If Jesus died to forgive us, then why is there a Hell?

I shall enjoy watching you, jk and you, xingu trade your erudition.

Were you to read the bible carefully, you would find out before the end of the third chapter of Genesis that the rebellion which occurred after Adam and Eve were created brought the punishment of death on the first humans and, through them, their descendants.

It should also be apparent that Satan is the true initiator of war and crime and sickness and death and that Jesus' death was to be a corresponding ransom for Adam's sin.

Additionally, Jesus was to give a perfect answer to the challenge made by Satan that God did not have the right to set standards for his creations and that people would serve him only out of selfishness.

The entire bible is set forth as evidence of the outworking of God's purpose in the past and for the future.

If you believe the bible, that is.

neologist

Please explain to me the difference in the timelines of both the fall of Lucifer and the fall of man and biblical verse references to support your position
- Just Kaus -

neologist

Please explain to me the difference in the timelines of both the fall of Lucifer and the fall of man and biblical verse references to support your position
- Just Kaus -

neologist

Please explain to me the initial purpose of the lake of fire
with biblical verse references to support your position
- Just Kaus -

Lucifer is a term applied to Satan in some translations. The fall of man instigated by Satan is described in the third chapter of Genesis. I'm not sure what else you want.

BTW, when you hit the submit button, sometimes it takes a while to load. Just be patient and you will avoid double posting.

You are quite right that the lake of fire was prepared for the devil and his angels. Its purpose is for total annihilation, not eternal torture.

Obviously you have no idea what au means. If you were not so LAZY and had read previous posts you would see that au is a forum member and is an active participant in this discussion. I hope your mouth was big enough for your foot.

Furthermore, this discussion thread started with a question and you in your infinite ignorance have failed to see "The Light" so as to realize you have violated the rules of this posting site as your topic is in the wrong area.

Again your showing your IGNORANCE and ARROGRANCE. We have had many discussions on the subject matter and we have digressed occasionally. Whether you like it or not we have the right to do so.

You, on the other hand, come in on your second post, totally IGNORANT about how our previous discussions and with supreme ARROGRANCE think you can dictate to us what we can talk about. Sounds like you have a God complex.



Oxygen may very well, in some cases, enable a person to have a NDE. After all isn't oxygen deprivation one of the things that leads to death? Does depriving a person of oxygen to the point of bring him near death mean NDE are not valid? When a person is drowning and is deprived of oxygen don't you suppose they will have a NDE?



How can a dark NDE make a person better. It is the experience of being with the Light and its love that changes those NDEr's. There is one curious thing about people who have NDE and an encounter with the Light. Many of them leave religion and become spiritual. They say religion is to structural and the God in the Bible is nothing like the Light.



EEEE gads. A witch doctor putting a curse on me. By the way you may notice that in this quote of yours you misspelled Christ. You would think that someone so fanatically religious as you could at least get Christ's name right. Who was it that told me about spell check?


One thing that makes Dr. Ring's book so much more valid then your religious mythology is he investigates real experiences. This is not a religion. There is no dogma here. It is observation and conclusion. Far more realistic then someone's interpretation of scripture and coming up with some bizarre stories about the Lucifer.

By the way, what's your cults website?

I'm terribly sorry for the length of time since my last post and hopefully I can answer the questions directed at me.

I almost drowned when I was six when my family went to the beach one summer. My life didn't flash before my eyes, but all I felt was this light all around me, which was strange since the water was really murky. And I knew it was Christ who was with me. it felt like a really long time, just being suspended like that, but i think it was only a small amount of time, since all of a sudden I found myself bobbing on the surface, and my parents didn't seem to notice everything. You're right, even though I had that, I still didn't fully understand God, but that's why I have my life, to give me time to understand him better. I admit, even knowing God for so long, I still strayed. And there were times when I felt he was so far away. Only recently did I start a deep exploration of my faith, and when I fully submitted myself, I could feel His presence in me that was just too strong to deny.

