"matthew 5:17-18

This in short tells us that all laws are correct, indefinately correct. Therefore the laws in the Old Testament are correct."

No, it doesn't.

The text actually is: "Do not think that I (Jesus) came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. 18 "For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled"

Elsewhere in the New Testament we are told specifically that Jesus, and those who become His disciples are the fulfillment of the law for righteousness:

2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.

3 For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:

4 That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. Romans 8:2-4 (King James Version)

Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. Romans 13:8 (King James Version)

For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Galatians 5:14 (King James Version)

What is clear from what the entire New Testament has to teach us about the Old Testament law is that the spirit of that law is infinitely good, but the letter of it is as fallible as the men through which it was given, and the understanding of those who try and apply it to their lives.

The "rebellious son" is not simply the child who sometimes disobeys their parents, but is one who has become an incorrigible and serious threat to the continued well-being of the entire society. Which of you would advise that we today allow sociopaths to roam free within society? Anyone?

It's correct that within the orthodox Christian faith reduced to "doctrine" there is no more redemption possible in Hell. However, you're assuming that you can "repent your ass off" in Hell, and that is ruled out also, making the question whether or not God cares moot.

As I understand Christian theology and human nature, having studied both for many years, both Heaven and Hell are the individual's particular experience of God, and one is in one state or the other based strictly on that experience. If one experiences the perfect, unconditional love of God now as something odious, or even evil, where is there any reason at all to suppose that the future intensification of that experience is going to change from abhorrance to joy? Reason should compel us to expect no such change. I hate liver now, and have no reason whatsoever to conclude that eating liver at every meal will somehow change my abhorrance for liver. Rather, I have every expectation that the more liver I eat, i.e., the more intensified my experience of liver becomes, the more I'll come to hate liver.

Similarly, if God's love is abhorrant to us at the moment of our death, a fuller experience of that love will only make it more abhorrant to us later, and the longer that experience endures, the more abhorrant it will become to us. This, then, is Helll, and our continuing and intensifying abhorrance of God's love is our everlasting torment. The idea that we are eternally punished for some temporal act in which we engage is nonsense; the strawman of shallow and/or lazy atheists who won't or can't take the time to find out what is actually Christian dogma and what isn't; who would rather engage in caricatures of the Christian God than with the actual Christian God. God is the same regardless of how anyone may experience Him, by any definition the one logically necessary example of "objective reality", which should confirm for any critical thinker that our experience of God depends upon us, not Him, from which it necessarily follows our being in Heaven or Hell depends upon us, not Him as well.

Your argument assumes that anyone believes a benevolent God would subject someone to indescribable torment simply because they held to a false belief. No one, including most Jews, Christians, and Muslims, believes anything like that. It's not what you believe that matters to a God who is perfect, unconditional love, but whether or not you return that love.

You may never have experienced the torment there is in being loved by someone you don't, but I have, and I can tell you from personal experience it's real, it's constant, and you eventually get to a place where you can't stand being around that person any more. Their concern for you becomes, to you, an indictment of your inability to love them in return; almost an accusation of your own flawed character, until you begin to feel, without a word being spoken between you, as if your every breath is on trial in some invisible courtroom in front of some invisible jury of loving beings. And that's just being loved unconditionally by a seriously flawed human being like ourselves! Multiply that torment and that hatred you begin to feel by the perfection of the Divine character, and you just might catch a glimpse of Hell.

I'm a Bible believing Christian and I don't believe that God casts people into Hell in any sense except the one I've just sketched above. Christians believe God is not only perfectly loving, but also that God is omnipresent, which entails, at least to critically thinking Christians, that God is every bit as much "present" in Hell as He is in Heaven, and this concept only strengthens the idea that it is the experience of God in a much more full and complete fashion that produces either Heaven or Hell for anyone, rather than the idea that God sits as a Judge of the "Law" who hands down some verdict as to what one has inproperly believed in one's life, and then throws them into a place of torment and suffering.

