ttalks:

You ought to be aware that the concept of "eternal" damnation is false and alien to scripture.
Translations showing eternal are very very wrong. . .

John 3:15 That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal [aiōnios] life.
John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting [aiōnios] life.

aletheia:

But you have no quibbles with. . ."eternal life" as in John 3:16. Aren't you cherry-picking?

ttalks:

You ought to be aware that the concept of "eternal" damnation is false and alien to scripture.
Translations showing eternal are very very wrong.
There has been a lot of disagreements on the fact that aiōnios means eternal.
It does not mean eternal; rather it connotes "age-long/age-abiding", and we know that ages do have beginnings and do have ends.

Eternal is very foreign to original scripture(but very conversant with most available scripture translations of today).

Please go through this - - - > Whence cometh eternity? to understand what I'm saying here.

I do not expect everybody to suddenely agree with the point I'm making here; i just want you to realize that this is a position that is standing
and is worth looking into.

Even to God the Scriptures do not ascribe eternity. What need is there to describe Him as eternal? Would it not be almost an affront to use such an epithet of One who must, in order to be God, be eternal?

aletheia:

But you have no quibbles with. . ."eternal life" as in John 3:16. Aren't you cherry-picking?

ttalks:

The eternal life which we've all been used to is still subject to this interpretation issue I pointed out.
Rather than eternal life, it should be "eonian life" which connotes "age-abiding/age-long" life.

ttalks:

The chosen who believe in Christ have this life.
After death, comes their resurrection when Christ returns. They are given immortality which refers to "deathlessness"
which is not a concept of time but rather a state of being.

1Co 15:52-54
(52) In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
(53) For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
(54) So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

Those in Christ will surpass the ages as they come and go.

viaro:

Well, I tried to look into the subject and also consulted the link you recommended. On reading the first paragraph, the question that came to mind was: Is God Eternal? I patiently tried to read through to see the author's answer to that question, and this is what I initially found:

I haven't read to the end of that article, but I would here at this time ask you directly, ttalks: Is God Eternal? And in what sense? Your would help contextualize our discussion, rather than appealing to what others think.

ttalks:

I'll also give some examples to show that this "eternal" or "everlasting" which we're all used to do have some culmination/end at some point.

ttalks:

as regards your question; "Is God eternal?" ,
my answer would be this:

God is the eonian God; meaning he is the God of the ages, tha age-abiding God.
He makes/creates the ages and abides through them.
Eternal is not a proper concept so I can't really place him as eternal(since the word is definitely foreign to original scripture).

ttalks:

Now, I know I have somehow been sidetracked from my postings on what this "Lake of Fire" is supposed to be.
I will get back to that but can't say when at the moment cos i'm going to be offline for a while.

Mad_Max:

[size=15pt]But eternal damnation in hellfire is perfect for human beings, with our relentless evil and cruelty, to wish on others. [/size]

Sometimes I wonder how God sees us, human beings. We're not nice things. We're not good things.

MyJoe:

^^^ You are essentially right about our inherent ability to tell good from bad. But it may not end there. Why, for instance, do "good" men turn bad during war, natural disasters and similar upheavals?  Why, indeed, is there so much evil perpetrated by humans in spite of their inherently good nature? At the most basic level of looking at it, I think it's selfishness. It appears the ME factor alone is spectacularly successful in subverting the inherent good in us.

Mad_Max:

Jenwintemi, what are you? Buddhist? Gnostic?

Mad_Max:

You say we are [b]bits of God that return to God after death, [/b]and that biological death is it. That's intriguing. Could you elaborate? I've no interest in an argument or anything like that. I'd just like to understand that view.

Mad_Max:

You say we are bits of God that return to God after death, and that biological death is it. That's intriguing. Could you elaborate? I've no interest in an argument or anything like that. I'd just like to understand that view.

Mad_Max:



Thanks, ttalks. I'm guessing you're a JW.

Mad_Max:

That's very unusual. How come? Don't people give you grief about it, urging you to their church or temple, trying to save your soul?

Mad_Max:

Wow. What were you before? Most of us were raised as something till we knew better. Catholic? Protestant? Pentecostal? What changed your mind and led you to where you are now? Sorry if I'm being intrusive.

ttalks:

I've gone beyond caring about what some people say about my way of things as regards God.
In the past I felt some grief when people asked questions or wondered about my beliefs but that's all gone now.

I meet with some christians of like mind every opportunity I get on some sundays to fellowship.

ttalks:

- I was born into a muslim home. Was a muslim till my secondary school days.(never enjoyed it at all;except for the ram eatings )

Lol. Ole. Really inspiring. Thanks for clarifying.

Mad_Max:

Yes, it is. Our minds are extremely powerful and suggestible things. Sometimes we find we've been labouring all our lives for a God we ourselves have created. More often than not, our Gods are handed down to us, complete with likes and dislikes and an instruction manual on how to work it. They bear a great deal of resemblance to humans, naturally, since they're the work of human hands. Who knows what the originals were like? They've gone through countless revisions down the ages. When we pray, we don't hear back. We give it the credit when things go well, and make excuses for it when things go badly. We don't have a single, personal, unambiguous encounter with these Gods. All there are, are second-hand stories and 'faith'. We throw ourselves into religious activity because, outside of that, we have nothing.  And it is sometimes these unverified alter-ego Gods that go head to head when people argue religion and 'My God is better than yours'. No doubt, many know their Gods well, but life's too short for meaningless arguments.

Mad_Max:

So I was asking for your (jenwitemi's) honest, unvarnished views, no argument involved. You've made some interesting assertions. That life ends here.

Mad_Max:

I think you said something about people being parts of God that are reclaimed when they die. 

Mad_Max:
You say the God of the Judeo-Islamic-Christian tradition, based on the OT God, is actually the devil. That's classic Gnosticism. Can you elaborate on why you believe this to be so, and what else you believe? 

Mad_Max:

All right. How do you know we're outgrowing it though? Isn't this religion section a microcosm of the religious world out there, sans the oriental and eastern religious traditions? Too many liberal inter-faith friends may make one think the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion is evolving into something with some semblance of sanity, and then you meet fundamentalists and literalists and extremists. It seems if indoctrination is done too early, or to particularly suggestible minds, it stays with them for life. There is a wilful ignorance at the heart of fundamentalism in any religion, because it can't thrive without ignorance and fear and paranoia. Why are you optimistic about our outgrowing these things? I don't see the signs. 

Mad_Max:

And what's the Christ consciousness? 

Mad_Max:

Yeah. There is a lof of blood in our religions. Somehow the eastern religions seem to have escaped relatively unscathed. It might be because they practice what they preach. Compassion and self-knowledge and truth is the essence of the teachings of most of them, and the sophistication and subtlety of their religious thoughts and insight is just stunning. Thousands of years ago they had their theories about the origins of the universe, and the nature of light and atoms. Science will spend centuries scaling hurdles in empirical knowledge, finally scale the barrier, only to find they'd been outscooped on the nature of reality for a millenia by ancient religious thinkers.