• Transporter Room 3@startrek.website
      2·
      1 year ago

      The church I was dragged to as a child had several “teachers” who drove it into us year after year all about how there will be people coming to the church to kill everyone who doesn’t say they hate God. Then asked us who would deny God to “cling to your sinful flesh”.

      I got in trouble and had to stop going to their “lessons” because saying “yeah I’d do it so I can live another day and fight back” was not the answer they were looking for.

      They really do love painting that target on their forehead and pretend it’s real and that someone else put it there.

  • agoramachina
    6·
    1 year ago

    Yeesh. This is why I started self-harming as a very young child. I was trying to train myself to bear as much pain as possible. We were told that we were living in the End Times and that any day now, the evil god-haters would be busting down our doors forcing us to recant our faith under threat of torture. I wanted to get used to burning alive so that I would be strong enough to avoid the fires of hell.

    Hooray Christian Fundamentalism!

  • ZILtoid1991@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    If it was with Scientology instead of nondescript Christianity, everyone would agree this is cult-like behavior…

  • qooqie@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    Well this is incredibly likely, I’ve seen so many hate crimes against Catholics in the US /s

  • Bizarroland@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    And now that family will still get to hear the screams of that man burning in the everlasting fires of hell after a hundred trillion quintillion years.

    That honestly does not sound like heaven to me.

    I could understand a thousand years of punishment. That would still be excessive but if after a thousand years of that man who killed my wife and child being tortured in horribly inhumane unimaginable fiery screaming terror, if you came to me and said do we still need to punish this guy I would say a thousand years of suffering was more than enough.

    I don’t know why Christianity thinks that that is somehow okay. Don’t get me wrong, I am a Christian, but I am afraid that there has got to be some sort of misunderstanding.

    I mean, eye for an eye right? Tooth for a tooth, right?

    And we are all ignorant of the consequences of our actions. We at best have a weak estimation system for what will happen because we choose to do or to not do a thing, and yet there’s a boogie man in the room that’s never going to ever stop torturing us ever because we were born unless we are perfect and unfortunately it’s too late to be perfect because you’ve been born.

    I hope I’m not wrong, but I just I can’t see, I can’t envision any concept of God that uses eternal punishment as the sole consequence for temporary things.

    I mean, according to Christianity, stealing 25 cent pack of bubble gum is equally as punishable as murder, rape, and genocide.

    Telling a white lie to your wife that her ass doesn’t look bad in a dress gets you the exact same punishment and chains you to the exact same chains as Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.

    Something just doesn’t quite add up here.

    I could accept it if the options were to hit a brick wall when you die and never come back, but the exceptional and saintly would come back into a paradise, sure. That would make sense.

    I could accept it if for every sin you commit you receive three times what you did to others back to you, and after convalescing you may possibly be allowed to enter paradise.

    I feel like that would be painful but merciful.

    I’m no great theologian. Don’t take my words for anything other than me saying what’s on my mind, but if you believe that God is real, and you believe that God loves you, and you believe that he knows every thought that has ever crossed your mind everything you ever said, everything you’ve ever done, he’s been with you your entire life from before you were born all the way to the end of time, then you’ve got to believe that there is a point where the wrath of God will end and a point where the loving kindness and mercy of God will begin again no matter how far you’ve gone into the red.

    And that God would have to love you whether you believe in him or not, whether you have been fortunate enough to find the real religion or whatever is close enough to it to count or not, that God would have to love you the way a parent loves their children.

    A parent may ground you, they may spank you, they may blow their top and scream at you and take away all the things that you love as a punishment for your misdeeds, they may ask the state to step in and take over because they’re not up to the task of raising you, but no parent could imprison their own child and torture them at the maximum amount of torture a creature can exist in for all of eternity.

    There are cruel people out there who could do something like that for 20 years maybe. Maybe 40 years. But at some point they would get so tired of it and so bored of your torture that they would just give up and put you out of your misery rather than to continue to torture you.

    I can’t help but hope that God would at least be as good as the most horrible human being on the planet when it comes to punishing their own children for their minor misdeeds.