As for God's decision to create a world full of people who never return His unconditional love, and thus end up in Hell as He gathers all into Himself at the end of the ages (or the end of each person's life here, as the case may be), it seems to me that goodness demands choice, just as evil does, and that therefore regardless of God's omnipotence, it is simply beyond anything God can do to create a world in which no one ever goes morally wrong. For God to insure any particular person never went morally wrong it would require that God control that person's judgments and beliefs; in short, their entire mind. But if it's our free choices that are required for anything we do to be a moral act, then it follows necessarily that God cannot control our minds in any fashion capable of insuring no one ever goes morally wrong. From this it also follows necessarily, it seems to me, that it's not up to God how much evil there is in the world, or who is doing it. It's up to us. They are our choices, made with our minds uncoerced by God, as they must be to qualify as moral in the first place. God's perfect knowledge of those choices doesn't cause them or control them, nor could it and our judgments still be considered moral or immoral. Reality causes knowledge of it; not the other way around. And for all anyone knows this world is the best world an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly loving God could create. It seems unjust in the extreme to assail God's very existence based on the truth of a premise the truth of which no human being could possibly know in this life.

If God were also just, yes. If "evil" exists, and is defined as concern for the self, and good exists, and is defined as concern for the other, then it is clear that evil and good are complementary concepts. Benevolence is only required to make a way for the evil men do to be escaped by them if and when they turn from doing evil, and, at least according to the Christian faith that is exactly what God has done through His Son, Jesus. He has shown men that His love is unconditional, thus removing any rational mistrust of Him by men, thus opening the "narrow way" in which men can come to and experience God.

That said, everyone who has ever been unfortunate enough to have been in a relationship where they are loved selflessly and unconditionally by another they do not love at all, knows first hand the torment that there is for them in such a one-sided love affair. The other's love becomes an indictment; a constant accusation that there is something wrong with you issued in an inner voice you often recognize as your own. Hearing that voice over and over again eventually changes your simple lack of love for the other to a constant annoyance with them, and then finally to hatred. Now suppose this hypothetical "other" was a perfect being. The inner torment you'd feel in rejecting their unconditional love by failing to return it would be multiplied by the difference between human frailty and fallibility and perfection; i.e,, beyond the mind's ability to imagine. We could not possibly hide our rationalization for our failure to return their love behind our assumption they were flawed themselves, and their perfection would only serve to brighten the light exposing our own flaws until it was pure torment to continue seeing.

Hell is not a place, but a state of mind in a person who consists in nothing but mind; i.e., a "spirit", at least in most theistic religions. If that mind is in torments, then that mind is in hell. If that mind is at peace, and experiencing the inner joy that comes with selflessly loving others, including it's Creator, then it is in heaven, and in the presence of the Ideal Being who is selfless, unconditional love. And clearly any being who is "God" would have to be selfless love, for surely we can agree that unconditional love is better than love granted only when some standard of conduct has been met, and that thus "God" must have the property "loving unconditionally" if God is the Ideal Being.

Which brings us back to the quesstion, what if God isn't the Ideal Being? The answer to that is very simple. Since God is unquestionably at least possible, then there must logically exist some possible world in which such an Ideal Being exists. So, you might say, how does that tell us this world is that possible world? Easy. An Ideal Being that exists in one possible world must logically exist in all possible worlds, for clearly it is the case that any Ideal Being, to qualify as the Ideal Being must exist in all possible worlds as the Ideal Being in that world. Since this world is obviously a possible world, and since any Ideal Being that exists must exist as the Ideal Being in all possible worlds, it follows logically that the Ideal Being, who, as we've seen must essentially have the property "loving unconditionally", exists in this world. Further, it is God's unconditional love, that you've referred to as His benevolence that produces BOTH heaven and hell for mankind, depending on how they respond to that Love.

Well said. It is always much better to deal critically with the other guy's argument than it is to "define" it out of bounds.

