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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"Just reading Christian authors, Dante, CS Lewis, Thomas Aquinas, St Augustine, for my Catholic mom book group. 
 None of them seem to talk this way about Hell, and when they do it appears pretty clearly metaphorical.

Plus there are tons of parables in the Bible about God finding his lost sheep, about God accepting those who have left with open arms, etc. it really doesn’t seem to me that a lot of Christian adults believe that God is trying to cast everyone who turns away from Him into a fire pit that He creates for this purpose."

That's a nice way of trying to make Christianity sound a lot more inclusive than it actually is.

If God accepts everyone, then what's the motivation for accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior? What does salvation mean in this context? What happens on Judgment Day? What's the judgment that happens?

Do you see how your description of Christianity leaves a lot of fundamental questions in your religion unanswered?

A critical part of Christianity is preparing one's soul for Judgment Day. If I do nothing to accept Jesus, what happens to me on Judgment Day? Clearly something different than what happens to you, right?  [/quote]

Dante’s hell was fiery in the bottom circles. (As I recall—it’s been a few years since I read The Inferno.) The uppermost circles, though, were more about the punishment fitting the crime (some people were constantly running, I forget what they did, and if I remember correctly, the embezzlers were stuck in pottery “pockets,” etc). The top circle was just not having hope (of redemption). Then again, nobody takes Dante’s circles literally, and probably didn’t in his day, either. [/quote]

Right, but this whole "oh God is loving to everyone" thing that I hear from a lot of Christians is a bunch of BS, honestly. It's an excuse to make their religion seem totally inclusive, when it's anything but that.

The Christian God isn't loving to everyone -- he strikes people down and yes, he's supposedly responsible for hell because he created everything. Just like he created heaven, he created hell too. There are repercussions for not accepting Jesus as one's Lord and Savior. There have to be -- otherwise, the entire logic of the religion falls apart. [/quote]

So Dante didn’t just write Inferno.  The Divine Comedy has three parts.  If you just read Inferno, it does look like God strikes people down when they don’t obey.  
But if you read Pergatorio and Paradiso, you find people who have committed the same sins as those in Hell, but they have repented and asked God for forgiveness, and so they were saved.

And there are consequences for not accepting God, but they are the natural consequences of not being with God and being away from God.

And as far as preparing your soul...If you believe in eternal life, then at the very least, whether you believe in God or not, you are going to have to live with yourself for all eternity.  So you should make yourself into someone you want to spend time with.  [/quote]

All of that supports my point. In order to escape Hell, you have to ask God for forgiveness -- God controls your fate.

Your last point is transparently an effort to cast this as generalizable to all religions, but it's really not. Yes, [b]I believe in eternal life for souls,[/b] but I do not believe in a God that damns souls who misbehave to hell. I'm not totally sure what the afterlife looks like, but I certainly don't believe that the afterlife is controlled by a single deity. [/quote]

You believe based on what?  I'm guessing it just feels right to you -- and the whole Christian thing feels wrong.  It also feels wrong to people who don't believe in an afterlife or a supreme being.[/quote]

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