just curious as I’m not sure if I believe in God or not. I share your view on hell, I don’t think a loving God is compatible with eternal torment. But is it possible Scripture / other religious text has been misinterpreted? Is universalism (everyone eventually being saved and going to heaven) a possibility?
Is there honestly any actual basis for thinking any of that is true?
If there’s no hell, we don’t need saving from anything. Unless it’s heaven vs the end of the line, then the same problem of hell occurs: a god will let you die your permanent death on Earth and not let you into eternal heaven for secret and/or arbitrary reasons, mostly centred around satisfying its imperfect needs. It’s still as unjust. If it has the capability of “saving” everyone, but doesn’t, it’s not an all-loving creature.
If everyone will be “saved” then I don’t need to do anything. Also, Hitler will be there. All the same problems haven’t actually gone away.
Is there any evidence of the entity doing the “saving”, any evidence of the reason we need to be “saved”, or any evidence of the place we will be “saved” to? How did you come to this conclusion of “everyone eventually being saved”?
It’s absolutely possible scripture has been misinterpreted. But what makes you think your interpretation is more correct, even if it’s “nicer”? And aren’t we just admitting that they’re all wrong? And that not only do we not know if/that this hypothetical creature is there, but we have even less idea what it wants than the traditional scriptural stuff, since we don’t even have those unreliable bronze-age scribblings.
And why is it humanity’s responsibility to sort it out? If the entity exists, then it should acknowledge there’s a ton of confusion here on little ol’ Earth, and come back to set it straight. And then apologise for all the thousands of years of death and destruction wrought in its name by people thinking they had it right, when they didn’t. That it hasn’t already done so isn’t a very good sign of its benevolence. Or existence.
On the surface, it sounds prettier, but there’s a ton of problems with the idea - including a few rather unpleasant implications - not least of these problems is how did you/can we determine that any of this is true?
In the end, scripture isn’t really my problem. It’s often gross, violent, full of plot- holes, bad continuity and poor character development. It doesn’t say what people, who often haven’t even read it, say it says. But it doesn’t matter to me whether Sauron is angry or happy with me, whether he wants to kill me or grant me magic wishes, if he only exists in a book.
The fundamental question that precedes the wishes or attitudes of any of these god concepts is their existence - demonstrating this thing actually exists before I worry about what it wants or what its policies are.