_______

If atheists have a NDE, and have a life review, thus, as you say, discovering the source of what God truly is, then they cannot be an atheist, because they found out that there is a God. If they deny the experience, then NDE life reviews can be considered just a hallucination.

Faith means "confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing." [dictionary.com]. Thus a "life review" would establish a faith in God because that person himself experienced Him.

But the question asked, "If Jesus died to forgive us, then why is there a Hell?" Those who had a less than pleasant flash of their lives sometimes call it hellish. Those horrible emotions are hell. Whether hell is a tangible place or a state of being, all we know is that it is something we do not want to be in. So hell does exist, because these people have said to taste a part of it. But the second part, why did jesus die to save us from it?

To answer that, you do have to go to the bible for answers. And it says Jesus died to take our place, took our sins upon himself, thus taking all the negative experiences that we would have felt in our "life review." But why do people, Christian and non christian, who had NDEs feel the negative emotions? Because we are human, and no one leads a blameless life; no one ever follows God's commandments 24/7.

One must find his own relationship with God, and we all experience him differently. I acknowledge him and follow him because I've felt him. I can't describe it, but from that moment I knew he was real. I don't worship Christ because people convinced me. I worship him because I know him to be true for me. I don't know everything about him, but I have my whole life to try, which he has given me. And Christ didn't command us to force people into submission. He simply said, share the good news, and perhaps people will try to find a relationship with him as well. I don't go around saying to people, "you're going to hell." I just share the good things he has done for me.

Xingu, I don't know if you've personally felt God yourself, but if not, I don't think it's fair to deny those who have felt him personally, like I did. And if you deny what I felt was real, yet support those who did through NDE, then that's bias. I will agree with you as far as me not knowing God completely, and that NDEs can provide a clear understanding of Him, but it isn't fair to call me clueless, that I blindly follow a misguided teaching someone has fed me all my life. While people help me learn more about God, people like you who have made me want to search even more, it is up to me alone to find out God, and everyone else must affirm their own.

Neologist, thanks for welcoming me. As for your question, God did say they would surely die. Adam and Eve lived long lives and in the end, all they lost was their immortality. After they sinned, they repented and went back to God, who later blessed them with sons to fill the earth [after Cain and Abel]. So in fact, Adam and Eve paid no greater or lesser price than God said they would: death.

After that however, God's new creations turned their back more and more. And hell, which was originally made only for Satan, who since has never repented, and probably never will, and those who follow him, angels who joined his side. But Satan now also has a following of men, who will then share his fate by being cast into hell unless they turn back.

But remember, God is a righteous God, and he said he will do right. And his ways are higher than our ways. So we cannot make him use human reasoning to judge us for then that makes him human. We have no standards to compare him but what we have on this world. In Romans 9:20-21, "Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God?'" "Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why has thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor?" So to keep saying, "God is love, God is love" is like saying in the bottom of the ocean, "Water sustains life." Though that aspect is true, that fact won't stop water form drowning you. Likewise God, who is of perfect love, has also other aspects of him we cannot ignore, such as his ever firm justice. And to criticize him would mean you want him to conform to our human reasoning.

Human logic can only go so far. The rest of the journey requires a leap of faith.

I'm sorry I cannot delve into this anymore [or for at least a while] since finals are coming and soon I have to get a job to pay for college, which means online time will be slim to none. Shame too, since I wanted to look at the other parts of this site. It's teeming with information and interesting people. Perhaps catch me in a few months. Thanks for entreating my views on this thread.

blakwater

I wouldn't want to say that what you experienced was or wasn't a NDE. Most all NDE's are accompanied by an OBE. As I have mentioned before God cares little what religion one practices. That's why he puts souls in bodies of all faiths and not just Christians. No one going through a life review was shown that any faith was right or wrong. Many NER's who had close encounters with the Light became spiritualists, that is each individual sees or seeks God in their own individual way and not by the rules of a religion or any book of religion.



