@Melissa___Dawn - Two questions: (1)  Do you really believe there is irrefutable evidence of anything?  (2) Why are you so certain that you’ve “heard the Gospel”?  Perhaps people have poorly expressed truths to you that you then completely misunderstood and misapplied so that what you really heard was a lousy caricature of the Gospel, but not the Gospel itself.  By Musterion’s logic God could present the Gospel to you again for the first time — if so, Christians who fail to present the Gospel well do not doom anyone to hell.  But they may offer some an opportunity to live meaningful lives.  In other words there is no real harm in telling it poorly, but a real benefit when it is told well.  Note: Personally, I think everyone does have irrefutable evidence in their own hearts which condemns their own actions (i.e., their consciences) and I think they intuitively understand the Gospel — they just choose to deny such things.  I don’t believe in a second chance in the afterlife.

@Melissa___Dawn - Please read Matthew 13:

10

And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?”

11]”=”">[d]

Jesus answered them,“To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted.12 For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.13 Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.

Okay, if Christ — Who certainly preached the true Gospel — if He could preach to people in a manner that they didn’t truly hear, isn’t it possible that people like you have never really heard the Gospel?  Thus although you think you rejected the Gospel you merely rejected a poor caricature of the Gospel.  I wasn’t trying to diss you for being dense or disinterested.  I was offering you a legal defence.  I was saying that if God is fair and if God can see inside people then (if He agreed with Musterion’s notion of fairness and if He agreed with my notion that you hadn’t ever TRULY heard the Gospel) He could certainly say that you deserve a second chance because you never really heard the true, full Gospel — you merely rejected a poor caricature.  Again, I’m not arguing that you have to be diligent to investigate every possible Gospel interpretation.  I’m saying that a just God would know which one was the real deal and whether you had heard it or not.  He could grant you another chance if He thought you deserved it.  Thus, the argument that they were condemning you by presenting a poor account to you is only a worthy argument if in fact God was such a careless judge that He would convict you carelessly.  Even human judges throw out incriminating statements by those who didn’t understand their right to remain silent.  God could throw out baseless charges against you.  Don’t worry that God will convict you unfairly.  If He convicts you it will be because you deserved it.Okay, that was my first point, which was before the “Note.”

@Melissa___Dawn -In my second argument I rejected Musterion’s view that God gives a chance in the afterlife.  I also rejected practically all of your assertions.  I assumed/asserted the following: If all people have a conscience, and if that conscience condemns them irrefutably, then none have any hope within themselves.  Therefore men stand condemned by their own consciences, by the law which is written on their hearts.  No one — not even a hypothetical bush man who has never even seen a missionary — does not know that they stand condemned.  All men realise that they are naked before God.  Note: I have no desire to attempt to support my assumption/assertion herein.  I merely desire to draw its conclusion.  If 100% of people have consciences, if 100% of these consciences scream “you are guilty”, then this would mean that we all have certainty that we are guilty.  We will either die in this guilt — or maybe, just maybe — by something called faith — we can believe that we may have access to a cure for our guilt.

In other words the Gospel has nothing to do with our condemnation.  Our condemnation is assured b/c our consciences convict us b/c the law is written on our hearts — yet despite knowing the law we have treated others in ways that we know are wrong — we know they’re wrong b/c we ourselves would not want to be treated the way that we treat others.  Given our inevitable guilt and realisation of that guilt, logic and reason would then compel people to look for any hope of salvation, for any possibility of getting out of our guilt.  The Gospel offers men hope that they do not have to remain in that condemnation.  Faith does not restrict our lives — we already admit we have butchered up our lives and made a mess of things — why should we want to do more of the same?  Isn’t it insane to keep on doing things that we know are making things worse?  Faith allows us hope that we may truly live.  I think if you are honest you will see that you already know that everything that I am telling you is true.  Frankly, non-Christians have more faith than Christians because they believe that somehow if they keep on mucking up their lives things will somehow turn out alright.  Yeah, right.  People need to grow up and open their eyes.

