You are taking statements like "I can't believe that people would..." literally. I am more aware than you, given my history in Las Vegas, how irrational most people are.

The problem with your posts is that some people will misunderstand them and think you are condoning stuff like Christian scientists not taking their children to doctors.

Your implication is that once you value something aside from self interest, it is reasonable to put ANY value on it. Whether some non self interest issue is worth dying for is only partially a matter of opinion as far as most sane people are concerned. Its debatable if a woman should risk her life to avoid being raped. But if she would risk it to avoid her hand being kissed on the hand it is silly to say that she simply has different values. There is something wrong with her.

I'd sure take that over posts that repeatedly fail to address the point being raised.

Nope, try again!

You are just asserting your view in different ways. Humans have long valued things outside of just maximally preserving life. You can think that is stupid all you want, but don't be surprised if this common view gets codified in one religion or another.
Teaching math is a pretty good way to find out how irrational people are too...

In any case in the original OP I wasn't inserting my values in any way. Rather I was claiming that failing to pretend to convert may actually be the sin as far as their own religion is concerned and they just don't realize it.

More generally you are accusing me of not realizing that some people think that parallel lines meet when they come to their conclusions. But the fact is that most people who come to a conclusion that would be consistent with that axiom are actually people who believe they don't meet and then screw up a chain of reasoning.

Well your OP (as usual) didn't offer any shred of justification, but your following posts sure do exactly such insertions:
You are describing an evidenced based epistemology where one analyzes the fuzziness or clearcutness of evidence to deduce theological positions. Which is fine, but it simply isn't how many major religions talk about their theological positions where things like faith (ie nothing to do with the obviousness of the evidence) is valued. It is simply a different way of going about believing things about the universe.

That you have clumsily forced the parallel postulate into an insult towards believers doesn't change anything. You can't seem to imagine a deity that doesn't conform to your value that preserving one's own life trumps other considerations. Yet we widely see in human society that other values beyond rational self preservation (or evidence based epistemologies, to broaden the point a bit) are cherished and reflected in religion.

Martyrdom is the clearest example. You certainly must acknowledge that throughout human society being a martyr can be a highly lauded, that taking great risk to yourself including death to stand up for what is right transforms into great symbols that are revered.

I LOL'd when I read this. Obviously the Jewish God would NOT want them to pretend to convert. Stop trolling.

This is wrong.

Reread thread please.

I'll make these statement unrelated to the thread...
1. The Jewish God would be ashamed if one of his followers pretended to convert or even deny their faith.
2. It is not a sin to make no attempt to preserve your own life with a fake conversion.
3. You can be doing the Lord's work if you even kill yourself at times.

again Gamblor, completely unrelated to the thread so disregard.

Catholics see suicide as a mortal sin which raises a question for me about gods not wanting their followers to pretend to convert to save their own lives. Presumably if the choice is 'convert or die' then not converting would be tantamount to suicide. Since committing suicide is a sin for many Christians, would they convert to avoid committing it?

After all, the words that they speak make no difference to the reality of god existing, he'll still exist and know everything, including what you just did and why. And if you were wrong all along and you just inadvertently converted to the right god, then it's a win anyway.

What about the story when Peter denied Jesus?

Just for the record, I think that at best all this statement can support is that there might be a lot of irrational people in Las Vegas, but I'm pretty sure that even if you had actually experienced a large enough sample to make this statement, Las Vegas isn't typical.

Peter denied Jesus, he didn't convert to a different faith but in case I just think that is more reinforcement of the idea that you shouldn't deny your god ad it's a mechanism for keeping people faithful to a particular creed. A human construct. IMO.

God knows what you really think, it shouldn't matter a damn what you say but religions can't have their followers appearing to convert to other religions even if they don't really mean it.

It matters a lot what you say according to the Bible. It even matters what you look it. Matthew 5:29

A story about being told to covert or serve another god is Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The story of Daniel is another one.

And if the other option is doing something that is tantamount to committing suicide?

You must not be familiar w/ those stories. In both cases it was death or bow down and serve another god. Both cases they chose death. Another example would be the story of Samson, he actually committed suicide to destroy the enemies of God.

I am fully aware that there are plenty of theists who think other theists are going to hell even though they don't claim that you should believe in their religion because of its objective evidence. I am only saying that if you combine those two things with the belief that God wouldn't punish someone for an honestly held erroneous belief, you get a contradiction. And to get out of that contradiction you would have to think that the evidence for your religion was clearcut enough to ascribe ulterior motives to the non believers. Either that or not believe in hell, or not believe that God is lenient in the above way.

In real life few theists get out of this conundrum by claiming clearcut evidence for their religion. I know that. More do it by denying the existence of hell. Others do it by saying that God is good even if he isn't just, by our standards.

Of course most get out of the problem by not even understanding how they have backed themselves into a corner.

Samson seems like a bad analogy. In any case this thread wasn't even meant to be about Jews.

But the Jewish God would punish someone for an erroneous belief. I'm not sure who you know that is giving you your information but they have not studied Christian theology at all.

Please remove "Jewish God" out of the title if you don't want to focus on Him. Then perhaps some of your points might make sense, because right now they don't.

You claim to know that most theists don't use an evidenced based framework for faith, yet the only resolution to your (ridiculous framed) contradiction for such theists is this bolded nonsense about how clearcut the evidence is? It's funny, I don't think anything in your posts have managed to acknowledge what the error is, yet you do manage to consistently type out variations of the error.

I don't get what you are saying. But I'll rephrase again. If a Protestant thinks a Jew is going to hell unless he converts, he probably thinks that the Jew doesn't have a good, non selfish reason, to remain a Jew. Because a fair God wouldn't send someone to hell if that someone actually thought with good reason that believing in Jesus was a sin.

When posters on this site are asked why people believe in a religion different from their own they invariably reply that they see selfish benefit in it. They rarely acknowledge that they have objectively good reasons. That's why I bring up the ulterior motive aspect.

Ok. Unrelated to the thread:

Statement 1 is false.
Statement 2 is false.
Statement 3 is false.

By coincidence, the support for this is in this thread.