Does God cast people into Hellfire?

Sceptics like to point to Medieval paintings of torture and hellfire and demons with pitchforks and tell us that God throws sinners into this imaginary place.
Of course none of this is Biblical.

Have a look at A-rough-guide-to-God's-plan for a Scripture based detailed look at some of this.
For a more brief version stay put here.

Firstly. The idea of flaming pools of lava and torture racks and so on is an artistic invention that came about centuries after the Bible was finished. It is not what the Bible describes.
I myself am an annihilationist, which means I believe that those who don't go to Heaven, will be wiped from existence altogether. There are a lot of reasons why I hold this view, but as a quick pointer 'Matthew 10:28' just about covers it: "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell."

Jesus' Deity in the Gospel according to Mark

A common claim made by skeptics is that Mark was the first of the four Gospels to be written. The other longer Gospels that followed took what Mark wrote and added extra details, sometimes expanding on the legend. By the time John wrote his Gospel, Jesus had gone from a wise teacher as portrayed in Mark, to being God himself.

There are many problems with this theory. First that the church fathers are unanimous in saying that Matthew wrote first. Second that Mark has some details that the other Gospels don't have, so the idea that they just expanded on what he had said makes less sense if they were taking important things out too. Third that the length and content of the Gospels has more relation to who their intended audiences were than the order they were written in. And fourth, which is the point of this article, that there was no legendary embellishment of who Jesus is from Mark to the later authors.

So here we will go through Mark's Gospel and draw out how it tells us about Jesus' deity loud and clear. To me, Mark's Gospel seems the best place of the four to start, as it is the shortest, and the other Gospels do cover some of the same ground, so when I come to cover those books I can leave out the passages with events already looked over here. You may like to have a Bible handy while going through this for reference, though the most relevant details will be included. I have skipped some sections, so there's every likelihood I haven't noticed something that is a subtle clue to Jesus' deity, but there is more than enough here to cover it without doubt.

14 Reasons Why Jehovah's Witnesses Should Believe In The Divinity of Jesus

Probably the biggest difference in doctrine between Jehovah's Witnesses and the bulk of the rest of Christendom is the belief in who Jesus is.

While most Christians believe that Jesus is God himself incarnate in human flesh, JWs believe that he was the archangel Michael, the first created being, and a lesser god.

There are a number of doctrinal differences between JWs and other denominations but this topic is specifically about who God is, who Jesus is, and our salvation. It is a core issue. So while other doctrinal details are what separate the denominations within Christianity, this topic is what makes most Christians think that JWs are not Christians at all.

To some it may seem pointless to debate details, but this topic is no mere detail. Look at it this way. If we say that Jesus is not God, but he is, then we are not giving him the respect he deserves. On the other hand, if we say Jesus is God, but he is not, then we are not giving God his due respect because we have elevated someone else to be equal with him.

This article will look at the reasons why Jehovah's Witnesses and all Christians should believe in the divinity of Jesus. It will use the NWT version of the Bible to make the points and will be a little more focused than the previous article: What-does-Bible-really-teach-about-Trinity?

How Do We Know The Trinity Is True?

There isn't a passage in the Bible that specifically says anything like "Oh by the way, The Father, The Son a.k.a. The Word a.k.a. Jesus, and The Holy Spirit are three persons who make one being - Galapagos 13:69". In fact the word 'trinity' doesn't appear anywhere. But that doesn't mean that this doctrine isn't a clear truth of Christianity. The word 'trinity' perhaps came later to be a simple description of a recurring theme throughout both the Old and New Testament.
But still there are a large number of Christians who think that God and Jesus were separate beings, and have no idea what the Holy Spirit is about.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. -- 2 Corinthians 13:14

Here we'll take a look at some of the several reasons that the Trinity is pretty much indisputable.

Firstly, without even looking at specific Scripture, let's take a moment to think about the atonement from the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.
Basically, any human that sins must die. Sin can not enter heaven, so a human carrying it will not be able to go to heaven. That means everyone. Every human has a debt to pay. They owe a life for their sins. Potentially, one sinless human could pay the debt for them. If the sins of one human create a debt of one life, then the life of a sinless person could balance it out. It would have to be a sinless person, because if the second person had their own sins, they would have their own debt.
So given one sinful human, and one sinless one, either one could die for to pay the debt. One for one.
But if we have two sinful humans, and one sinless one, and the sinless one offers his life to save another, he can only pay for one. So we're still left with one debt not paid off.
So if Jesus was just a man who lived a perfect life, surely he could only give his life to save one other person. Maybe his favourite disciple.
But if Jesus was God, that means he has an infinite, eternal life, which is worth a whole lot more than one human life. His death, which cuts off eternity, is an easy trade off for however many humans (with an average of around a 70 year life span) have ever lived, with change to spare.
So Jesus in his infinite nature as God, having lived a sinless life is the only one who can afford to pay the debt of humanity.
Of course, everyone still dies, so it might seem confusing that Jesus died to save us all from dying, when we all still die. What Jesus' death saves us from is sometimes referred to as 'the second death'. So when our bodies die, our spirit can live on, until it is given a new body for the New Heaven in the future. But without Jesus' sacrifice, we would have no right to be given that new body and be brought back from death. The second death as described in Revelation is the destruction of the souls who are still carrying their own sin.

