Ken Ham was asked if Muslims are going to hell. His answer:
Well, it doesn’t matter if one is a Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, Mennonite, Muslim, Methodist, Hindu, Sikh, Orthodox Jew, or any other denomination or religious group—if a person has not repented of sin and received the free gift of salvation offered through the Lord Jesus Christ (being “born again”), they will be separated from God for eternity in a place the Bible calls hell. And sadly, the majority of people will go there as Jesus warned, ‘Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many’ (Matthew 7:13).
Shorter Ken Ham: yes.
Ah! My daily reminder why Christianity is fucking evil and needs to be erased from all thought and memory.
I assume Ham is pretty well-off, financially – so does the camel/eye of needle rule apply to him?
At least my feet will be warm.
Marcus @ #2 – Not if he has good tax advice. If so, he keeps his income low to avoid taxes, while his businesses cover his expenses like homes & utilities, cars, clothes, travel, food, etc. Preachers figured that out ages ago.
Unsurprisingly, a waffling “only those born again” with only a hint of “and I know who they are.”
As if he thinks everyone will all go to Hell but him and his gullible, ignorant followers.
I really enjoy the phrase “free gift” — it has the air of vapid marketing copy for a promotional deal, and neatly signifies the level of intellectual depth and moral seriousness of the whole Big Ham Project.
Anywhere without Mr Ham would be preferable to somewhere with him. That is his Hell is my Heaven.
I can proudly claim I will end up in at least two hells: I denounced catholicism at age 13, and I denounced Islam the moment I ‘married’ my Indonesian love interest.
@drsteve#7
Get your “free gift” now!
Some restrictions may apply. Only valid for qualified customers. Service supplied as is. May not be copied or transferred. Offer may be rescinded at any time. No responsibility or liability accepted. Void where prohibited, except in Indiana.
I noticed long ago, no church collection plate offers a money back guarantee.
The difference between the more malign Xian cultists and the more malign muslim cultists is, the latter rarely bother to hide the awfulness of their scriptures (see a recent debate with David Hiqaqitiou where he said child marriage and resulting consummation were OK if the girl’s parents gave their consent).
Most Christian preachers know they have to at least pretend to look good.
Ken Ham is saying the quiet part out loud, as he is living inside bubble of like-minded.
“Everyone else will be tortured forever, har, har!”
If I recall an audiobook featuring Herr Doktor Johannes Cabal correctly, he found out the dichotomy of heaven/hell was just Nyarlahotep playing good cop / bad cop. Going to heaven was not a better deal than hell.
OK -if you really want to come to heaven, all you have to do is ask the Opener of Ways, Yog-Sototh .
Jeshua ben Joseph is not nearly as senior.
One problem I have with heaven is that I can’t recall ever meeting someone who claimed to be going there that I wanted to spend all eternity with.
Good children get gifts; naughty children get lumps of coal.
Robro @4: Here’s to hoping it’s the same tax advisor who advised Mr Hovind.
I sneer at Xtians who think they’ve got a chance: The Heaven Lottery has only 144,000 winning tickets… although, admittedly, that’s the second prize. First prize goes to those who get to have conversations with Twain, and can conceive of “air conditioning” for dealing with the climate.
The great Rev. Lovejoy (from The Simpsons) said it best: “Freedom of religion means that everyone is free to worship Jesus in their own way.”
I wonder what KH is referring to. I’m an atheist, but even I know that the Bible makes no mention of hell.
Also KH’s American Evangelical idea of salvation is heretical – which doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things, but it always irritates me when such a small group of noisy God botherers gain such a disproportionate amount of power in our country. They are truly America’s Taliban.
Helge, there’s this thing called Biblical exegesis.
‘Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many’ (Matthew 7:13)
If they decide (they being preacher-types) that ‘destruction’ means eternal suffering, not just being destroyed (i.e. ceasing to be), then it surely is in the Babble.
(Yes, I know they purport to be Literalists)
@ 20 John Morales
Srsly? I’m genuinely disappointed. I thought you’d be able to counter with a more Hell-esque reference than that extremely long bow. Try Matthew 25:41-46:
“Everlasting punishment in fire” seems to me to fit the bill.
Silentbob:
Well, of course.
But I chose to specifically use the quotation that PZ chose for his OP.
(You know, work with the materials at hand)
Oh, sorry, Silentbob — it’s you, after all.
My response was to “I wonder what KH is referring to”, specifically, and I thus used that quotation.
