u/Apart_Information_27

Premise: my partner is nonreligious and isn't particularly interested in christianity or religion in general, so we don't usually talk about it. Moreover, I tend to get very nervous and uncomfortable when and if I need to explain to anyone in person what I personally believe (bad experiences) so even when she asks me some curiosity, usually I default to "this is the range of opinions on this that exists in christianity (that I know of)". So usually our talks on the subject amount to oh here's a fun anecdote...

So, fast forward to yesterday, when she encountered in an IG reel the classic argument (I don't even know if you can call it an argument but regardless) of "Why would Satan punish sinners in Hell, if they went against the same God he also rebelled against?" And she asked me hey isn't that weird?

So I briefly explain that for the christians who believe Satan is a personal being, most of them do not believe Satan and the fallen angels punish people in Hell, rather they're being punished or they've alienated themselves from God (depending on what one believes) the same way as humans. But for the ones that do believe it, like for example C. S. Lewis (Narnia is one of the few christian things she has read) the explanation is the same as the one for why they want to tempt humanity into sin and damnation in the first place: they absolutely hate us. They hate God, and would really like to harm Him, but since the attempt to do this went rather poorly, humans are the next best thing, because they're God's beloved creatures that He does not want to see damned and suffering, so much so that at some point He became one of them (neat). So driving as many as they can to damnation and then making damnation even more miserable for them than it would have been otherwise is really the only victory they can achieve.

She nodded and we went on to do what we were doing, except in the evening, she suddenly comes to me really excited and was like:

"So about the hell thing there's a thing I was thinking about"

"Oh okay, what?"

"So, it's like, I thought about it, and it does not really make sense for God to have hell. Because that means he loses the war with the Devil, right? Like, only a little bit, but it's still less than a perfect win, and God is perfect, right?"

"Yeah you could say that"

"Okay so if God was doing this intelligently, after the end times he would find a way to do something so that everyone went to heaven, so now, nope, the Devil wins nothing at all! Like, how come christians never thought of this?"

Me, chuckling: "I love you"

"...this is not original?"

"If you ever travel 17 centuries in the past yes it is"

*insert loving insult*

I laughed so much. I realise it's nowhere near as funny to tell as it was to experience, but when it happened I found it so funny. 

Exactly as the title says. Me and my gf have been thinking of starting it, but we're not sure which to start with.

To my fellow believers, recent discussions here got me thinking -- we usually talk about what we believe, but what Christian beliefs do you have that you hope you are WRONG about?

I'll start: universalism (the idea that ALL will see the kingdom of God and be saved, regardless of what they did or believed here on earth). This is a Christian belief that some but not all believers of Christ (myself included) hold.

I don't believe in universalism based off my reading and understanding of the Bible, but I would LOVE to be wrong about that, and that God will sanctify all and renew everyone's spirit in the afterlife, and even the worst people on earth will be made new, with a pure soul.

Anyone else have Christianity-related beliefs that you hope you're wrong about?

How did it happen?

I'm curious to know what was the "oh shoot I'm christian now" (or again) moment for you all!

Premise: I was raised catholic, but then I became unreligious and I was such for quite a while. I "reconverted", so to speak, only recently.

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I am having a but of trouble adapting to prayer. In short, I don't get what the purpose of it is.

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In long:

I don't expect praying for a thing to increase the probability of said thing. It seems to me inconsistent with the reality we live in right now, and theologically unsound (does God care more about a child that is prayed for compared to one that is not, then? And do They not know already what we want? That sort of thing).

Other people say, then, that prayer is something that one does to get closer to God - which is fair, however:

1. it seems that anything else would be better, then. Reading the Bible, or anything religious, or contemplating nature - or, well, to be honest, doing good to other humans. If I am talking about my subjective feeling of being closer to God, Rilke does a lot more than three Hail Marys

2. What about praying for other people, then?  especially our enemies, like we were specifically instructed to, and the people who will never know about it - or the dead, for that matter. Please don't derail the convo on that it's just an example.

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I keep doing it, but I feel like I do it because, well, that is unequivocably something we were called to do. Especially for other people.

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So... what do you think?

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If there are any theologians you feel have tackled the issue systematically in a way you especially found compelling, feel free to share!

I don't know if this counts necessarily as an argument for CU, but it is something that I think is otherwise problematic in other system of christian thought.

Most non universalist christians are not predestinatarians, and don't believe in infant damnation/limbo. So the average christian thinks something like this: children (and those affected by severe mental disabilities) are covered by the grace of God, but once one is able to understand morality and exert their free will, they must instead "choose good" in order to be saved, or they will be damned (Or annihilated, it doesn't matter here).

Now, everyone familiar with CU knows of the imo very compelling argument that in such a framework letting a child be born or grow up is an infinitely cruel gamble. The question of "but realistically how young can you be and still end up in eternal conscious torment" is also very disturbing (at least for me).

