Preface: Agnostic
Pardon the pun but I find taking the devil's advocate position against atheists or other agnostics to be much more stimulating than against Christians - which feels like low-hanging fruit.
I try to find the underlying logic in the Bible by not being a literalist and acknowledging the different interests and bureaucracy involved in the creation of it. I'm also hoping against hope to not just become worm food at the end of all this while realizing that may be the likelihood.
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Originally Posted by Grima21
Although I also appreciate the OP's focus as well, I also appreciate that belief without waffling or temporizing can be very dangerous.
Also, I think the death-bed serial killer forgiveness thing is pretty hard to swallow for 99% of the Christian population. You may believe that in theory, but I'm not sure how it actually works in practice.
For a plausible but "Christian" take how's this?
Point 1) Serial killer while being possessed
Point 2) To accept Christ they would have to truly turn to Him in their heart as opposed to merely in show/verbally so most cited instances were fraudulent and is analogous to
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"Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
so it
could happen but doesn't. Just like in theory a man who steps over many people to achieve his billions and has an obvious love of money (a root of evil, not money but the love of it)
could get to Heaven but won't.
Two points are separate explanations and both work in practice
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Originally Posted by BeaucoupFish
There was no sin in the world until Adam and Eve disobeyed God, but the serpent lied to Eve - was that not sin? Or perhaps the serpent was telling the truth...
When the gospel is written out like that, simply and fairly complete, the overwhelming thought that overcomes me is also quite simple: it is literally unbelievable.
A thought crossed my mind recently, I had been thinking what would I think if I found out that Christianity was actually true (perhaps because of some post-death experience). My response would be the same as if I found out I had really been living in a cartoon world (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, say!). Everything I thought I understood about the world would have to have been so far from reality, it would be just like discovering I had been living in a reality in which cartoon characters were also a part of that reality.
That's also why, when threads come up like the one asking what it would take to provide evidence that Christianity was true, I cannot think of anything real that could even support it. What evidence could you think of that would support the idea that cartoon characters lived alongside real people? I can't think of anything that one would really expect. Only some kind of personal experience would be of any use, and even then, our presuppositions dictate how we interpret our personal experiences.
Imagine we didn't have fossils - isn't a land of dinosaurs almost equally fantastical?
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Originally Posted by Mightyboosh
But by dying, presumably they would go to heaven, which is a desirable outcome. So, they must have considered dying to be 'bad'. How did they know that if the only revealed knowledge they had about good and bad was 'don't eat the apple'?
Were they in the equivalent of Heaven to begin with?
Before they had cut out the whole living and dying thing and now the world serves as the middleman? The GOE was literally Heaven on Earth?