Silentbob @21: The use of ‘everlasting’ has an interesting history, and hinges on the translation of the Greek αιωνιος (from the noun αιων, from which we get ‘eon’). Everlasting punishment was by no means a unanimous position in the early church (it may have been a minority view in the first few centuries CE).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_universalism#Origins_of_the_idea_of_Hell_as_eternal
It is sung that in Heaven there is no beer, so perhaps Hell is the better place. At least Hell is not run by some narcissist sociopath.
By the way, why does the devil punish bad people? If he is really that evil, he should be celebrating with them.
rietpluim, He wishes to punish all people, but Dawg only allows him the evil people.
Basically, it’s all He gets. His punishment.
(Hey, I was raised Catholic!)
Wealthy evangelicals have long argued that it’s perfectly fine to be stinking rich just as long as you’re “right with God” which, conveniently, can mean anything they want it to mean. Solomon was incredibly wealthy after all…
@17 You beat me to the punch… over a billion saved, only 144,000 taken up in the Rapture.
Feeling lucky?
By the way, I’d like to point out that the idea of a burning hell in the afterlife is a Christian invention. The Jewish Gehenna is more accurately translated as a giant garbage dump/midden pit in the afterlife, about what you would expect from a culture whose idea of sanitation was midden pits. At least in the cities of the times. Nobody burns, you just get garbage dumped on you for eternity.
So much for the Bible being the “word of God”. Sure it is… if you count the “word of God” being heavily edited in the first century of Christianity by a bunch of old dudes with an agenda and a lot of misogyny. Which is why Deborah as judge (and her perhaps not-entirely platonic relationship with Jael and possibly Barak, which would make them a throuple) and tribal ruler and Susannah and the elders are only ever in the Apocrypha and never in the main feature.
@John Morales #27 Calvinists would disagree. They believe everyone deserves punishment.
silvrhalide 27
I think what we may deduce from the facts you cite is,the God of all three mystifications is a master roaster.
Whether this implies cooking powers as essential to the position remains to be established.
Like #8 Benedict says, any place with Ken Ham & Co in it will be hell, no matter what it is.
What these fine minds fail to appreciate is how damn attractive a place without sadistic gods and carping priests is going to appear. One could well put up with the fires and demonds, as long as there are no gods and their botherers stinking up the place.
A classic case is Dante’s divine comedy: the description of hell is justly famous and widely quoted, while purgatory is literally that and paradise is 100% insufferable. Just about every student pines for hell while reading paradise, which is one of the finest examples of failure of purpose ever seen in literature.
I learned about the Jesus requirement for salvation as a 9- or 10-year-old in catechism class. I asked the teacher if a child born in China, who lives a good life but never hears about Jesus, would go to Hell. It was clear the question had never occurred to her, and she said she would have to go ask the priest. Later she brought the priest in, who assured me that the Chinese person would go to heaven.
This was one of the incidents in my life that led me toward atheism. I found it ludicrous that hearing a god’s name would make you obligated to worship that god under threat of eternal punishment.
Mark Twain’s Extract From Capt. Stormfield’s Trip To Heaven touches on these issues and, as usual for Twain, illuminates the underlying absurdities of dogma. Imagine a vast number of spirits, who don’t know how to play harp, all jamming away at once?
The guy who wrote the apocalypse (not one of the apostles) went all in 8n sadism.
The gospels mention punishments in the afterlife more sparingly. Also, we don’t know how much was altered after the gospels were written down. It seems to me like a lot of influence from zoroastrian and/or Greek sources.
The guy who wrote the apocalypse (not one of the apostles) went all in on sadism.
The gospels mention punishments in the afterlife more sparingly. Also, we don’t know how much was altered after the gospels were written down. It seems to me like a lot of influence from zoroastrian and/or Greek sources.
Goddammit, doublet posting. Delete!
OT
Having Parkinson’s disease correlates with having Desulfolibrio bacteria. This just might be the beginning of understanding enough to stop the disease in its tracks.
He doesn’t.
Satan doesn’t rule in hell. He isn’t even in hell right now.
Most of what xians believe isn’t in the bible. It’s just stuff they’ve made up over the centuries.
and
Satan used to live in Turkey, in Pergamon. His throne is now in Berlin.
These days, satan lives in Los Angeles and used to have a TV show.
I have my doubts that the righteous, omniscient Abrahamic God has bought into the whole Christian carve-out thing. I’m pretty certain we’re all going to fry according to the original dogma.
