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What do people here think about this so-called "Judgment Day"?
When I was little, my very religious baptist grandmother would tell me about heaven and hell. She told me that if I didn't get "saved", when "Judgment Day" came, I was going to be sent to hell to burn for eternity. Of course she always said that we don't know when judgment day will come. She said it could come tomorrow or many years from now. I wondered about this as a I got older and realized that many who believed were preparing for some "Judgment Day." She lost me when I asked her what would happen if I died at 8 years old before getting "saved", would God send me to hell then? She said "yes", and that's when I realized that I didn't believe in a God who would treat kids like that. I have my own concept of this "Judgment Day" though.
For me, this "Judgment Day" is when you consciously realize that your time is near. You could be laying in the hospital bed for instance and somehow know that you will not last through the night or until the next day. It is during this time that you reflect on your life and all that has past in it. The judgment comes as you confront the decisions you made, the missed opportunities, the wrong turns, the right decisions, your accomplishments, whether you have given to those you love, and so forth. It is a time where you are brutally honest with yourself about your own self-worth and to this you pass judgment. If you are happy with your decisions and where you are because of them, then you will judge yourself positively, and die a fulfilled person. If you are not happy about the decisions you made in life, then you will judge yourself negatively, and die unfulfilled. This to me is "Judgment Day."
Ah yes, Judgment Day. The day in which you will meet your maker, kneel down to him with great sorrow in your heart for never believing in him, beg for forgiveness for scorning him from your heart. But, alas, it will be too late and he is going to throw you into the pits of hell to burn in righteous fire for all of eternity. Judgment Day, the Day when for the rest of eternity your spiritual salvation is cast aside with wreckless abandon all because this God loves you so much.
Imagine this:
Imagine living your whole life in fear of what may happen on Judgment Day. You don't want to doubt the possibility of this happening and you refuse to think otherwise about it. To you, the fear alone of eternal damnation is enough to keep you from attempting to do the mental "push the red button". Yet, you cannot resist for you are human after all. You peer perilously close to the edge and you examine that which is God and you realize that you don't believe in it. However, the fear, the danger that lurks from this is so overwhelming that you must ignore it. You must perform good acts, proclaim your faith, and act in accordance with that which is now going to banish you to an eternal life in hell for even THINKING that he is not real. Imagine... Imagine on Judgment Day floating up to a cloud in heaven, having St. Peter look you square in your soulful eyes and exclaim to you. "For all the good work you have done, for all the things you did, you doubted God on March 17, 2001 and you really felt as if he did not exist. Therefore I now sentence you to an eternity in hell. Now, get off my front porch."
Judgment Day. I sit back and think about it. What a primitively ridiculous way to scare people into faith. Telling an eight year old child that he is going to burn in the pits of hell if he does not give his life to Jesus? I'm sorry, I don't see how that is NOT child abuse. At eight years old I had enough to worry about. There was a Bogeyman in my closet, a monster under my bed, a creepy shadow outside my bedroom window and now I have to worry about if one of them decides to come out and eat me in my sleep, there is a possibility that I'm then going to be banished to hell for eternity.
No, Judgment Day seems to be something somehow brought up through tradition and folklore to scare children into believing. The idea of God is so perilously and dangerously irrational at times that even eight year olds see the failing logic in it. However, it's very easy to scare an eight year old into believing. Just tell him he's going to be tortured for eternity if he doesn't believe and that'll shape him up.
I personally think that judgment day is any day of your life where you have to face the consequences of your own actions and decisions. It is ongoing and repeats at various times. It happens at different times and in different ways for each person. And it happens whether you believe in it or not - religious or not.
As far as the Xian concept, which has quite a lot of variability to it, depending on the theology, it is a form of reincarnation. You die, then at some point, you are resurrected and the god passes judgment on you. It is somewhat similar to the Hindu concept of karma, except the mechanism is ongoing and all the time in the Hindu concept.
The whole xian judgment day concept to me is one of the big negatives in that religion. It pushes a very negative and unhealthy focus on death. It devalues life and exalts death. It has been used thru the ages to get people to accept the most atrocious abuse in return for the hope that after you are DEAD, you get treated fairly. Yuck.
Yeah, I agree - enjoy your life while you have it. Make it good while you have it.
I guess everyday is judgement day for me when I look back at all of the screwups and missed opportunities I've tallied up over a lifetime. The religious description of judgement day is of course laughable on the face of it but I can understand the OP and I think Alexus described his or her own personal feelings about what it means and that's very similar to my opinion.
As someone who believes in a Creator, I have a slightly different take on this subject. I used to believe in hell, (or, at least, I tried to, and I thought I really did), and it used to scare me, tremendously! When I finally gave up this "belief" in hell, a few years ago, (after much researching, reading, thinking, and the sudden startling revelation that I'd never actually believed it anyway), it still didn't keep me from believing that there is a reckoning of some sort. I think we do have to stand in front of our Creator and explain our actions, and perhaps there may even be some sort of temporary punishment, (our parents punished us for wrongdoing, so I don't think this would be entirely unreasonable). However, I don't believe in any kind of eternal hell/punishment. I think that it is a church teaching, brought on by mistranslations/misinterpretations, (by the well-meaning folks), a lust for power, and a greed for riches, (that would be the "other" folks), and heightened by such things as Dante's Inferno, and Medieval paintings.
