Quote:
Originally Posted by FlamingZword
I think this is precisely what you do not accept and that is why you have left the way. You do not like the unpleasant parts of the Bible and therefore you have decided that they are not true, and that has given you the excuse to abandon the way.
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Quite wrong. I had no problem with eternal torture when I was a bible believer (for 30 years or so.) It was a given that I was not accountable for God's "mysterious ways", although I did accept personal responsibility to spread "the Truth" to others. But never as a believer did I sit in judgment of the existence of hell, or anything else in the bible (which is kinda the definition of true believer, no?) I quit (over period of another cautious 10 years) only after I
couldn't believe, based mostly on results of reading the bible (and about the bible) more deeply than what preachers, Sunday school, and Wednesday evening church classes fed me. IOW, I quit for intellectual reasons, and not (as Christians ignorantly accuse) due to "a rebellious spirit" or "desire to sin" or other typical claims that reveal more about the Christian making the judgment than the person they actually do not understand. Today, I enjoy picking on the silliness of Hell (and other issues) because it's such low hanging fruit, and should be one of the places to trigger increase of cognitive dissonance in someone's mind and heart, that is, if the person is ready to think critically, which most believers are not (almost by definition.)
Without my god glasses on, it's
so clear how deluded I was for 30 years--to have believed so much with such poor evidence. Emotional neediness does that to a person.