Percent of People Going to Hell

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Again, these concepts are meaningless.

We're aware of your opinion and most of us have already made up our minds as to whether or not we care about it. The question is meaningless and horrible by my standards too, but the concepts aren't because not everybody shares your religious beliefs.

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Why shouldn't it? (Rhetorical question since I assume yours was too. I'm not ignorant of the arguments here.) Also: 'The Christian'. The collective 'Christian'. You've used that sort of construction before, I think as 'The Muslim'. It's a nice way to avoid addressing or acknowledging differences and arguments internal to groups that you other, isn't it?

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What if crooks chased cops? What if hot snow fell up? What if Willard Van Orman Quine had died in a freak accident in 1940, thus forcing Paul Churchland to go back in time as a proxy, thereby hastening the invention of the pop-a-point pencil?

[Meursault]

The internal differences are irrelevant. Do you extend your penchant for nuance into discussions of, say, fascism? Do you insist that not every fascist is an anti-Semite or a brutal thug? Naturally not - this you resesve for yourself.

The day of the Cross is done. But if a thousand years are as a day before the LORD your God, the sun may just have begun to set. But the result is the same.

[afleitch]

Both of you, take it outside.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Okay, this is the last I'm going to say on this matter within this thread because afleitch works very hard on this subforum and feels that his contributions, which are nearly always far more substantive than yours or mine or indeed anyone else's, often go unappreciated, so I'd like to abide by his suggestion that we not keep going on about this here.

The internal differences are irrelevant.

[I originally responded to this in some detail, but it wasn't really important or saying anything new, so I'm editing it out because, as I said, I'd rather this not keep snowballing into a whole thing. The upshot of it was 'To you, perhaps'.]

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Yes, actually, I know good and well that that's a relevant distinction. All forms of fascism are horrible but some are more horrible than others. That's important to recognize, especially in historical discussions of, say, the prewar dynamic between the Italian and German governments.

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I'm not sure why you think you know me so well but it has got to stop.

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I will not attempt to guess or project whether or not you think the way you phrased this was a nice allusion or a cool turn of phrase, but I'd like to register my own opinion that it wasn't.

[H. Ross Peron]

47%

[BaconBacon96]

Hell doesn't exist.

[angus]

All of us, I reckon.

Anyway, I voted 91%+

[Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden]

Just some food for thought: I came across this quote on a blog entry from a Calvinist website that provides different viewpoints on Hell from a number of theologians throughout history.  This was my favorite one:

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Ernest, I believe, said something with the same idea a few months ago, but I like the way Barclay phrases this.  It's not evidence for or against anything, but it is interesting to ponder, and I think it's far more sound than the implied concept of one only being allowed to repent and repent until their clock runs out.

[afleitch]

Just some food for thought: I came across this quote on a blog entry from a Calvinist website that provides different viewpoints on Hell from a number of theologians throughout history.  This was my favorite one:

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Ernest, I believe, said something with the same idea a few months ago, but I like the way Barclay phrases this.  It's not evidence for or against anything, but it is interesting to ponder, and I think it's far more sound than the implied concept of one only being allowed to repent and repent until their clock runs out.

EDIT: I've cleaned this up a bit to try and be more succint.

If god needs to use an eternity of persuasion then he’s not very persuasive! Given that our understanding, our volition, is in part guided by our physical form through its experiences and perception, by removing what is physical through death but retaining the consciousness or the 'soul' could that not inhibit our ‘understanding’ further? Particularly if we have an eternity in which to reflect on what we have done despite being removed from the vessel that helped form and shape our experiences. Or alternatively, if ‘understanding’ is actually furthered by being removed from its physical form then why be born at all? Wouldn’t having physical life be a hindrance if not a punishment, especially if you were being judged under it's influence! Why not remain an unbounded consciousness?

Furthermore if indeed god allows mankind an infinity in which to ‘repent’ and given that no one knows what god’s standards are, it could well be that no one who has ever lived and since died has ever reached, for want of a better word, the ‘accepted’ point of repentance (according to god) either in life or the portion of eternity that they inhabit after death. There would be no heaven, or if there is, no one is there. As eternity has no end, then mankind’s soul may too have no destination.

Which is fine, when you think about it. If I ask you to think about the very first memory you have; to form it in your mind and remember what people said, what you saw, how it felt and then when you remembered that experience and held it in your mind, I asked you abruptly what you were doing the day before, then you couldn’t answer. You couldn’t answer not only because you couldn’t remember what you did the day before but because you had no conscious memory of your life before that point. You have no evidence to prove that you even existed for the 4, 5 years at the start of your life that you can't remember. Luckily, you have witnesses. So you’ve already experienced in reverse what happens when you slip towards death. And I’ll bet it’s never bothered you. No one makes a plea to exist before they were born but yet do so when approaching death as a perceived finality. As I've said before people seem to care more about popping out of existence rather than popping into it. As humans are beings whose experience of time is linear and of existence as entropic, so we look constantly in one direction. It’s poetic, but it’s also quite narrow.