I simply can not see how Jesus being only a man and not the incarnation of God could work in this scenario.

No man can by any means redeem his brother or give to God a ransom for him, for the redemption of his soul is costly, and he should cease trying forever, that he should live on eternally, that he should not undergo decay. -- Psalm 49:7-9

One more point that shows that the Trinity is a necessary aspect of God without diving into Scripture. God is defined as the embodiment of love. (1 John 4:8 -- Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.) God is also described as having aseity, which means he exists fully without needing anything. (Acts 17:25 -- And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything.) But how could God be capable of loving, sharing love, and receiving love if he was alone? He would need someone else. But seeing as God does not need anyone else, and can embody love whether or not humans exist, it must be that the shared love is contained within himself, in his multiple persons. If he was alone, he would not be sufficient to embody love, but as three in one, he can be just that. A God who is not self sufficient, and needs something or someone else, is not the God Christianity describes. The Trinitarian God is sufficient, but a unitarian God is not.

But let's go on and look at the Scriptural support for the Trinity.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. -- Matthew 28:19 

Why does God allow evil?

Here's a thing. The Problem of Evil is a terrible terrible argument philosophically. It's terrible. Rubbish. Just awful. It's an emotional knee jerk reaction to stuff people don't like. It hasn't got any actual weight as an intellectual problem. 

But people are hung up on it. And we shouldn't be surprised about that. People in general do favour their emotions over rationality.

It's human nature to put our feelings first, even when reason points in a different direction. When you do philosophy, you have to get in the practice of switching off emotion for a while, otherwise you can cloud your judgement. It's not always easy, and in tricky subjects like the worldwide suffering of humanity, it can seem cold and heartless. But them's the breaks.

Quite often, the Problem of Evil won't even be presented as any kind of logical philosophical argument or syllogism. It'll usually just be the question "Why does God let bad things happen?"
You don't have to have studied philosophy for long to know that a question is not the same as an argument!
A question is looking for an answer. You don't know how to explain something, so you ask someone else if they can. An argument is an attempt to make an explanation that you already have stick.

So given that there's this big question casting a large dark shadow of doubt over people, we should wonder if there's an answer.

And this is a thing that plagued me before I began my journey into Christianity. There were so many questions like this that were in common knowledge, yet nobody seemed to even have the beginning of an answer. We'd say "If God exists, why do bad things happen to good people?" and then shrug our shoulders and move on thinking "I guess we'll never know".

There was a time where I thought it was perfectly reasonable when I heard people saying stuff like "I think it's likely that there was a man in history called Jesus who was a good teacher, but I don't know for sure."

But then I discovered these things called 'reading' and 'research' and 'critical thinking'. It was amazing the results that I got. Answers are out there. Just go have a look.

So, after that lengthy sidetrack, let's get on with the question of the day. "If God exists, why does he let bad things happen to good people?"

A Rough Guide To God's Plan

I would never suggest that I know the mind of God, and I'm wary that there could be mistakes in what I'm putting here, but I find that when discussing various issues, as a Christian I'm coming from a certain understanding that someone else might not have. I might be taking for granted some thing or another that they haven't even thought about. So while I think I'm talking about something obvious, the other person might not have a clue how I can square what I'm saying with anything. Like, I might be talking about the way Jesus suffered for us, while their image of God is the benevolent comfort blanket who makes sure everyone is happy all of the time. The two things don't make sense.

Things like the 'Problem of Evil' and 'Divine Hiddenness' are massive issues for sceptics, but for Christians, they are nothing. They are expected! Somehow, even though these things are necessary in Christianity, some people think they are reasons that Christianity isn't true. It's clearly a lack of understanding about who God is, what we wants, and his ultimate plan.

So, here I want to attempt an outline of what God is trying to do according to Christianity.
It will be an attempt, and I don't for one second pretend to know every detail. The old phrase "God works in mysterious ways" is not helpful to anyone, but he has revealed to us what we need to know on a need-to-know basis. We don't have all of the information but that should be enough.

Anyway Lesson 1: God is not a comfort blanket who answers every prayer with the goal of making everyone on Earth as happy as possible.