All atheists I have read about that have had NDE have stopped being atheist and embraced some form of deity.
NDE is the one thing that will convince Atheist that atheism is not a valid belief system.
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/atheists01.html



You seem to contradict yourself here. You say that hell may be our victims pain being inflicted on us so we may learn from our experiences. Then you say Christ death took all of that pain (or sin) and bought it on himself. But yet all feels the pain of our victims, Christian or non-Christian. For me this tells us no one died for our sins. All our mistakes will be presented to us. It has to be that way. How else will we learn.

To say we don't have to suffer for our mistakes if we believe in Christ is akin to saying the spoiled rich kid never has to learn from his mistakes because his Daddy is always bailing him out. If Jesus is the Daddy absorbing the pain of our mistakes then not only does that have a negative effect on our souls but is unjust; just as unjust as a rich kid getting away with wrongdoing because he has a rich father to protect him.



I agree. I have no problem with Christianity as long as it knows its place. But in America today we have conservative Christians trying to tear down the wall between church and state. They want to impose their moral and religious values on all regardless of what they believe. This is wrong.

When the church and state become one the very worse of both emerge. The history of Europe is an excellent example as is the Muslim nations today that are ruled be their religion.



I don't deny anyone their religion. I don't have the power to do that. But if they come on a public forum and express their point of view then I feel I have the same right to express mine.

By the way, Satan is fiction. It was created by humans to be the scapegoat for everything we see as evil.

Here are two sites that will give a different perspective of the Devil and Christ.

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/research23.html

http://www.near-death.com/origen.html

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

So much guessing going on...and so little acknowledgement that it is nothing more than pure guesswork.

If only homo sapiens would grow up enough to accept that at present....it has almost no idea of what the Ultimate REALITY is...it might start to make sense to refer to ourselves as "an intelligent species."

but not so intelligent as to understand the limits of intelligence.

I find these debates totally futile and irritating. I can't believe (relatively) intelligent people want to spout forth about what is not known and cannot be known. Why?

I still can't believe that people come into forums and tell everyone that what they are talking about is just "spouting"...

WOW! Can you imagaine what the state of the world's technology and knowledge would be like today if everyone thought this way.

Don't you know it's impossible to fly. If God wanted us to fly he would give us wings.

The quest for knowledge is what makes us intelligent. How can you find knowledge if you never ask impossible questions, speculate on impossible matters (like can we fly?) or exchange information?

Do you really think NDE is a guess? Do you think it's a religion? If not then what do you think it is?

Yikes! A two day vacation and all these words! What can they possibly mean? Catch you later.

well i did say relatively

anyone who wants to pontificate about the unknowable...be my guest

The real problem with the NDE speculation is that there are no RDE folks to verify the proposition.




RDE= Real Death Experience

It is like a water fall, some have been very close to the edge, and claim to have seen something signifigant, others have never been near the edge, so they don't know. The only ones who know what truly lies at the bottom, are the ones who cannot be reached.

NDE is not speculation. It has happened to far to many people for it to be a guess.

I have yet to see anyone explain how OBE is speculation.

"There are now literally millions of people from all over the world who have undergone a Near-Death Experience. In 1983 a major American survey by George Gallup Jr reported that eight million Americans, approximately five per cent of the adult population, had experienced one (Gallup 1982). A 1989 Australian survey by Allan Kellehear and Patrick Heaven found that ten percent of 179 people claimed to have experienced at least five typical elements of a NDE.


Studies in widely differing geographic locations have produced remarkably similar findings eg. Margot Grey's study of NDEs in England (Grey 1985), Paola Giovetti's study in Italy (Giovetti 1982), Dorothy Counts' study in Melanesia (Counts 1983), Satwant Pasricha and Ian Stevenson's (1986) study in India. More studies are coming out from different countries on a regular basis, and historical examples show that the experience has been remarkably consistent over time (see Plato's example of Er's NDE in The Republic reprinted 1973)."

http://www.victorzammit.com/book/chapter18.html

going to the original question in the thread....

what makes you so sure that he died to forgive me - someone he is unlikely to have met ?

or

that there IS indeed such a thing as hell ?