I do appreciate your honest attempt to answer my questions, but unsurprisingly my doubts have not been erased.
God's love is not conditional, for starters. Just because you don't go to Heaven after you die doesn't mean that He ever stopped loving you. Having it returned is not a condition of its existence.
It seems hard to believe that love could be present when he condemns you to eternal torture in Hell, particularly if reason could not have led you to him.
Covered this later on.
Second, what Christians believe is that salvation is not automatic. Jesus's death on the cross was not an automatic soul wash for everyone. It was a gift, the ability to have your sins wiped away, but you must choose to accept it. And if you refuse it, He's not going to drag you to Heaven kicking and screaming.
If everybody knew that was the choice, and we define Heaven and Hell in traditional terms, very few would reject it. Sure bliss would be meaningless and boring, but better than torture/destruction. The problem is that it requires faith to even believe that a choice exists. There are competing religions to contend with, not to mention the fact that science and reason seem to point away from faith.
You vastly underestimate the human capacity for denial and tunnel vision. Also, blaming God because YOU are recalcitrant and He doesn't just overwhelm you and take all choice and freedom away from you is a little unreasonable.
Few people knowingly make that choice. Satan's existence is as dubious as that of anything supernatural. There's no evidence of Satan in the world. People are perfectly capable of doing bad things without help.
Lots of people knowingly make that choice. I know any number of people who were raised as I was, had the same training from birth that I did, and knowingly chose to turn away from it.
There's lots of evidence of Satan. Your remark concerning people being bad on their own shows a misunderstanding of who and what he is. Satan isn't the source of all evil, and he doesn't make people do bad things, or cause bad things to happen. He merely tempts humans to give in to the evil that lives inside of all of us.
You honestly believe that, deep down, atheists, Hindus, Muslims all know they are choosing Hell and Satan?
In this day and age? Yes. Very few people are left in the world who do not have access to the teachings of all the major religions with which to make their choices. So I do honestly believe that they did knowingly choose to believe what they do, knowing that if they are wrong and Christianity is right, that is what it means.
It's clearly not available to everybody during life. Not everybody hears of Jesus, and the idea of Jesus doesn't make too much sense, to me and many others, upon hearing of it. Why would an innocent and superior being sacrificing himself have anything to do with forgiving sins? It doesn't seem logical...
This is the 21st century. Do you have any idea how utterly out of touch with the rest of the world you truly have to be to have never had access to the teachings of Christianity? Particularly when you consider that Christians have been working for centuries to make sure everyone gets that opportunity via their missions work?
I suspect the reason it doesn't make much sense to you is that you've never actually listened or tried to understand it without imposing your own preconceptions onto what you were hearing.
As to the question about sin and Jesus's sacrifice . . .
First of all, you have to rid yourself of the notion that "sin" is defined as "things that are bad according to the human conception of bad and harmful to others". Sin is actually defined as "disobedience to God". This means that it is possible to commit a sin without doing anything that other humans would consider unacceptable. Jonah refused to go to the city of Nineveh, and that was a sin, not because there was anything inherently wrong with staying where he was, but because God had told him to go. You see?
Now, when you knowingly choose to do the opposite of what God wants you to do, you move yourself farther away from Him, spiritually speaking. One sin probably is not enough to damn your soul to Hell - probably - but to be in a state of sin is to be in an overall state of rebellion against God.
What you have to understand, and what many non-Christians (and even some Christians) find hard to accept, is that we are owned property. Initially, we are owned by God by virtue of the simple fact that He made us. However, He gave us the choice of not belonging to Him, if we don't want to. What that means is that we then become the property of Satan instead. If we die under those conditions, he claims his property and takes it home with him. A state of rebellion against God is a choice to become the property of Satan.
While God will allow what belongs to Him to pass out of His ownership if we so choose, retrieving that property from the clutches of Satan required that it be bought back, that a substitute be made. Because He loves us, God - in the form of Jesus - chose to become that substitute. He became a human, took the rebellion of all of us upon Himself (which subsequently condemned Him to Hell, same as it does us), died, went to Hell, and then came back out and returned to Heaven. At that point, the debt incurred by each of us when we sin was paid. Now we have only to accept that payment on our behalf.
Your remarks concerning baby rapists and Gandhi are only relevant if salvation and Heaven were dependent on you earning your way in. But you don't. It's another big misunderstanding people have. One does not go to Heaven because one is a good person and "deserves" it. What could you, or anyone, do that would be great enough to impress the Almighty Creator of the Universe? From His perspective, we are all sinners, which means we are all the same: tainted and distanced from His presence. The only way anyone's getting into Heaven is through His grace and mercy, and we are all equally in need of it.
Of course all of this requires that we start with the assumption that there is a One, omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent creator. Even given that, how else would we judge human behavior except by human standards? I don't judge dogs by human standards. Why would a god judge humans by god-like standards?
Yeah, believing in religion does sort of require that you believe religious precepts.
How else would we judge human behavior? By the standards I just told you, which have already been told to us. And they aren't "god-like standards" the way you mean them. They're completely achievable by any human on Earth, since they require nothing more than the desire to achieve them. Your standards would actually be much more difficult to achieve than God's. It's not comparable to you expecting a dog to walk on his hind legs and drive a car. It's comparable to you expecting him not to bite your hand when you try to pet him.
It's very easy to conceive of a more fair system.
Yes, but He wasn't trying to create a "fair" system, and certainly not one that's "fair" by human lights.
One could give different punishments for different levels of sin. Nobody deserves eternal torture, but Hitler might deserve to experience the pain of all of his millions of victims, which might take awhile, and I might deserve to do the same for a smaller number of victims. Upon serving that sentence, the soul (which we are assuming exists), would be sent to heaven or reincarnated.
Are you not listening to me? You're still talking about "punishment", and acting as though this is about meting out human justice for crimes. God doesn't send you to Hell, and certainly not to punish you for your sins. If you go to Hell, it's because you chose to go there, and by that standard, it doesn't really matter what act or acts you committed to convey that choice. And going to Heaven isn't a reward, because there is nothing you, or any human, could do to deserve it. God loved Hitler every bit as much as He loves you or me, and nothing Hitler did changed that.
You almost had a glimmering of understanding of this when you said "This is mostly independent of how terrible the person was on a human scale." It is ENTIRELY independent of that, because God is not a human. He's not taking people to Heaven as a reward for their good works. He's welcoming His beloved, rebellious, prodigal children home, regardless of the mistakes they've made, and mourning the ones who never choose to return to Him.
I said that because I've studied this, including reading the Bible, and talked to hundreds of people about it. I certainly would rather believe in an afterlife, but I can't believe in something merely by wanting to. It would have to make sense first.
I'm sorry, but you really haven't studied this at all, for one good reason: you haven't been open to truly understanding it. You've been trying to force your own perspective of how the universe is onto it, and then declaring that "it doesn't make sense" because it doesn't match up to what you think it should be. When you allow for the possibility that you've been mistaken about the order of things and open your mind to the change in perspective required to see Christianity on its own terms, you will begin to comprehend it. You might still disagree, but it won't be because you're demanding that we conform to you and we refuse.
