Awesome! Now we need to isolate via sanctions the nations that condone this sort of thing :)

Threatening or warning someone of something, anything, even if it doesn’t exist, is the same as blowing up buildings, pulling people out of their homes and killing them?

If using fear to manipulate is terrorism, then every parent should be rounded up and sent to guantanamo.

It seems to me that you make allowance for you belief, but not theirs. Although the intentions of every single person in that church are probably skewed in some way, your intentions are not 100% pure either. I appreciate your honesty, but I think the blindness you show to the feelings and motives of the people in the church doesn’t do you credit. As I have lived a little longer, I become a little more understanding of why people do things, and what the world is like. I know it is the same for you, because I read your blog. But I challenge you to extend that same understanding back towards the church that you so obviously despise. They are not perfect. Many believe the way they do from tradition and their parents, but I believe that the same could have been said of you (I say this from your writings, not as an accusation). Like I said, I appreciate your blog, and your honesty…please keep up your devotion to truth. You don’t hurt my feelings and I am not upset by your misunderstanding of my intentions. I just don’t think you do your blog credit when you don’t explore both sides in your post.

And as a side, there is no concrete proof on either side for the existence of hell, which is the whole premise of the sign. If you don’t believe it exists you better be right.

well this is uplifting. LOL

i need to think about this. BUT if we determine that parents are going to gitmo, i’d better start packing. and i hear the health care there is awesome.

That reasoning does work for me, but I do believe I am right, and strongly enough to not be afraid. There is a general fear of death that almost everyone has. The fear of the unknown. I think we don’t talk about it enough. I can see that it could bring fear, and fear does move people to action, but that action depends more upon the person than the person exciting the fear. Just as it did with you. It made you anger. It didn’t do a darn thing to me, because I believe so strongly in one direction. Just like you saying that I better be right about the existence of Jahannam. Doesn’t do anything for me. I can understand that since it was Emma, though, that it is more concerning. I am concerned about the stupid Dream Girls billboard that is posted on our way home (that has practically naked women on it). I wish I could convict them for being terrorists because they are influencing my girls in a negative way. But all I can do is talk to the girls about it and write a letter (or a blog post). Or, if I wanted to be a terrorist I could find out where they live. Anyway, now I am ranting, so I better stop.

Ok, I thought about this a little.

Let me pose this question:

Would you consider it fear-mongering to warn teens about the possible dangers of drunk driving? In other words, do you think that there is a role for fear in life? I mean, if none of us were afraid of anything, what is to stop us from eating broken glass or setting fire to ourselves?

Well, I suppose the real conundrum exists for the person who believes in hell, but isn’t sure they aren’t going there then. I mean, someone like you would not be afraid thanks to a sign like that, right?

To be perfectly honest, I would not want a sign like that outside my church. I believe in the existence of hell, but it’s not my fear of hell that motivates me to be the person I am. It’s my fear of God.

Hell is a tricky doctrine that I don’t claim to completely understand. I certainly admit that it can and has been used to manipulate people for selfish ends. At the same time, let’s assume for a moment that there is such a thing as eternal life. The “problem” with the New Testament teaching on the afterlife is that, pretty consistently, it claims that there is a resurrection of the righteous and the unrighteous. If all the selfish, manipulative, thoughtless, bitter people are raised up again and allowed to continue living exactly as they did without ever changing the trajectory of their lives, it seems to me that the society that would exist in millions or billions of years would be a place of torment for everyone (heck, we sometimes seem pretty close to that now). So, it makes sense to me that there should be a place of quarantine to isolate those who would never change (or in King James terms, repent).

Now, why a perfect God wouldn’t either leave those who would not repent in unconscious death, or else transform their will “by force” I don’t exactly know. Certainly, some in the early church thought God would do one of these things (and there is even some evidence for this in the Bible…1 Timothy says Jesus is the savior of “all, but especially of those who believe” and Romans claims “all Israel will be saved")…passages evangelicals have to work pretty hard to smooth over. But Jesus, at least, seems to use Hell as a motivator in exactly the way you seem to find distasteful (that is, he threatens those who don’t care for those in prison, or naked, or hungry with everlasting torment). Maybe that makes Jesus a terrorist, but again, only if the danger he threatens is non-existent. In any case, what Jesus hopes to accomplish by the threat (a society in which the oppressed are cared for) doesn’t seem all that similar to the demands of most terrorists.

I would prefer you guys wrote - H E Double Hockey Sticks.