Can't God Just Rearrange The Stars And Write His Name To Prove He Exists?

It's often heard from sceptics that they would change their minds and believe that God exists if he does something big and grand like that. He won't do it...

"The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.” And he left them, got into the boat again, and went to the other side" -- Mark 8:11–13 

God doesn't just want you to know he exists. He wants a relationship. Showing off his power while demanding your obedience isn't the way to go about that and he knows it.

Auschwitz and God

I'm so far removed from this. My parents generation were born well after the wars were over. I'm in the UK. I'm a Christian. So it's hard to really get to grips with an understanding of what happened at Auschwitz. The best I can do is watch the movies, the documentaries, hear the testimonies. Even then I doubt I can fully grasp the horror of the death camps. I wonder if even those who were there to suffer in them had a full picture of the terrible place they were in.

I've been a little flippant dealing with the Problem of Evil. My only defence there is that generally I treat it as a logical problem. A philosophical argument that gets a thorough debunking. What I (and I'm sure I'm not the only one) often forget is that the strength of the Problem of Evil and Suffering is not in its philosophy, but in its emotional weight.

When you see, or worse, suffer hurt, sadness, loneliness, let alone the horror of being reduced to whatever subhuman category the Nazis treated people as, it's very understandably difficult to keep a level, logical, philosophical head about it all. It's no surprise whatsoever that a person who has gone through a bad time is going to struggle with looking at their situation with the passionless outlook of Mr Spock.

Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? - Matthew 6:27

It's so easy to ask "Where was God when I needed him?", "Where was my guardian angel?".
It's so easy to think that the answer to the question is that he was never there to start with. And it's very understandable to not be comforted at all the by the answer "God has a sufficient reason to allow this".

I Believe In Evolution, So I Don't Believe In God

"I Believe In Evolution, So I Don't Believe In God"

This (or a paraphrase of this) is heard really really often when asking atheists why they don't believe.

It seems simple, but there's so so soooo much wrong with it, that it gets embarrassing for the person who said it when the mistakes are explained to them.
There's so much wrong with it, that it's difficult to know where to start.

So ok. First let's ask 'what do you mean by evolution?'
That word could refer to a few things, or all of those things as a bundle. It could mean stuff like how birds wings might get a little bigger, or their beaks might change shape a bit, or they might get a little faster. It could include natural selection or 'survival of the fittest', where the creatures best suited to environments will survive while the rest die out. It could (and I think most often does) refer to Darwinian evolution i.e. the theory that all life today gradually grew and mutated from a single celled organism over several million/billion years.

If we're talking small changes and natural selection (which is sometimes referred to as micro-evolution) then we're all good. That stuff has been observed, proven, and has to be accepted as factual.
If we're talking Darwinian evolution, then the evidence for that is on pretty shaky ground. Essentially what's been done by scientists who hold to it is they have seen the small changes and from that concluded it must go all the way back to the big changes that have to happen to make something like a lizard mutate into a dog. Unfortunately, the fossil record doesn't back them up. The oldest known relative of modern dogs is an ancient dog. The oldest known relative of modern horses is an ancient horse. It's the same for everything we have today. There aren't any cat/wolf hybrids or anything else that's split into two different things.
Trouble is, atheists have to believe in evolution, because they have nothing else. If Darwinian evolution was disproved, then it would be the final nail in the coffin for atheism.

It Doesn't Matter To Me If God Exists

When not talking to the internet infidel type of atheist - the one who stereotypically has a neckbeard, a fedora, and alternating posters of My Little Pony and Richard Dawkins - you quite often find the run-of-the-mill atheist who simply says stuff like: "I haven't really put much thought into it, but I haven't seen God anywhere so I don't believe in him. I don't need him in my life. I'm quite happy as I am so why bother? I'm just not interested."

This to me seems amazingly short-sighted. I just don't get how anyone could think like that.

Proof that God exists

They say that you can't prove it.

I think 'they' are the people that either don't want it, or haven't thought about it that much.

It's basically a simple process of elimination.

First off. What do we know?

We exist. So what's the reason for that? How did that come about?

We are a part of this universe. If we have the universe, then whatever the explanation for us in particular is comes after that, so it's kind of a secondary question. We need the universe before we can get to us, so it's a reasonable place to start.

So how did the universe come about? Either it existed forever, or it began to exist at some point. Those are the two options.

Big Bang Theory, expansion of the universe, entropy - essentially all of the evidence in cosmology says that the universe we live in began to exist at some point around 13.8 billion years ago. So that answers that.

So we now again have two possible options for where the universe came from. Either it came from nothing, or it came from something.

