Colombian youths' alleged visit to hell

[Jon]

One of the most noteworthy things about this story (see http://spiritlessons.com/Documents/7_Jovenes/English_7_Jovenes_Hell.htm if interested) is that in it, Jesus is painted, as in the gospels, as a cold, legalistic figure with no words of wisdom who is powerless or unwilling to save, and has utter contempt for, ordinary, flawed folks even when they call on him (especially around an eighth of the way down the page, where it's mentioned three times that he avoided looking at screaming, writhing damned people pleading with him to end their torment) - folks whose unpardonable sins in these cases do not include being self-righteous, being a serial killer (with one exception) or even attributing God's works to be of Satan as per Mark 3:22-29, but include things that, by and large, show that they are guilty merely of having been too human (that is, they're being hideously and sadistically tortured by God's satanic agents and will continue to be forever pretty much for having been the way God had made them). How heartening to know that a report of a modern-day encounter with Jesus depicts him as having exactly the same personality and the same petty, pharisaic attitude that the gospels depict him as having!

Something I've picked up from the "revelation" is that we should all submit ourselves to the authority of some church (preferably a Pentecostal one) because they have every right to control every aspect of our lives thanks to the infallible hotline to God that they have (Pentecostal ones anyhow) providing them with perfect knowledge of how he wants us to behave down to the smallest of details.

Is the reader also supposed to infer from it that God and the devil are friends or "business partners" - each half of one whole, and very like the other in character? I mean, God must regard Satan as competent and faithful, and probably values him greatly too, if he allows Satan to be the ruler of possibly the most important part of the cosmos, and how Satan is said to manage it is hardly what one would expect from a being that can't stand the one that entrusted it to him. Put differently: if Satan hated God that much, and was that desperate to screw up His creation, he could do so simply by doing a botched job of administering the hell God has reputedly put him in charge of, and what better way of doing that than to make it a comfortable abode for its inhabitants or release them from the place? Yet instead, if we go by this tale and ones like it, Satan runs hell precisely as God wants him to. Perhaps it's fear that keeps Satan from stepping too far out of line - fear that God will turn on him if he doesn't fulfil his part of the deal? If that's so though, isn't God the more cruel, calculating and manipulative of the two?

Another peculiarity is the assertion that "all the suffering on earth concentrated in just one place is nothing, NOTHING, compared with the suffering that a person experiences in the best parts of hell" - for such incomprehensible suffering does not prevent its internees from being able to understand and communicate well, with some giving quite coherent (if fairly brief) accounts of why they fell into there. (My guess is that if the story is made up, the person whose idea it was to put this in it had never experienced excruciating pain, and is highly unlikely to have ever been, say, a POW with vicious, merciless captors. Because if he had, he would surely have appreciated that a human in extreme agony will usually be in way too much discomfort and under too much mental stress to even think clearly, let alone articulate things about his life.)

Many fundamentalists like to quote 2 Corinthians 11:14 in order to cast a satanic light on alleged spiritual experiences of others that don't line up with their rigid views, and it's largely because of that that I'm a bit reluctant to be seen to be even chewing over the possibility that a certain being pretending to be someone he wasn't may have been behind what these youths apparently went through, given that it could be looked upon as taking a leaf out of the fundamentalists' book. Still, there's no denying that this verse does inform us that Satan can manifest as an angel of light, so I can't help but wonder if experiences like the one told of in the article, if they really did happen as described (note the "very bright light" referred to near the beginning of it and the lack of any indication that that being of light emanated love), might have involved a satanic visitation of some kind.

[Lazarus Short]

If the cosmos is divided between God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, and they are business partners, then Satan has achieved what he wanted:  equality with God.  It is something the ET advocates cannot get around.  Any doctrine which elevates Satan and compromises the absolute sovereignty of God must be false.  Further, the character of Jesus is slandered by such stories, which depict Him as cruel and lacking in compassion.  Nonbelievers reject Christianity because of such stories and doctrines, and rightly so, given their level of understanding.  Too many Christians swallow these unverifiable accounts as truth, perhaps because they are so outrageous that the hearer dare not go on to see the ridiculous they are.