Shown on Fox Network, no less. And predictably, their rightwing Christian nitwits had hysterics over the very idea and forced Fox to cancel or at least not renew a critically and commercially successful show.
Dumbasses.
Still, the show isn’t nearly as good as the original comic.
@40 According to the original dogma, ie. the Jewish Torah & associated writings (Talmud), the names of the unrighteous will be removed from the book of names, rendering the removed as nonpersons, fit only to be thrown out on the trash heap (midden, ie., Gehenna) thereby denying the nameless the succor of the presence of The Throne. Yada yada. The Christians weren’t even Christians for the first hundred years or so of existence; they were just one more freaky little Jewish splinter cult, one among many, as far as the Romans were concerned. The whole burning damnation and lake of fire thing didn’t come until centuries later and was largely a European Christian invention.
@38, the evidence still is a bit weak on the association between the bacteria and Parkinsonism. Still, it’d not be highly surprising, as some autoimmune conditions are associated with other bacterial infections. Apparently, some antibodies are selected that can cross-react with receptors on our own cells, resulting in the immune system attacking those cells/tissues.
I’m Christian and I don’t even believe that good decent people go to hell. I read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as a child and I got the point about the sheer petty stupidity of sectarian religious arguments and wars by satirizing them as a fight over which end of the egg to open first ,the big end or the little end. Swift was a clergyman.
@grandolddeity , Curtis Mayfield’s old song “If There’s Hell Below We’re All Gonna Go”
In life, there are only two things to worry about—
Either you are well or you are sick.
If you are well, there is nothing to worry about,
But if you are sick, there are only two things to worry about—
Either you will get well or you will die.
If you get well, there is nothing to worry about,
But if you die, there are only two things to worry about—
Either you will go to heaven or hell.
If you go to heaven, there is nothing to worry about.
And if you go to hell, you’ll be so busy shaking hands with all your friends
You won’t have time to worry!
~Author lost to time
Wzrd1 @ 43
Yes, I just wanted to insert a little good news.
When it comes to Parkinsons, Alzheimers, ALS etc there have been little progress for decades but science finally seems to go somewhere.
-As for understanding how religions evolve , going from there to “curing” the most malign eccesses is much harder than producing medicines.
OT again
-I am looking forward to PZ’s review of the coronation, which I am certain consumed all his attention on Saturday (sark).
It hardly seems like a surprising stance, nonbelievers going to hell? Thats the default for both christianity and islam afaik, making both very dangerous as any atrocity in the real world is trivial in comparison to eternal damnation.
By contrast, when The Sandman got pissed off at The Corinthian (a runaway nightmare that started a career as a serial killer) he simply uncreated him and made a new one.
Then again, The Sandman and his siblings were not technically gods.
In the original OT tale the satan (lower-case s, it was a position rather than a name) did merely destruct-test Job with the approval of El/Jahwe.
A nasty customer but not an adversary of El.
Later, things changed. And so did apparently the concept of sheol.
What Ham actually says, is that Heaven is open to people of all religions as long as they are born-again Christians.
birgerjohansson @47, I suspect we’ll eventually find more evidence supporting leaking of the BBB allowing antibodies that shouldn’t enter into immune privileged areas and immune response then causing a number of serious diseases, especially diseases of the CNS. Just as the BCG vaccine has been shown to be protective against type I diabetes. I’d be unsurprised to see the antibodies responsible for that form of diabetes originating from an immune response to a related type of bacteria to TB, but not known to be pathogenic. The immune system ususally selects the “right” antibody to not cause additional problems, but usually isn’t always.
Rietpluim @52, for now, later, should his sect predominate, then only his sect is admitted and all who aren’t are to be converted by force. History has shown that nonsense to be true repeatedly.
Because Jesus taught conversion by the sword or something, hand wave…
I’m no expert on all the forms of Christianity, but I’m not sure they all require Ham’s particular form of confession. So shop around, find one that suits your fancy and rest easy…you’ll go to heaven.
Also, it’s arguable that Islam is a form of or derived from Christianity as it existed in the the 7th/8th centuries in the Middle East. The Umayyad Caliphate may have been dominated by or strongly influenced by the forms of Christianity in the region.
@53 wizard
Worse, believing as Ken Ham does – it morally evil not to convert people by force, if you believe that is possible.
OT Dolt45 found guilty gets a 5Million judgement. I was wishing for jail but a guilty verdict here is acceptable
Just thought the title was appropriate for this off topic #56 . He’s been abusing women for decades