Re: OT: Prayer, ritual and magic // was conlang website

John Cowan wrote, quoting myself:

> > (1) My beliefs about the afterlife. The whole point of my faith is
> >     that given personal committment, God will transform us into
> >     perfect beings incapable of sin.
>
> That is perfectly consistent with a place of rehabilitation (not
> punishment) after death.  Do you expect that God will make you a
> perfect being merely by waving his hand, after all?  If that happened,
> you would no longer be yourself.
Yes I do. The question is whether the handwaving is instantaneous or not.

Now, I don't have a problem with the idea of 'stages' in Heaven, that
progress from earthly corruption to heavenly fulfilment might happen in a
series of steps so as not to blow our minds. Provided, of course, that
the progress is attributed entirely to the power of God.

But I've never seen a presentation of purgatory that painted it as a
*better* condition than life on Earth, which is what an intermediate stage
before Heaven would be. Furthermore, most (all?) presentations of
Purgatory see it as something that lasts thousands or even millions of
years, and if God's transforming power takes *that* long to find
realisation then I have to ask some very serious questions.

> >     Since I believe that souls are literally destroyed in Hell, I do
> >     not believe that Hell is eternal.
>
> That view is unorthodox (except to 7th Day Adventists and related
> sects) but (I suspect) privately widely held:  Lewis Carroll, otherwise
> an entirely orthodox Anglican, believed it.
William Barclay discusses the various views on Hell in "The Plain Man
Looks At The Apostle's Creed". The three main views are: (1) Eternal
punishment; (2) Conditional immortality; (3) Universal salvation. All
three have been widely held down the ages.

--
web.       | Here and there I like to preserve a few islands of sanity
netyp.com/ | within the vast sea of absurdity which is my mind.
member/    | After all, you can't survive as an eight foot tall
dragon     | flesh eating dragon if you've got no concept of reality.