[ded2daworld]

Jon said, "Something I've picked up from the "revelation" is that we should all submit ourselves to the authority of some church (preferably a Pentecostal one) because they have every right to control every aspect of our lives thanks to the infallible hotline to God that they have (Pentecostal ones anyhow) providing them with perfect knowledge of how he wants us to behave down to the smallest of details."

Your joking right? or being facetious? or just kidding? I seriously hope you aren't serious. There is no person or group of persons that has a corner on the truth or has any right to tell a believer how they should work out their salvation with God. Christ is the authority, the word of God is authority, the guidance of the Holy Spirit is authority.

No person on earth runs their own life perfectly, I'll be damned before I let anyone but Christ run mine.

[eaglesway]

Jon said, "Something I've picked up from the "revelation" is that we should all submit ourselves to the authority of some church (preferably a Pentecostal one) because they have every right to control every aspect of our lives thanks to the infallible hotline to God that they have (Pentecostal ones anyhow) providing them with perfect knowledge of how he wants us to behave down to the smallest of details."

Your joking right? or being facetious? or just kidding? I seriously hope you aren't serious. There is no person or group of persons that has a corner on the truth or has any right to tell a believer how they should work out their salvation with God. Christ is the authority, the word of God is authority, the guidance of the Holy Spirit is authority.

No person on earth runs their own life perfectly, I'll be damned before I let anyone but Christ run mine.

Jon was being sarcastic- and very funny indeed, for someone like me who has a lot of experience in pentecostalism.

However in my experience, his sarcastic revelation applies to most denominations, sects and systematic theologies like Preterism, Calvanism, Armenianism, Fundamentalism, Catholicism, etc., etc.

[reFORMer]

At the site linked in OP http://spiritlessons.com/index.html is Wiese's 23 Minutes In Hell.  There's a discussion of that book from a while back elsewhere in tentmaker (if it didn't get kaboshed in a cyber skirmish.)

I've talked to some people who read Wiese's book.  Why they have next to no ability to listen to what the Bible says or to hear pointed out what it does not say is an enticing mystery.  Real quick they become agitated, angry and hateful, condemning the one trying to draw their attention to Biblical revelation.  Having only a limited number of words, what is or is not in the Bible is easy to prove using concordances. 

Some people have seen the visions they tell about.  (While not re-telling it here) in my vision an angel said:  "the song of the damned" of what of what I heard from what was probably the lake of fire.  Throughout this vision there was never anything that indicated what realm (spirit, soul or body) this occurred in; or, how long it was to last.  I have seen and tell you the truth:  when God pulls the plug, it all drains out!

[Jon]

However in my experience, his sarcastic revelation applies to most denominations, sects and systematic theologies like Preterism, Calvanism, Armenianism, Fundamentalism, Catholicism, etc., etc.

I think you're right - the emphasis I gave to Pentecostalism was due to Pentecostal "spin" appearing to have been put on the story (which remarks that the youths "were all immediately baptized with the Holy Spirit" and "began to speak in tongues" after witnessing the bright light that marked the beginning of their experience).

[Jon]

I've talked to some people who read Wiese's book. Why they have next to no ability to listen to what the Bible says or to hear pointed out what it does not say is an enticing mystery. Real quick they become agitated, angry and hateful, condemning the one trying to draw their attention to Biblical revelation.

I've run into such people myself, who never fail to leave me baffled as to why they should be so fanatical about the absolute reliability of a book (i.e. the Bible) whose ability to convey sound doctrine from start to finish they give the impression of having little or no confidence in, preferring as they do to use sources they do esteem to be trustworthy through and through (Bill Wiese's book 23 Minutes in Hell being a good example) and/or fixate on select biblical passages (in the process ignoring those whose straightforward, face-value readings are not in harmony with religious dogma that's dear to them).

