Omegonthesane wrote:Premise 1: The Old Testament's description of the afterlife is Sheol, a pit of basically sod all where you all get chucked regardless.
Evidence:
Well it seems to have fooled Wikipedia
Premise 2: In the Gospels, Jesus instead describes a pit of eternal torture where you go if you don't follow him.
Evidence:
Luke, chapter 16, verses 19 to 31 seems a good place to start, since it specifically opines on eternal torture versos making it to God's side.
Conclusion: Within the picture painted by the books alone Jesus and not Yahweh is the first to make eternal torture for sinners an explicit part of the mythos.
Save for literal chapter and verse citations there is not one microsyllable of that argument which is not adequately expressed by the sentence
[Jesus] put eternal hell into the equation.
So fuck you for being wilfully obtuse.
See there you go, now that you made a stupid argument, I can make fun of you more specifically.
So let's start with the most specific and limited, and work backwards.
1) The verse says it's about balancing, and no where at all says that it is eternal. Your evidence for eternal torture is pretty shitty.
2) The new testament was in zero cases originally written in English, instead in this specific case it was originally in Greek, and the word used that was translated into english as 'hell' was in fact 'hades' which is elsewhere translated into english as other shit like 'grave' or 'the place of the dead' and in fact, in this example, the good happy one also went to hades, because everyone goes to hades, and he just happened to be having a better time of it.
3) The verses you quote are a parable. If Jesus was just a guy hanging around, and as part of a parable he told, he completely reinvented the state of the religion, you'd think someone would have mentioned it, but no one seems to care any more about this then when he talks about the prodigal son? Why is that? Could it be because parables are just parables and no one cares about their truth, just their spiritual meaning? Or perhaps some people already thought that was what happened? Or maybe the read it and didn't think it changed anything because it doesn't say there is eternal torture?
4) Parables are usually useful because they contextualize a moral in the form a story that other people can understand, so weird that he would pick the middle of a parable to introduce a complete change in how the afterlife works. Or... maybe he didn't, maybe he just used a parable that people had heard before elsewhere, and so it didn't blow their minds. Hey, there is a Talmudic tradition that has this exact parable in it. Now, maybe they totally just stole it from Jesus, or maybe, hey, it's not incompatible with their religion, and it was a story already in circulation so people did already understand it without Jesus having to explain that he was reinventing the afterlife.
5) Way more complex than all that, once there was a guy (not) named Mark, and he wrote a story that probably wasn't based on anything a guy named Jesus ever did or said, but if you did believe it was, still, Mark wrote that story, then years later, a guy (not) named Matthew wrote a redactory version of Mark and added his own shit, and there is no evidence that any of the shit he added was in any way based on reality rather than stuff he made up to fit his message. Then later a guy (not) named Luke wrote a redactory version of that and Mark to make a different point. Even if Jesus was a real person that actually existed, still, there is no evidence that something showing up in Luke and not Mark would be in any way anything he actually said. So the sentence "Jesus Xed" is pretty much always wrong, no matter what the sentence is, but even more so when you base it on reading a passage in Luke in English and then just pretending it says shit it doesn't say.