You are correct that no one "chooses" their beliefs. After that, your response pretty much departs reality, as you seem to be arguing that intelligence, in and of itself, compels people to disbelief in God. Without going into a lengthy examination of why that premise is patently false, let me just point out a fact that shows any critical thinker it is:

There is no reason in the world to suppose that people somehow became instantly more "intelligent" this side of the Enlightenment than they were just the other side of it, when atheism was virtually unknown among Western intelligencia. One may argue that before the Enlightenment era all the institutions of higher learning were controlled by religion, but that argument cuts both ways (today, atheism predominates at this same level of education!), and either edge of that sword cuts against your premise that it's intelligence, simpliciter, that produces disbelief in God. There is therefore no reason I can see to accept the truth of your premise as I understand it, without first truning off our "critical thinking" faculty.

To me it seems simple. Intelligence used to be one's "ticket" into a theistic environment that, surprisingly enough, generally produced theists. Today it's one's ticket into an atheistic environment that, shockingly, produces a great many atheists. Thus your premise that it's intelligence that drives atheism and a lack of it that dirves theism is at odds with both history and logic.

I would have thought it too obvious to need pointing out, but since a "dogma" or "doctrine" is by it's very nature exclusionary and judgmental, it makes little sense to assail those who hold them on the basis of "fairness", or the fact that tend to "judge" (i.e. exclude) those who don't hold to them.

You seem blind to the fact you hold to "dogmas" of your own that are just as exclusionary and judgmental as any coming out of any religion I know of (your initial quesiton assumes the "dogma" that "religious people look down on critical thinking"), and this is usually the sign of the person operating primarily on bias, rather than critical thought. The irony here is that you're representing exactly the kind of personal bias you seem to find so offensive from religious people.

The "logic" in any causal chain of events leads to a first cause. Therefore, the notion that there is no "logic for God", "God" being partly defined as the First Cause for everything caused to exist, is false.

True, there are concepts that are and have been attached to God as the Creator (i.e, ultimate cause) of everything caused to exist (i.e, every "event") that on some cursory review seem to be illogical, but that doesn't mean that God is illogical, or that people who believe in the Creator are maintaining an "illogical" belief. An "illogical" belief isn't one that can't be proven to be necessarily true by pure logic. If that were the case, then virtually every belief you or anyone else held to be true would be "illogical". Rather a belief is "illogical", in common parlance, when it is held contrary to the preponderance of the evidence against it and/or for it's opposite proposition. Thus, for example, whether atheism, agnosticism, or theism is "illogical" depends upon the evidence for and against each. As we've just seen above, there is one piece of "logical" evidence for the Creator in the fact that temporal events manifest a causal chain that "logically" entails a cause that is itself "causeless". Even the supposition that the chain of temporal events is infinitely long in the past (an idea with lots of it's own "logical" problems!) doesn't remove the logical entailment for a first cause, anymore than the number "one" removes or disproves "logically" that the set of possible intergers isn't infinite. Where then is the counter evidence against the existence of such a First Cause that enjoys a similarly strong "logical" provenence.

You start with the rather controversial assumption that religious people look down on critical thinking. The fact is that in the real world there are a tremendous number of people who consider themselves "religious" and claim to be who are not in fact. The fact is that in the real world there are a tremendous number of people who consider themselves "critical thinkers" and who claim to be who are not in fact. These two facts, taken together, make it true that it is possible for it to APPEAR that "religious people" look down on critical thinking, when in fact that is not the case at all. Given that possibility wouldn't a debate about THAT be in order first?

I'm new to this forum, so would someone enlighten me? Is putting the cart before the horse accepted procedure here? You see, I don't do things that way, primarily because I consider myself a critical thinker, who may not know very much, but knows that valid argumentation must proceed from fact where "fact" is more or less universal consesus concerning the truth or falsehood of a proposition. Clearly the truth value of the proposition, "Religious people look down on critical thinking" is not any where near universally held among either religious or non-religious people, rendering it incapable of grounding a debate as to why it's true! Why then would any "critical thinker" propose it as such?