Comment on Do You Think It's OK For A Person To Prefer Dating Virgins Only?
masterofballs@wolfballs.com 2 years agoI don't think its a big deal.
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Fearing hell as a reason to follow a religion seems disingenuous. Like you wouldn't do any of these nice things if there wasn't a pearly gate at the end.
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Most people are going to hell. At least according to Christianity. It seems pretty absurd that I would be one of the exceptional ones.
I'm OK with going to hell. I would rather just live life how I think God wants me to live it regardless of where I end up after the grave because those laws and methods are for my and other's well being while being alive. They have value during our current life.
I'm not even 100% sure the after life sections of the bible are saying what people think they say. They seem pretty vague. And much how we think of the afterlife came from works of fiction like Dante's inferno.
Monarque@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
There's a lot to unpack there. Your attitude is not entirely wrong... We should do good for the sake of being upright, which is pleasing to God, and we should not do so for personal gain. Our morality should never be about gaining something, and we should not believe in God only to gain something.
But let me say this: God wants you to go to Heaven. This does mean repentance. And it also does mean being exactly who you were meant to be by exercising your virtues to the maximum, and trying to remove your vices.
A Saint said that the world is constructed in such a way that if everyone were to employ their natural virtues, all the problems could be fixed. So, for instance, perhaps your greatest natural virtue is honesty, and perhaps mine is charity: together, we are supposed to learn these virtues better from each other, and employ them to solve problems. I think this applies to a wide variety of things...
You do have a unique personhood and a unique destiny that God wants you to live out. To really be yourself, though, is to never succumb to petty desires, and to truly conform yourself to Christ. By putting on Christ, you become more of yourself.
Heaven/hell remain vague and speculative in Orthodox life to some degree. Heaven is absolutely indescribable. We know very little about it. There is even the idea that heaven/hell are the same place on the day of Judgment: God's love burns the impurities out of the believers and feels like an all embracing warmth & joy, while to those who reject God it is the fires of hell.
It is a complex topic and I hope to learn more about it and potentially post on it here in the future.