@Melissa___Dawn - I asserted or assumed that 100% of people do have consciences.  But I do not need to assume that these consciences necessarily work perfectly, or even all that well.  If a person with neurological damage or whatever actually has no conscience whatsoever, then I agree that it is extremely difficult to see how a loving, just God could condemn such a person.  On the other hand, let’s pretend that the sociopath sees nothing wrong with physically hurting puppies and people, but he does think that it is wrong to insult people about their weight, yet he does insult one person about their weight.  If so, then he stands condemned on the account of his hurtful comment, we don’t even have to consider counting his deeds involving physical torture.  In other words a holy, sinless God cannot accept or put up with

any

sin.  So all the sociopath needs is a conscience that works correctly

some of the time

.

I think my analogy was fine, we just start out with very different assumptions, so you don’t care to apply it, while I do.  In the end you have faith that humans can take charge of our own fate — that we humans are smart enough to figure things out and move forward.  To me this is the blindest faith that I can even imagine.  I’m not talking about gross evil like Hitler, Stalin, Nero, Leopold II, Hussein, bin Laden, etc.  I’m talking run-of-the-mill evil: the mean, hurtful desires of children — or the evil attitudes we see lurking in our own hearts which sometimes lash out cruelly at others — even or especially those we claim to love — and then leave us up at night wondering, fearing what kind of monsters we ourselves are.  You are willing to trust that although we’ve mucked things up time and time again, the next time we may have learned and maybe we’ll get it right.  I doubt that fairy tale and its happy ending.  BTW I haven’t given up on this world per se.  I’ve given up on the goodness in the hearts of men.  Without assuming that goodness, we cannot logically trust ourselves, since it is easy for anyone to rationalise our own evil b/c of our selfishness to get what we want.  Franz Kafka presented one of my favourite images — imagine a child who sees a brilliant sparkly thing on the table.  He desires to see it closer and realises that by pulling the tablecloth it moves closer and closer to him.  For a while this may work, but what is the end?  Yes, destruction.  The vase or whatever will fall off the edge of the table and shatter into a million pieces.  It will be destroyed and the child may be hit with a shard of glass.  You see, you do have faith: you place your faith and trust in men.  To be honest, I may not be 100% certain that God exists, yet alone that He will reward us — but I am 100% certain that men will keep on screwing things up.  I don’t see any other viable options.  You evidently do not see that man is in as dire of straits as I do.  When people do not agree on the problem it is little surprise that they will not agree on whether a given solution is the least bit helpful.
Oh, BTW, not to get sidetracked again, for a good while I was a theistic solipsist.  I found no evidence that the world existed, therefore I rationally rejected its existence (basically it was all just a nightmare).  Nyclegodesi had had an interesting challenge for others to prove that the world did exist — sadly, I think, he took that off his site.  Most people ignore the faith which every philosophical position requires.  They only question the unproven and/or unrealistic assumptions that others make.

@Melissa___Dawn - Allow me to clarify that I do not think the feeling of guilt after the fact is what makes an act wrong.  It was the intentional or willful disregard of concern for others which made it wrong.  Which is worse: if a man accidentally drives over one of his children who was crawling in the driveway or if a man who out of hateful spite says something hurtful to his child?  The first accidentally did something which appears monstrous, but the second willfully chose to act like a monster.  Personally, I’m grateful to say that I don’t know enough sociopaths that I can definitively say whether or not any lack a conscience that ever functions correctly, so perhaps that discussion is moot.

My world is not that bleak — I see the darkness which is in my heart and see evidence of the darkness in the hearts of others.  But that is not all that I see, nor even the primary thing that I choose to concentrate my attention on.  It just saddens me when I think of all that could have been ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw8_7apOoyI the song by NIN is one of my favourites, although I’d love to see the song end a different way).  I’m sure that we all like to imagine that we have things under control, but why is it that so many people have relationships that they invest years of their lives in that they claim to cherish, yet somehow they crumble?  I think we all tend to trust in ourselves far too much.