get out of hell because they deserve nothing better. They are in their natural element.
If we deserve nothing better than hell, why did God allow us to exist for the present on this better-than-hell earth?
Does God sometimes give people what they don't deserve? If so, then why couldn't there be a strictly philosophical argument that this way of God remains true in the afterworld (i.e., sinners deserve to be in hell longer, but God limits the amount of time they spend there anyway, for the same reason he often makes life easier for undeserving criminals)? Something is greatly amiss in your trifling attempt to make your sadistic god's ways sound plausible to modern western ears. But since you view yourself as a puppet on a string, I'm sure you couldn't care less whether your reasoning does or doesn't square up with common sense. Cultists are experts are justifying their departure from common sense and convincing themselves God wanted them to act contrary to "worldly wisdom". The brainwashing is the same whether you push Christianity or ISIS.
There's something nihilistic, something morally subversive–even diabolical–about the idea that no matter what anyone ever does, it makes no ultimate different to what happens to them. To treat good and evil alike.
Then blame your god, who often treats criminals and law-abiding people alike. And blame yourself for promoting Calvinism, a doctrine that says our sense of making a genuine difference is completely illusory and false, we can do nothing whatever except react to an infallibly predetermined plan. And your god often treats evil and good alike.
5. Suppose (ex hypothesi) that human agents start out as a clean slate. By that I mean, suppose that initially they have no rap sheep. Their moral record is spotless.
There's no
ex hypothesi about it, the bible forthrightly calls little kids "innocent", see Psalm 106:37-38, Matthew 18:3, 2nd Kings 22:16, 24:4, and under James 4:17, which predicates sinfulness upon knowledge, for which babies, then who know nothing (i.e., they don't know the difference between good and evil, Isaiah 7:15) are correctly deemed "innocent". If that contradicts Paul's doctrine of original sin in Romans 5, lets get excited about preaching the good news to those lost inerrantists.
I'm not an inerrantist, and for academically rigorous reasons, therefore, I really don't care if another part of the bible tells Steve that babies are infected with original sin, this doesn't impose the slightest intellectual obligation upon
me to give up my reliance on grammar, context and genre, and add "reconcile this with what the bible says elsewhere" to the list of hermeneutical principles that scholars agree apply here. Most Christian scholars are not inerrantists, those who are inerrantist cannot even agree amongst themselves about its scope, Steve Hays himself allegedly thinks the Chicago Statement on Bible Inerrancy was less than perfect, etc, etc. So bible inerrancy is not sufficiently settled as to deserve being exalted in my mind to the status of governing hermeneutic.
I will NOT give up an otherwise contextually and grammatically justified interpretation of a bible verse merely because the interpretation contradicts my interpretation or somebody else's interpretation of some other bible verse.
Hays will trifle that biblical passages calling people "innocent" are only meant with reference to the human standard, but alas, it is "god" who is doing the talking in all the above-cited passages (at least as far as Steve is concerned) so it is Steve's burden to show that the "human standards only" interpretation arises from the grammar, context or genre of such passages.
Steve continues:
The first time I do something evil, that puts me behind.
Except that in Steve's world, whether raping children is "evil" depends on your frame of reference, and is therefore only a moral relativity. Even if we granted that baby-rape violates God "revealed" will, Steve has already argue that any and all acts of man,
including sin, necessarily conform to God's "secret" will, so that a completed act of baby-rape is biblically in harmony with God's secret will.
In other words, Steve wants us to believe that you can be "evil"
because you conformed to the will of God. Sort of like the parent who punishes their child for doing an act
exactly when, where, and how the parent intended the act to be done (!?). There's an excellent reason why Paul's smoke and mirrors evaporates at Romans 9:20. There is no moral method anywhere near any accepted convention of reason or common sense, that will justify
punishing a person for
perfect obedience. Except of course in the bible, where the stupider the act, the more "spiritual" it is (where you defeat death by getting yourself killed, and where strength is made perfect by lack of strength). I call victory when Christians feel forced to decry the superiority of 'human reason'. That's what one should expect from stupid cultists whose doctrines completely defy anything remotely approaching sensibility. Whether it's about Jesus or Vishnu hardly matters.
Because I can't change my past, if I do something evil, I can't get back to where I was before I did evil.
Which would justify a lifetime of depression after you jaywalk. Isn't it obvious how evil sin really is?
