Great topic.

No, it is not fair. The fact that suicide leads to heaven or (mostly?) hell tells us about God's control needs (if that's the English word for it). God made humans for fun. He didn't have to create us, but he did, and now we must obey all of his commands. We have a "free will", but no matter what choice we make God is still the one to decides its consequences. We are not free to choose our destination, because God has already done it for us: He is almighty, so he can see the future. He knew where we would end up even before we were born.

This is all just a sick game that he's witnessing.


(I know, religion doesn't make that much sense.)

(Are you sarcastic?)

Why won't God just kill Satan once and for all so that nothing evil will happen to us ever again?

People say that God works in mysterious ways, I say he works in sadistic ways. Mystery solved.

Other: only if you're bad. If you're good then you will be absorbed into the collective and your consciousness will be joined with the others who were good enough to make it to the end, and your mind will become one with the universe, at which point you as an individual consciousness will cease to exist.

So, kinda like the Borg really, Without the skin lesions and circuitry.

Blame your parents not God. Unless God is your mother / father / both at the same time. It's your parents who decided to make a baby, theoretically in the full knowledge that they were deciding on your behalf to subject you to an eternity of living in one form or another. How dare your parents make that sort of decision for you.

Unless you think God controls every decision anyone ever makes (i.e. free will does not exist), in which case you're just a robot with no true consciousness and hence you really don't have to worry about a post-mortem individuality. Without free will our individual consciousness is an illusion. So there's really nothing to worry about.

So, with free will it's your parents' fault for beiong horny at the wrong time, not God's.

Without free will you don't really have an individual consciousness with which to continue to be self aware after you die.

Wow, I didn't notice this comment until now.

I had actually planned to make a thread called "God is a dictator?"  O.O  Guess I can skip that now since this is basically the same topic.

There is no absolute answer to your question. If there is a God, God is not bound by the laws of physics. It is even mentioned in the Bible that a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day... Also, I think I remember reading that there are different kinds of death: physical death, spiritual death, and oblivion(non-existence), (etc?)
We have much to learn about afterlife, if there really is even any. We still don't know much about realm past this physical existence.

Besides, for one who is so worried about everlasting life in Heaven or eternal damnation in Hell, you seem to be wasting your time thinking about it here and now on Earth.

The perception of afterlife, god, heaven, hell etc. of most people in this thread is obviously heavily influenced by typical western christian belief.

If your perception of "god" and "afterlife" is starting to become uncomfortable or simply not credible, maybe it's time to alter your perception.

When someone says that they believe or don't believe in god for example, what does that mean except that the person who said so believes or rejects his very own perception of the word "god"?

For example, when most western people hear the word "god", they automatically think of some kind of human-like being, something like an old man sitting on a cloud having a beard. They have a certain perception of the word "god" that they got from their parents, people around them, the priests in church, the guys who made the movies they watched or the Wikipedia-article on "god" (revision 1234567, last modified by user bick_dick_79).
And then they feel very clever rejecting their own ridiculous perception of the word "god"...

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him-"

Genesis 1:27

Also, stop assuming that atheists don't know about the Christian God.

Only if you actually believe gods exist.

the way we live and think alive is different than the way we will in the afterlife