are you asking me or asking Christians?

If you ask me eternity means eternity. Do you believe God would promise us eternal life and then some day break that promise?

Putting an entity in eternal torment for a finite crime, waiting for that person to make a free will choice to leave, is cruel and evil especially when you know that person will *never* change. Why does Satan get this "special" treatment, whereas sinful humans get to be destroyed and dont have to worry about eternal punishment?

I mean Satan doesnt seem all that bad. Im not sure why he gets so much flack.

Careful thats a no no according to God, he is the only judge of salvation.

Not to mention some Christians believe even Satan will be saved. Those crazy immoral Universalists.

I do believe that there is a "purging" process that we all have to go through. This is a process that is not just for the "un-Godly" but for all of creation. So yes, everyone will go through a further "learning" process where our characters are made right.

This is a very biblical view, but is not to be confused with the traditional concept of purgatory in which one "pays" for their sin.

Here is a good overview by Boyd on the subject,

http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/purgato...eat-of-christ/

I think that you are right that it seems that a lot of mainstream Christianity believes in this process that we must go through on earth, but that even though the process cannot be considered even close to finished on earth for some (most obviously with deathbed type conversions), and that all of the sudden when you die you can just "magically" be converted into where you need to be. That just seems inconsistent.

Ok i see where your coming from and it makes more sense now.

I do think for this view to be more moral (imso) God would have to allow all non believers and sinners to be apart of the refining process as i have never meet anyone whos choices have lead them to be pure evil. But i guess you could argue God knows some peoples good choices will eventually lead to 0 good ones so he knows best. I still think its immoral for God even under this system to exterminate, but at least its better.

That is what I believe. I just don't think that everyone will make it out unfortunately. And those that continue to resist will lovingly be destroyed.

Here's the way I understand it:

- From what I can tell, god is incapable of doing evil, because anything that god does is by definition 'good' according to Christians. If god ripped the eyeballs out of every 3 year old kid on the planet, that would somehow be 'good' too. Even if we think it's evil, the Christian stance is that we are in no position to judge god. End of story on that.

- I'm not sure I've heard anyone say that Satan is incapable of doing good. Satan uses his free will and "chooses" to be evil. I'm guessing he could turn a new leaf anytime he wants.

- Is it true that all human being are evil? I know they are all born with original sin, but I don't think anyone can say that being born is an act of evil. So theoretically, humans do not have to be evil at all. Doesn't mean they'll get into the club, but doesn't mean they have to be evil either.

That's my understand of what I hear most Christians say on this.

In practice, is there really a difference between a being that can choose to do good but hasn't ever over a reallllly long time, and a being that can't choose good? It seems that the only distinction is one has an unevidenced, unfalsifiable assertion tacked onto it and the other doesn't.

I didn't say humans ARE evil. All I said was that they are only evil because of free will. Without free will, they would be 100% good. At least that's the way Christians say it is.

The chicks would dig it!

If at the end of the movie Mr. Evil - while holding the lovely princess, the last person on Earth ready to be tortured to death - has a change of heart while looking out at all the death and destruction he has caused, and decides to save the lovely princess, and the two fall in love and repopulate the entire Earth with loving and spirit filled people and everyone lives happily ever after..

It's the way it's supposed to be.

Here is the problem. When you say "if God ripped the eyeballs out..." and then say "even if we think it's evil.." you are not giving the whole story. What we view as "good" is only good because it is God's will. In other words, our morality is grounded in God.

So the idea that God could do some heinous thing that we think is evil is nonsensical as if it was from God we would not view it as heinous to begin with. When you start playing around with what God's morals are you are changing the paradigm.

So we don't view plucking the eyes out of children as evil despite what God's "morals" are, we view it as evil because of what God's "morals" are.

But we would still cringe when it happened, as that part is hardwired into us evolutionarily.

This assumes that our morals are a product of evolution. I disagree with that assertion.

In any event, if you were right that our morals are a product of evolution, it is very possible that evolution could have taken us down the path were we would not cringe at such an act.

False. Animals also cringe when pain is inflicted on members of their family/group. According to your theology, animals do not have morals and animals have nothing to do with turning to or away from God.

Wait, what? There are tons of things attributed to God in the Bible that we view as heinous. Your second paragraph makes no sense. We have all these arguments about the evils the Biblical God commits precisely because we find them heinous.

Apparently it only counts when Christians find them heinous.

We see Christians making pro-murder, pro-genocide, and pro-slavery arguments on here all the time. When god does these things they are necessarily good. Atheists just aren't capable of this level of thinking.

Who's morals?

Lol yeah universalism it is kind of chick flickey.