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

On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Mangiat wrote:

> No second chances. But why couldn't God come to take us from Hell? To
> say it with Ockham, if He did it, it'd *have* be a good thing. Some
> mystics proposed a theory which holds that God loves us so much that He
> could never let us in Hell.
The idea of universalism has always been common in Christianity, although
it has never been orthodox. This is the view that, although Hell exists,
everyone who goes to Hell will eventually go to Heaven. I can produce a
sizeable list of historic Christian figures who believed this; Origen for
one. On the other hand, the more extreme view that God would 'never let
us *in* Hell' does not have an established place in the Christian
tradition.

As I've said, my own guess is for the view called 'conditional
immortality'. This can be subdivided into two versions, firstly the view
that the soul is not naturally immortal but can acquire immortality as a
gift, and secondly the view (which I hold) that the soul *is* naturally
immortal but can have this quality taken away.

--
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.