I can't get out from under that. If I did something evil, then it will always be the case that I did something evil. That's indelible. It doesn't fade with the passage of time. I don't become less guilty. Once I do something evil, there's no way to put that behind me. It's permanent. Evil has a timeless moral quality. There's no decay rate. The past is irrevocable.
Then the same must be true about your
good deeds. They too are permanent, right?
And the more evil things I do, the further behind I fall. A lifetime of cumulative wrongdoing.
Now you are just preaching the choir.
This is why vicarious atonement and penal substitution are fixtures of Christian redemption.
Maybe that's also why god offers to "forget your sins", because they are permanent? (Isa. 43:25-26). No, Mr. God's Jailhouse lawyer, that doesn't mean he is only claiming to exempt people from the penalty for sin. Read both verses, the human sense of literal memory failure is meant, even if the consequence is that this god would have to be insane. The dumber it makes god look, the more likely the interpretation is correct, amen?
Without a Redeemer who atones for your sin, on your behalf and in your stead, your culpability because increasingly hopeless.
No, all we need is charcoal briquettes, a pair of tongs, and obviously non-existent creatures who seem to think heaven has air:
1 In the year of King Uzziah's death I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple.
2 Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
3 And one called out to another and said, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, The whole earth is full of His glory."
4 And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke.
5 Then I said, "Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts."
6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. 7 He touched my mouth with it and said, "Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is forgiven." (Isa. 6:1-7 NAU)
(and Steve says "mere anthropomorphism! the get-out-of-jail-free card that is by definition necessarily always a correct interpretation with no obligation to actually justify it from the grammar or context or genre.)
Actually, we can be exempted from the penalties of even the most egregious sins (i.e, adultery and murder) by nothing more than god waiving his magic wand:
11 "Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.
12 'Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.'"
13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.
(2 Sam. 12:11-13 NAU)
Feel free to dig your own theological grave by pretending the subsequent divinely caused death of David's baby was the "atonement". You can't cover it with Yom Kippur, that didn't cover intentional sins. Now what? Maybe David committed adultery without intention?
Steve continues:
6. Counterfactual guilt
Another factor I've discussed, although it has yet to catch on, is that it's very nearsighted to limit culpability to the sins of a lifetime.
That's right. If your teenage son jaywalks, you should save up to finance the desecration of his grave marker after he dies. Culpability doesn't cease with physical death. Only in stupid fanatical religion.
The sins we commit are related to our circumstances. Change the circumstances and we'd commit a different set of sins.
or not sinned at all, such as changing "we went to the titty-bar" to "we went to church".
It's not so much about committing a particular sin, but the character of the sinner. Put him in a different situation and he will commit different sins.
Put sinners in different situations and they might
not sin. Hence, the reason Christian parents counsel their kids against running around with the wrong crowd.
It's arbitrary to exclude from consideration all the wrongdoing he'd commit if the opportunity presented itself, and he could get away with it, as if guilt and innocence in God's eyes is a matter of lucking or unlucky timing or setting. Wrong place. Wrong time. Just missed it. Had you been there an hour sooner or later.
In other words, sin is inevitable...and yet God still bitches at humans over that which they are incapable of avoiding, sort of like bitching about the fact that humans need water.
But more directly to the point: there are gullible or 'weaker' Christian brothers that will sin simply because of the peer pressure from other Christians, whereas had those Christians not come to visit, the weaker brother would probably not have sinned as he did. So you are wrong, Steve: how you act really IS dependent on the timing of your arrival to any situation and other circumstances. The Christian man who has an anger problem shows up at his ex-wife's house and she's the only person there, and he does not sin. But if he had showed up 5 minutes earlier when her boyfriend was there, he probably would have started a fight. Steve, you are stupid if you think circumstance doesn't contribute to what motivates a person to sin or refrain from sin.
You also pretend that any act we might engage in would be sinful, when in fact chance and circumstance do not merely dictate what
evil we'll do, but what ACT we will engage in. Tarnishing the future possibility as an inevitable "sin" doesn't make sense, otherwise, why bother trying to stay away from Christians who live in sin? If you are running around drinking on Saturday night, or staying at home reading your bible, you are still bound to sin, regardless, so how the fuck could it "matter" which way to spend that evening?
What are you gonna say next? Maybe that reading the bible is sinful for a Christian because their sin nature requires that their motive in doing so was to become puffed up with knowledge?
