Re: Tolerance

On 17 Oct 2003 at 0:19, P. M. Arktayg wrote:

> Paul Bennett ta nugatu-r:
>
> > For example, the Jehovas Witnesses believe there is only room in heaven
> > for 144,000 people. This leads me to wonder facetiously whether it's wise
> > for them to encourage greater numbers of people into their faith to
> > compete for those few spaces, but that's another question entirely.
>
> It is obvious that you do not know their faith. They believe in an eternal
> life *on Earth*, a physical life, that is, they do not believe in existence
> of an immortal soul.
>
> The heaven is for the choosen ones only. A Roman-Catholic could call them
> _saints_.
Nonetheless, heaven is a greater paradise than one could find in
eternal life on Earth, else what's a heaven for?

Taking that as an assumption, and taking their word that only a small
number of people will be invited in (out of the entire history of
everybody ever -- or at best case, out of the entire history of
everyone ever since the dawn of their faith), and taking as an
assumption that those people will not be chosen randomly (which
appears to be a tenet for all religions that have a concept of
paradise after death), it does not make sense to encourage ever
larger competition for that greater paradise.

Anyway, let's not make an argument out of this. I was trying to make
a light-hearted point about the wide variety of rules and regulations
of the many diverse branches of the judeochristian belief system.




Paul