I wonder if Matt Slick of carm.org ever got around to doing an article giving the "proper" meanings of the parts of the Bible used to back up UR, God's desire being for everybody to be saved and the notion of God being no respecter of persons (Matt's a Calvinist who rejects all these)?

[Jon]

Thought I'd bump this thread to add first off that the page linked in my initial message has what seems to be a blatant contradiction with scripture about two thirds of the way down, where the explanation given for nightclub revellers being punished by being forced to dance on spikes is as follows:

You may be asking, "Where does it say in the Bible that it is wrong to dance?" In James 4:4 the Word of God says, "Do you not realize, you adulteresses, that friendship with the world is enmity toward God? Therefore, whoever determines to be a friend of the world becomes God's enemy." Also, in 1 John 2:15-17 it says, "Neither love the world nor the things in the world. Whoever loves the world has not the Father's love in his heart, because everything in the world, the passions of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the proud display of life have their origin not from the Father but from the world. And the world with its lust passes away, but he who does the will of God remains for ever." Remember, the world will pass away; all this will perish, but the one who does the will of God stands forever.

Well, I gather that means that God's stance on dancing has changed since David's day (2 Samuel 6:14 tells of David dancing "before the Lord with all his might" and without suggesting that God disapproved of it in the least), and that we are very much under law after all notwithstanding Romans 6:14!

Further, if James 4:4 and 1 John 2:15-17 have been interpreted correctly above, does that mean that none of us should date or get married either? For when one does one of these, or even has any interest in doing either or both of them, he has arguably succumbed to passions of the flesh and desires of the eyes more than one who is dancing, being that getting intimate and wanting to get intimate with another generally involve passions of the flesh and desires of the eyes more than just about anything else does - which makes me wonder if some fundamentalists fear that they'll be damned for being amorous, particularly if they've acted on it. (Partly because of the extent to which they do involve passions of the flesh and desires of the eyes, it goes without saying that it's far from uncommon for romantic relationships to be consuming, and that they are for that reason alone considerably more prone to take one's focus off God than is dancing - which in contrast is more often than not nothing more than a pastime: something that even many people who enjoy a lot seldom or never have strong urges to engage in when they're away from a dance venue.)

Careful readers of the article and others on the same site may also notice that the paragraph roughly a fifth of the way down the page in which it's mentioned that "there is no love, mercy or forgiveness in hell" appears to conflict not only with a literal reading of Luke 16:27-30, but with Angelica Zambrano's account (http://spiritlessons.com/documents/prepare_to_meet_your_God) to boot, as in these, hell is made out to be a realm where some of the condemned do have compassion, and are eager for others not to end up where they themselves have ended up. (Zambrano has spoken of encountering during her trip to hell a girl who'd died at 15 years old and who implored her to warn others about its horrors.)

[eaglesway]

The problem is when people start setting their own ideas of what is right and wrong....what God hates, tolerates, approves....over the Word of God. God judges by the secrets of mens hearts(Romans 2, Hebrews 4) not by whether they dance, they drink, they smoke, they celebrate or day or another day, etc. :2c:

[Warhawk17]

The problem is when people start setting their own ideas of what is right and wrong....what God hates, tolerates, approves....over the Word of God. God judges by the secrets of mens hearts(Romans 2, Hebrews 4) not by whether they dance, they drink, they smoke, they celebrate or day or another day, etc. :2c:

There are 7 things that God hates. Proverbs 6:16-19

16 There are six things the Lord hates,
seven that are detestable to him:
17 haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
18 a heart that devises wicked schemes,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
19 a false witness who pours out lies
and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.

When people say that God hates something, and it doesn't involve these 7 things here, I think their claims need to be scrutinized a little bit. Though I'm sure some fundies would say that "feet that are quick to rush to evil" means dancing.  :laugh:

[eaglesway]

evil dancing feet   :banana:   LOLOL

[micah7:9]

Shades of "23 Minutes in Hell" Weise :sigh:!