Yes, there are fuckhead Christians who demand that Christians
repent of their repentance. Read Valley of Vision by the Puritans, which is apparently approved of D.A. Carson and other prominent conservative Protestants. I've heard the same in plenty of Protestant and Calvinist churches years ago. I call them fuckheads because if you are too sinful to properly repent in the first place, then you are just sinning every subsequent time you repent of your prior repentance...in which case this Puritan soliloquy is little more than a dirge about the inevitability of sin. Gee, maybe it was sinful also for any Puritan to compose or read Valley of Vision?
Steve continues:
7. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, critics of hell approach this issue from the wrong end.
So since many critics of hell are Christians, skeptics observe that even spiritually
alive people have no guarantees of noticing important theological truth, making it even more reasonable for the spiritually
dead person to stay completely away, if they so choose, from biblical "theology". So for many non-Christians, it's much safer and more reasonable to just laugh off Christianity.
In Christian theology, the default assumption is that sinners are already lost.
I much prefer what Jesus said, and have fun getting original sin out of anything he said. It would be like squeezing blood from a turnip. See
here and
here. Plenty of churches today are Pelagian, but its hard to remember that because the Protestants and Catholics usually squeal the loudest through the media.
They didn't start out in the right direction, then take a wrong turn. Rather, sinners are in a lost condition from the outset. They don't have to do anything extra to go to hell.
If you believe infection with original sin makes one worthy of hell, then you have no basis for making aborted babies any exception, as they too are worthy of hell, and apparently only an emotional worldly mammalian dislike of infant torture is the basis for any exception. And Steve will triumphantly proclaim that if you don't like the idea of god subjecting babies to eternal conscious torment in hell forever, it's only because you aren't sufficiently "spiritual", the excuse cult leaders use to desensitize their followers to the obvious violations of common sense the cult requires them to engage in. Yet Steve wants non-Calvinist Christians to view him as something other than brainwashed.
They didn't lose their way at some point along the journey. There was no fork in the road where they made a fatal moral choice. To be saved requires divine intervention.
But since the divine doesn't exist, we need not worry. I only refute idiots on the internet for the benefit of the innocently ignorant people that might otherwise get sucked into all this stupid crap because of their lack of critical thinking skills. Struggling to pay the rent and raise kids doesn't leave much opportunity to figure out why scholars disagree with each other about hermeneutics and historiography.
It's like a movie villain. He's already a villain when the movie begins.
So babies are already deserving of hell upon conception. Another reason most spiritually alive Christians find Calvinism about as persuasive as atheism.
There's no backstory about how or when he became a villain. Does it have something to do with his childhood? Did he gradually turn to evil? Was there a crossroads where he made a decisive choice for evil?
Once again, Jesus did not teach the doctrine of original sin, and you are a hypocrite anyway for thinking the word of any follower of Christ could possibly have the same significance as his own words, as there is allegedly an infinite difference between advice from God himself, and advice from people claiming to represent him. You are more safe depending on God's word, but you open the floodgates of ceaseless questions and uncertainty when you start telling yourself the words of other sinners are "inspired by God too".
That's not where the story begins. As far as the plot goes, there was never a time when he wasn't on the wrong path.
I end this post where I began it: all attempts by hellers to "reconcile" or "harmonize" the OT texts on God's justice with the NT texts teaching eternal conscious torment, are clearly little more than the word-games you'd expect from a jailhouse lawyer (my scholarly view is that 2nd Temple Judaism became more and more influenced by pagan religion, hence, "hell" in the OT become more and more defined as the centuries go by). God's alleged "need" for justice against sin is itself contradictory to at least one biblical passage. If God can exempt people from the consequences of sin as easily as waiving his magic wand (2nd Samuel 12:13), you'll find only deaf ears when you try to "explain" that God's holy nature "requires" that he judge sin.
And expect theological disaster if you trifle that God's killing David's baby was an atoning sacrifice for David's sins of murder and adultery. But without that type of atonment, you have no atonement, and hence, God can permanently exempt you from the penalty of sin without atonement and apparently nothing more than waiving his magic wand. Or making you eat burning wood (Isaiah 6:6-7).
Did you notice that when Triablogue comes to town, atheists just scream in terror, run the other way plugging their ears and saying "Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne"?
Neither did I.