If we think about it as a maths thing, then nothing is equal to 0. Something could be 1, it could be 3, it could be seven billion three thousand and twelve. Something could be anything.

If we have nothing then the options are: 0+0=0 or 0x0=0 or 0-0=0
'Nothing' has no abilities, no aspirations, no traits, no potential. Essentially, nothing will only ever amount to nothing.
Seeing as we have something (a universe), we must have started with something.
Even if it was '1', perhaps that '1' has the potential to reproduce, so 1+1 would be 2, 2+1=3 and so on.
If the '1' wasn't able to reproduce other possibilities are open to it. 1 could possibly divide itself. So instead of a 1, you could have two halves, each less than the whole, but still at least having come from somewhere. So perhaps our planet is one billionth of a percent of that original '1'.
At this stage of the train of thought we still don't know what that '1' was, or even if it was '1', but we at least know it makes sense while '0' doesn't.

Cosmologists and physicists seem to be pretty much in agreement about this. Because they realise the universe must have come from somewhere, some of them are offering up the possibility that our universe is just one of many. So when we talk about a universe, we mean a closed system that begins with a Big Bang, expands, and finally dies a heat death. So if there is one, or several, they exist within a bigger cosmos.
Each universe begins and ends, but the cosmos itself could possibly be something that exists forever (because scientific method can't tell us anything about it).

So let's try and figure out what the cosmos could be.

Big Bang theory tells us that space, time, and matter (the stuff that everything is made of - elements, chemicals, energy, all that) all began to exist at that point several billion years ago. That means it did not exist before then.

So the cosmos simply must be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial - because those things didn't exist.
The cosmos must be eternally existing for the reasons covered in the maths bit above. If there was ever 0, there still would only be 0, but as there is something then something must have always been there. The first thing to exist must have been there without beginning, otherwise there would have been nothing before it. It also makes sense that it has no end, because a thing that has existed for eternity, but had a lifespan, would have had eternity to live and die already well before it got around to creating a universe.

So immediately our 'something' that the universe came from has a few necessary traits: eternal, outside of space, and not made of anything found solely in a universe.

We can add 'power' to that list. This thing somehow caused a spark that made the universe (or each universe) begin expanding and growing into stars and planets and galaxies that began sprouting plants and bees and lions.

So what kind of things do we know about that might fit the description? Things that exist in no material form, that exist eternally, potentially can exist outside of our space, and have creative power.
The only examples I'm aware of that come close are natural laws, numbers, concepts, and ideas.

All of those examples only have three of those traits, but no creative power.
Concepts and ideas are created products of a conscious mind. Laws require a lawgiver.

Essentially we have whittled down the only possibility to an immaterial, eternal, powerful, spaceless, conscious mind.
As a conscious mind you can add 'intelligence' to the list of traits - it would have to be pretty clever to know how to create a universe.
You can also add 'free agent' to it. If this thing was just a machine, it would have churned out our universe an infinity ago and everything would already have been destroyed in the heat death. Machines pump stuff out as long as they have fuel to do it, but things that are capable of choosing do it when they decide to, and this thing seems to have chosen to wait.

So our list of traits for what the 'something' was that created the universe is now: spaceless, eternal, immaterial, powerful, creative, intelligent, and free willed.

If that isn't the most basic description of a god, I don't know what is.

So to quickly sum it up:

1. The universe (space, time, matter) began to exist.
2. All things that begin to exist have to come from somewhere.
3. That somewhere can't be made of the stuff that doesn't exist yet.
4. That somewhere must then be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial.
5. Only laws, numbers, and ideas are known for certain to have those properties.
6. Ideas require a mind and laws require a lawgiver. So if they exist, then a conscious intelligent mind must exist to provide them. A conscious mind could potentially be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial.
7. An intelligent, conscious mind that exists eternally, is immaterial, outside of space, has the power to create universes, and freely chooses to do so, is the most straight forward definition of a god.

Dumb Questions To Ask At This Stage

So if God created the universe, what created God?

Remember that word 'eternal'? That means 'without beginning or end'. Eternal things don't get created.
You're thinking of 'immortal', which is 'immune to death', but could still have a beginning like a vampire, or a false deity...

How does this prove that Jesus is the son of God?

It doesn't...  it doesn't even try to. It doesn't intend to. Jesus does not come into the equation here at all. Who mentioned Jesus? I didn't.

So which God is it? Zeus, Thor, Osiris, The Spaghetti Monster?

From this proof? We don't know exactly. All this proves is that there is a God and he/she/it has all these traits.
Although... Zeus, Thor, Osiris, and The Spaghetti Monster don't share these traits, so we can actually rule them out. Best thing to do is read up on a few possible gods and find out which one matches the evidence.