You’ll know by now that I contest that we are nothing until the matter that forms us coalesces though conception and pregnancy leading to the birth of a living process, albeit a cognitive one with a sense of awareness as the result of energy bouncing though matter in it's growing brain. Birth generates people capable of love, hate, art, genocide and everything in between before the matter or the energy stops and the process of life ends. What remains of us is physically recycled by other organic processes. I don’t subscribe to metaphysical concepts. If I decide to take them out of the box and play with them then I do so knowing that the metaphysical is bounded by the physical. This doesn’t mean that abstract philosophical comments have an objective reality to them but the human minds that construct and deconstruct them do. We are very physical and our perception of the world and pondering of ourselves are both thoroughly rooted in the physical. Our understanding of metaphysical concepts are very much guided by our physical experience and diagnosis of them.

For example, no one can truly say that if there is a ‘soul’ left to itself, with no physical constraint then that it has quality ‘x’ and therefore it's destiny is 'y' because while we may postulate a soul divorced of its body, we have not encountered anything that is just a soul by which to make any comparison. Every soul is bound to a physical person. When it is released, we are told it is no longer in the physical plane. You won’t find one floating by itself in your garden. Any assumptions as to what happens afterwards, or even if the separation is at all possible is conjecture.

It would be logical, when dealing with the concept of a soul and knowing of birth and death and projecting onto the life in between the concept of a 'soul' inhabiting the body in life, to deduce that souls inhabiting bodies is something that souls seem to do. Therefore it seems logical (not that metaphysics can ever be logical) that souls need bodies and perhaps by extension that bodies need souls. Therefore if I was spiritually inclined then reincarnation, or if I was a little more masochistic, metempsychosis would seem to be more plausible. The idea of a ‘cyclical’ consciousness to me makes more sense than a god ‘ensoulling’ a body (which is by definition, ‘fallen’) and in doing so letting the physical world determine whether you die struggling for breath after 8 minutes or in your bed after 80 years and then either be judged for eternity on the game that you played or offer you an eternity in which to be judged. It seems much kinder to let you play again.

[anvi]

Actually, Andrew, your metaphysical speculations in the last paragraph are closely akin to the historical position on souls espouse by Brāhmiṇical ("Hindu") philosophers who believed that souls wandered from one body to the next but could only be conscious while embodied.  If souls ever are liberated from rebirth, Nyāya philosophers concluded, they lose consciousness, because the lack of bodily contact deprives them of it.  Not much of a salvation, obviously, but they were consistent, at least!  Continuing on that theme, Jaina and Buddhist notions of hell were always kind of intriguing to me--for many of their schools, there is not one hell, but millions; we each make our own hells through the character of our deeds and intentions.  This aligns hell, at least metaphorically, more closely with our individual experiences and the kinds of worlds we conspire to make.

Anyway, I don't believe in hell or heaven anymore.  But as a former Catholic who eventually tried to inform himself about scripture scholarship and theological history, I mostly assumed that, if hell indeed exists as it's sometimes spoken of in scriptural passages, it's God's job to decide who goes there and who doesn't, not ours.  When people speak about hell, they mostly use it as either a rhetorical incentive to motivate--or manipulate--others in some way or to just condemn others for what they think or do.  People like to condemn one another far more often than a supposedly benevolent and omniscient God probably relishes condemning anyone--in fact, that constant urge to condemn others is precisely a feature of our fallen nature.  So, most of the time, I figured, people who talk a lot about hell shouldn't be trusted all that much.  All a long-winded way of saying that no one can possibly know the answer to the question in the OP.

[afleitch]

Actually, Andrew, your metaphysical speculations in the last paragraph are closely akin to the historical position on souls espouse by Brāhmiṇical ("Hindu") philosophers who believed that souls wandered from one body to the next but could only be conscious while embodied.  If souls ever are liberated from rebirth, Nyāya philosophers concluded, they lose consciousness, because the lack of bodily contact deprives them of it.  Not much of a salvation, obviously, but they were consistent, at least!  Continuing on that theme, Jaina and Buddhist notions of hell were always kind of intriguing to me--for many of their schools, there is not one hell, but millions; we each make our own hells through the character of our deeds and intentions.  This aligns hell, at least metaphorically, more closely with our individual experiences and the kinds of worlds we conspire to make.

Anyway, I don't believe in hell or heaven anymore.  But as a former Catholic who eventually tried to inform himself about scripture scholarship and theological history, I mostly assumed that, if hell indeed exists as it's sometimes spoken of in scriptural passages, it's God's job to decide who goes there and who doesn't, not ours.  When people speak about hell, they mostly use it as either a rhetorical incentive to motivate--or manipulate--others in some way or to just condemn others for what they think or do.  People like to condemn one another far more often than a supposedly benevolent and omniscient God probably relishes condemning anyone--in fact, that constant urge to condemn others is precisely a feature of our fallen nature.  So, most of the time, I figured, people who talk a lot about hell shouldn't be trusted all that much.  All a long-winded way of saying that no one can possibly know the answer to the question in the OP.

Thank you for the response I was aware when I was writing of the different spiritual views of the soul and the condition of the soul when it is part of the human body and I don't ever wish to misrepresent views so I didn't want to make comparisons but I'm thankful for you doing a bit of matching!

[Oldiesfreak1854]

None of my business.  That's God's job to decide.

[°Leprechaun]

"Hell is other people".