On 2005-05-04 10:11:00, Anonymous wrote:
"pretty serious subject, where you'll spend eternity! Jesus said, "Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: 'You will be ever hearing but never understanding;you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.'" Matthew 13:14-15"
Well, if I'm going to spend eternity, I really want to comparison shop first, and I'm just not the type to spend all I've got in one place.
Nor am I the type to mistake a hard-sell advertizing campaign for a decent product.
I mean, you wouldn't know it to listen to their commercials, but there really are more than Coke and Pepsi on the shelves. It's not a binary choice between them and, for myself, I kinda like rootbeer.
Mostly, I'm inclined, personally, to spend some of my eternity on the Summerland and another goodly chunk of it on a dozen or so medium-challenging Reincarnation Vacations. Or maybe one every century, you know, do the tropics, Disneyworld, see the Everglades, maybe Rome, love a trip to Paris. Alaska would be nice at least once.
So much to do, so much time.
Next to all that, the eternal cocaine trip (or is it heroin?) you're selling sounds a bit boring, ya know?
If endless (boring, mindless) bliss is your product of choice, I've never been an anti-drug fanatic. Go for it.
But your "paradise" just isn't that appealing for me. Sorry.
And I'm not to keen on buying the overflow hotel, either.
So I won't.
I've just never, since adulthood, had much use for deities that got off on torturing the folks that didn't buy the hard sell. Strikes me as deeply psychopathic.
Gee, you get to be tortured forever or your "reward" is to be drugged up out of your mind living with a vicious psychopathic killer forever--(talk to Nadab and Abihu, or a bunch of innocent Egyptian kids who had the bad taste to pick the wrong parents about that).
How long do you figure you'd live there before he got bored and started having some of those "eternally" saved "falling"? A week? A year? A thousand years? If once you're out, you're out, it kinda doesn't matter.
Neither choice sounds like a winner to me.
And even if you were *right*, that would make eternity truly a lose-lose situation---in which case there's *nothing* to lose by choosing a better option on the apparent plate of choices.
When you get right down to it, the only way your "God" can be considered a nice person is if you define "Good" as whatever it is your "God" feels like doing at the moment on a whim. And I've got no use for a god who achieves being "good" only by redefining "good" to a much lesser standard than he expects of us lesser mortals.
No sale.
Timoclea