But there is another thing that I feel like is overlooked, and that is that it assumes that at least some part of the development of human consciousness is strictly binary.

Which is a bit absurd.

Let us take two "reasonable" extremes of an age interval (but you could do this with mental disability as well): a 5 year old definitely cannot go to Hell, while a 20 year old definitely can. And since in the aforementioned worldview salvation is strictly binary, there has to be a point in between the two where the individual switches from "cannot" to "can" be damned. But, again, since the choice is binary, in theory the interval can be restricted to an infinitely small duration. Years, then days, then hours, then fractions of seconds, and so on.

Since there is definitely a point of consciousness in which a being *can* go to hell, the place in the timeline where this shift happens is a point.

In other words, if one believes so, they must also believe necessarily that there is a metaphysical passage from "child" to "adult who can go to hell" that is *instantaneous*.

Children don't just grow into morality-and-sin-capable adults from one day to another, but from an *instant* to another, which considering all the complexity of a human being, seems to be absurd.

Perhaps this also bothers me because of my scientific background, but I also think that "who is the youngest person forever burning in eternal hellfire" is a question that mainstream christians are a bit too confortable ignoring.

I personally don't know if I could bring myself to worship a God who would allow even someone who died at 20 years of age to enter a state of eternal, endless torture, let alone literal actual children of 16, 14, 13 and so on - and yet no evangelical preacher, for example, seems to have any remora about scaring to death people as young as that.

Not necessarily universalism related exclusively either

And christian thinking in general.

Because it feels to me like it is one of the weak links of both non-predestinatarian traditional ECT and annihilationism.

Usually when it is brought up it is in relation to someone's entire life (not becoming a Third Reich soldier doing Third Reich atrocities really is a lot easier when you don't live in the Third Reich and are subjected to Third Reich propaganda) but I feel like the issue is much worse when you focus on a person's *moment to moment* life.

It is a common (correct imo) argument in CU that having children in an ECT universe would be an act of infinite cruel irresponsibility, but if one doesn't believe in infant damnation it would be more proper to say that *letting a child grow up* is the real act of cruelty.

In non-predestinatarian ECT and annihilationism, if you are in a state of grace, every new day you get to live is simply a mistake.

Reading The Screwtape letters by C. S. Lewis was really shocking to me for how candidly he just agreed with me, and yet didn't seem to recoil at the horror of a God who was willing to gamble so cruelly with the children he supposedly loved enough to have died for.

And there's also something, on just a *feels wrong* level, deeply inhuman in thinking that people who died in childhood and youth got *lucky*.

In this view, every soul in Hell, no matter how depraved and free of outside influence their actions were, has all the right to forever complain that God could have spared them an existence of misery, had They been so inclined as to take them while they were in a state of grace.

Which technically is not the same exact issue of moral luck proper but it is still a component.

Think of how many of those incredibly tasteless fire-and-brimstone sermons and homilies and books posit this situation: someone accepting Jesus as their savior, like, 5 minutes before getting into a car crash, implying that God created a world in which infinite suffering is an absurd gamble that you can lose by stepping on a road five minutes sooner or later, and still thinking that's good news for the world.

An example from my own life:

one year ago, roughly in this period, I was applying for a job at a weapons platform manufacturer that is one of the few safe options for a physics Master's in my country. I really wanted the job. It didn't even pay well. But university had left me depressed and feeling idiotic and inadequate, and I just wanted the safest option that would let me live a normal life with a normal family. After five (five.) rounds of interviews (English test, MENSA IQ test, plus other 3 hours long rounds with ever shrinking pool of participants, that was pure pain) right at the end I was told no. I was devastated. I had told myself and believed all sorts of justifications, just to be rejected before even starting.

Now a year and a, uh, God's grace-having-snuck-back-into-my-existance against my better efforts later, I now see it was wrong of me to do so.

But part of that journey wasn't my own choice. It was chance (in the sense that them hiring someone better for the job has nothing to do with my moral character). It is near impossible for me to imagine myself having gotten the job *and* being able to make the tremendous decision to do the right thing anyway.

Setting aside the issue of whether the job alone could be considered a mortal sin in which denomination (you could substitute, idk, joining a skinhead gang or anything else):

-A non predestinatarian traditionalist/annihilationist could say that it was not coincidence, it was God giving me a better chance at salvation - but then, what about those who got the job?

-They could argue I am not different than the person who wanted the job, not in a state of grace now any more than then - perfectly fair, but you can definitely picture someone like me who did "truly" repent, then. Some people like that definitely exist. You might have heard of a certain guy called Paul, for instance.

-They could argue that God knows the outcome of either life path - but that's no different than predestinatarian thinking.

At this point this is more of a rant than a thought, perhaps, but I think you get the point.

Exactly as the title says. Have you ever read anything by a woman theologian at all? If so, what are your recommendations?