re athiests and hell in article may geneva rutgers edu sun gerry palo uunet uu net gerry palo writes between adam and eve and golgotha the whole process of the fall of man occurred this involved a gradual dimming of consciousness of the spiritual world this was precisely my point from a theological bent those who lived immediately after the flood such as noah ham his son cush and his son nimrod had a much stronger appreciation of divine wrath they also had a stronger understanding of the true god in fact this immediacy was a cause of hardship for some so much so that atlas who is seen with heavens resting on his shoulders but this is not merely the physical heavens that he is lifting it is to put god and the strict spirituality of his law at a distance and thus he became the elevator of the heavens this god made men able to feel as if heaven were afar off and as if either the god of heaven could not see through the dark cloud or did not regard with displeasure the breakers of his laws it is interesting to see that it was that was titled emancipator or deliverer or phoroneus it was nimrod who invaded the patriarchal system and abridged the liberties of mankind yet was worship for having given many benefits he was a deliverer all right but not as we think of christ as a deliverer one delivered from a conscious feeling of god s wrath the other actually performed a delivery from gods wrath and it is up to us to accept it as true the question of what happens to human beings who died before christ is an ever present one with christians i am not ready to consign adam or abraham or even cain to eternal damnation i don t see the problem from the time of adam those who looked forward to the coming anointed one and put their faith in the fact that it was god who was to do the provision were accounted as righteous but up to the crucifixion their sins were only covered not taken away therefore the dispensation of the church views the accountability of sin the same but see it as a completed action rom s makes it clear that it has always been salvation via faith and nothing else it is possible to experience eternity in a passing moment the relationship of eternity to duration is not simply one of indefinitely extended conditions of greenwich mean time i understand what you re trying to convey but i don t think i d lay hold of it because the scriptures do equate the eternality of the second death with the eternality of say the church ruling with christ jn tells us what eternal life is exactly as you are correct that it is much more than non cessation of consciousness it was also a standard belief among many peoples that even the righteous were lost it depends upon your def of lost the elect were lost only in time as outside of time they had been chosen from the foundation of the world existentially we were all born lost but the righteous were in christ and therefore never assuredly lost it would be interesting to share in the results of your studies of ancient people s ideas of life after death maybe this summer i could find time to put together a paper on it i simply have to buy more books for myself and these older books are very expensive either that or countless trips to the oriental museum mankind fell into mist and darkness and at the turning point of time a new light entered into the world the light still grows and we are developing the eyes with which to see by it much new revelation and growth in under standing lies before us our new vision and understanding is still very feeble but it contains something new that will grow in time to embrace that which is old and much more as well couldn t agree with you more our understanding of say eschatology is clearly clearer than that of say isaiah but that is not what i was referring to at this point i should acknowledge openly my debt to the work of rudolf steiner founder of anthroposophy for many insights that have led me to my views on this subject the way you refer to it as doctrine puts a modern intellectual coloring on it i think it was much less abstract and much more real and spiritually concrete a teaching that struck much closer to home than our doctrines or teachings today can be received no i understand it as you have said this was my point i am not so ready to attribute widespread notions in antiquity to simple dispersion from an original source even if they were passed on the question is to what extent did they reflect real perception and experience ah this is it this is the big question however i would say again i think that the best lie is one that has an appreciable amount of truth to it look at satan s twist of god s word when he coerced eve that is a very interesting study the similarity in the midst of great variety of expression of the different people s ideas of the time immediately after death testifies to the presence of an underlying reality yes that is my point but it is a two edged sword for some do not want the underlying reality to be revealed they were not known as mystery religions for no reason there was the public side of them and there was the private side that was so protected that the initiates to an oath of death if they revealed that private side that is why it is so hard to bring their teachings to light the mystery of iniquity that we find in the bible correlates to this i think the primary object of the mysteries was to introduce privately little by little under the seal of secrecy and sanction of oath what it would not have been safe to openly profess was the true religion case in point today might be the masons just a note that they too worshipped osiris in egypt who can be traced to nimrod the husband son on the other hand there is one notion firmly embedded in christianity that originated most definitely in a pagan source the idea that the human being consists essentially of soul only and that the soul is created at birth was consciously adopted from aristotle whose ideas dominated christian thought for fifteen hundred years and still does today no i disagree with you here gerry i know what you re alluding to in that the church primarily the rcc did endorse aristotelian philosophy into their worldview but i would disagree with you that it originated in greece if you are a student of history you will come to see that much of what greece came to expound to the world as their original was just an adulteration of that which they had taken from conquered countries the soul is clearly mentioned and discussed at length in the egyptian religions as was the unity of god and also the trinity of god see if you can find wilkinson s egyptians he really does a number on what the greeks did to what they pilfered from the egyptians he was at once the father of modern thought and at the same time lived during that darkened time when the perception of our eternal spiritual being had grown dim i m not knocking aristotle or plato or any other greek thinker its just that there is nothing new under the sun indeed i should also clarify that i do not deny that eternal irrevocable damnation is a real possibility but the narrow range in which we conceive of the decisive moment i e after the end of a single earthly life is not in my mind sufficient to embrace the reality and i think that is why the early creeds were couched in terms that did not try to spell it out each age has its own focus of theology the early church struggled with the trinitarian formulation the reformation dealt with authority today eschatology has had much study the early creeds do not spell these things out in detail because they weren t the topic of concern there was insufficient wisdom accumulated they didn t have the exegetical tools that we have today also each age seems to have an air of revelation to it one age has a well tended and cultivated garden in which a particular doctrine is given growth it would be natural for the end of times to have the garden appropriate for the growth of eschatology wouldn t it tangents never ending tangents rex
