gcomeau
Member
After re-reading all of John 3 and Corinthians 15 I see nothing there that supports your particular claim about the specific fate of the unsaved. Could you elaborate what part of either one specifies that all those not saved are placed in some kind of neutral holding pattern forever living out perfectly happy lives?
Sure. Scripture makes it clear that those who are not baptized are damned (try Mark 16:16 for another reference to this). What does that mean? Certainly not misery and woe forever (which would imply some awful harsh, nasty things about a God most Christians claim is our "Heavenly Father"). Nor is there scriptural support for that idea. Rather, it seems that people are the ones who insist someone has to be miserable. Consider instead a river dam, which stops forward progress. This seems more likely of the merciful God whose stated objectives for us include resurrection and eternal life.
If this is true, then it is no longer as black and white as heaven and hell (poor guys just south of that borderline). There must be more. Indeed, Paul assures us in Corinthians that there are at least three degrees of glorious resurrection: celestial like the sun, terrestrial like the moon and a degree for the stars. Why would we need three types of resurrection for only one heaven? And are there resurrections without glory?
There must be some wiggle room between simply passing or failing here. What about the excellent person who was never baptized? Would you cast him to hell? Or does it make sense that a just but loving God would prepare a place for him where he can be happy, even though he has not met the qualifications for eternal life?
It makes sense to me that there must be different levels of heaven; that it's not a system of acquiring so many good deeds or saying so many prayers to pass some arbitrary, unknown benchmark. A person who was resurrected terrestrially is damned in the sense that the moon cannot be as bright as the sun, but receives some glory (and is therefore happy to some degree) all the same.
Let me just summarize what you just said.
The only thing you can find in scripture about the fate of the unsaved is basically that they're damned. But since you refuse to think anything could ever be unpleasant about god, "damned" just can't be a bad nasty thing so it must be a happy pleasant thing and you just took it from there by filling in all the blanks about what things must really be like for them using your own imagination.
And that despite the bible being absolutely packed with god doing nasty unpleasant things to people who tick him off.
Any part of that summary you care to find fault with?