Pet owner kicks the tarsier to remind her of her pet-ness

3.Contradictions are not impervious to logic.
Contradictions fail logical rules.

Thus if Good and Evil are not compatible and the presence of one signifies the absence of another.

Then technically speaking (if P is good)
P= -(-P)
or -P = – -(-P)

Because you can only define Goodness or ( in my logical extension) Heaven in terms of what is not there (Evil or Hell) then Hell must exist in order for Heaven to.

Also in Joshua’s mind,
if Knowledge cannot be gained through Science or its philosophical assumption of Episteme, then how should we acquire knowledge? Failing to provide a means to adequately acquire knowledge on the mysteries of God makes it redundant to discuss what God means to anyone.

Since
1. If we cannot be sure of knowledge, then the Devil could always be making up false knowledge for you to believe
2. you should therefore not trust anything.
3. Anyone could come up with his/her own conception of God and that would be really sinful cause you are merely making God in your Own Image, which totally breaks Commandment no 1

Next in Joshua’s mind,
Jesus did not come to offer Heaven.
Jesus came to take away the Sins of the World.
Heaven was never an end product of belief and neither should it be an aim for any Christian. Christians merely accept that they have found salvation in the death of christ and thus will rise with him on the last day. Rising to heaven remains a privilege. Christians do not have a special right or place or guarantee in heaven.

Lastly!
The leap of faith must be taken with absolute cautiousness, one may leap into oblivion and pass what philosophy can offer us.
Moreover, before you leap, the fundamental existentialist stance that there is no essence before existence must first be accepted and appreciated. Perhaps Sartre should have been placed before Kierkegaard.

I might be wrong of course, but I think you have a few strange points.

1) God has got to follow His own rules. I think that it is somewhat inimical to the idea that God is omnipotent. If even God is circumscribed by his ‘own’ rules, then perhaps there exist some inherent good in the ‘rules’/laws that he dictate. If that is the case, then we should understand what is superior about these rules and why their universality exceeds even God’s omnipotence.

2) That because people with sin cannot by ‘God’s own laws go to Heaven, they must go to hell … because I quote, “they have to go somewhere”, I think I have addressed this point in my entry. That ’somewhere’ should not by default mean eternal damnation in the burning throes of hell. Surely there can be a less extreme way of segregation.

In any case, I think that the leap of faith is better than any rational argument that a christian apologist can mount. It preserves the beauty in the belief as well render it impervious to logic. =)

God did declare Jesus as Judge over humanity because Jesus was here and He done it. He would be the more appropriate one to Judge.

I believe the reason God was more compassionate in human form rather than as God in the O.T. was due to the nature of sin.

While God was in Heaven with nothing to keep Him from seeing our sin, He was full of rage. He about rid the earth of life several times.

But His compassion kept Him from that.

Once Jesus walked the earth, the sin was removed.

—-
But to go into “Why Hell?” God cannot allow Sin into Heaven. Sin is the disobedience of God. God has also got to follow His own rules. He has declared that Sin = Death. He paid for Sin when Jesus died. We have to accept that death and sacrifice our lives so to speak so that we can have eternal life.

Without that sacrifice and acceptance of Jesus’s death, we are lost as bad as the O.T. folks.

Since Jesus died, there was Abraham’s bosom, after Jesus brought forth the people from Abraham’s bosom, there is now only Heaven and Hell. Heaven to be with God and Hell which is the absence of God (originally made for Satan and his angelic followers) Since people with sin cannot by God’s own laws go to Heaven, they must go to Hell as they cannot really come back to life and they have to go somewhere..

That is my view on it.