I suppose that ultimately, (regardless of whether of not actual punishment is involved), I believe that someday our Creator will bring everything, and everyone back into balance, and I believe strongly in balance. Of course, this is all based on a belief in an existence after death, which I know y'all don't believe. But, these are just my thoughts.
Judgment day: I don’t accept the religious view of one day to review all your deeds, or misdeeds. I do see life as a series of days in which I try to make judgments and ask questions which will improve life. I set a goal to make the path I have chosen flow smoothly with my family, friends, and working partners.
I take great joy in stepping into a new theory filled with new questions. I love getting out of the box and viewing a new path for life. That, in my world, is me making adjustments to my judgment and hopefully making a smooth and improved passage from day to day.
The ability to view situations and make the changes is not easy, but I think would be a good self evaluation for all humans to have their own self Judgment Days.
I recognize some changes are not the best choice, and I have on many occasions made a change and after reviewing the change gone back and readjusted the change to make it better. These errors have always been good, as I learned from them, and my next adjustment has always seemed to improve my ability to grow and help others.
I do not worry about a final judgment day, I have taken the corrective steps to improve my life day by day, and as I see it that is more important than fretting about what you did or did not do in life. I actually feel sorry for people who are waiting for a single judgment day. They have limited their growth and lost much of the potential nature gave them.
The sad part of this is that there are many fundamentalist Christians that cannot wait for what they call the rapture ( whatever that is ) then the end when god kills everybody except those that have escaped in the rapture...
I'm not certain I understand this rapture thing and how it is all supposed to work though. Some nonsense about Christ coming down from heaven and transporting all " true Christians" to meet up with god where they will be given immortal bodies and live in the clouds with all their fundie buddies while everybody else burns in hell...They actually believe and are looking forward to this nonsense.
I read it as meaning all the fundies get raptured up to sit on the right hand of god to mean they are the ones who get killed since sitting on the right hand of god is symbolizing dying. The rest of it is a bunch of natural disasters - earthquakes, fires, floods, plagues, etc. that happens periodically anyway, so the rest of us get to stay on earth and live out our days without those fundies. So I choose life!
I also have a different view of judgement day than the traditional christian view is because I don't take the whole bible as literal as is the traditional christian belief either...I believe each and every day should be lived as though it were the day of judgement..That is to be the best you can be..I think you more or less seal what ever fate awaits you in the afterlife in this life..A christian believes that Christ died for his sins..Therefore if the christian follows all the teachings of christ and dies, why would he have to be judged, if his sins have already been forgiven on the cross..A Christian who asks forgiveness each day for those sins of the day is (in his own belief) forgiven
Discourse 68 What jesus meant by "Everlasting Punishment"
"Even aeons of ignorance and wrong actions could not change the eternal soul's intrinsic divine nature...Since the soul is an emanation of God's own Being, it is manifestly impossible for man's true Self to be degraded into an evil entity meriting everlasting damnation."
"When the Son of man (this incarnation called Jesus) shall be glorified in heaven by mergence in Cosmic Consciousness with all the holy angelic liberated souls, my everlasting Christ Conciousness shall be enthroned in the glory of Omnipresence, at one with the infinite Christ Intelligence that is the witness and supreme judge of all persons of all nations. When souls leave the earth at death, they are arraigned before that Infinite Intelligence, which will ordain through cosmic law that those who have humbly followed the ways of virtue, the "sheep" be kept in the fold of righteousness in heaven's bliss; and that all the scapegoats who bear the sins of many incarnations, evildoers, be consigned to lower regions of the astral world, thence to reincarnate on earth to continue working out the effects of their wrong actions.
These verses are commonly interpreted as the describing the "last judgment" purportedly to be pronounced upon the masses at the time of the "second coming" of Jesus predicted by church belief. As earlier explained (Discourse 34) the "Day of Judgment" is not a cosmic event decreed by God tyo occur at some specific future time. Rather, it takes place for all individuals after each one's death when they arise in the astral world. The Christ Consciousness discerns their accumulated good and evil karma, and the cosmic law of of cause and effect emanating from that Universal Intelligence sorts them according to the next-life destination earned by their meritorious or reprehensible deeds. Eminently virtous ones are elevated to higher celestial realms, or are liberated by being lifted into Cosmic Conciousness; the others, because of their material desires and lingering imperfections created by past wrong actions, are reborn into varously good or bad families and environments on earth, a places of perpetual deliusion of insatiable desires and continuous punishment from the effects of proliferating evil karma-- a torture of constantly burning fires of misery.
Jesus has said before in similar words but with a different emphasis: "For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with His angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works. On a personal spiritual level Jesus was citing the experience of the advanced devotee in meditation whose soul is uplifted to God-perception. That devotee relizes God's infinite Christ-Kutastha Intelligence with its judgement of the cosmic law of cause and effecte reflected right within his own Son-of-man soul consciousness. From the devotee's divine "works" of persistence in devout meditation, he receives the reward of his spiritual endeavors when the glory of the Cosmic Consciousness of the Father with its angelic joys and wisdom are revealed to the Son of Man, the soul consciousness dwelling within his body.
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), and heightened by such things as Dante's Inferno, and Medieval paintings.
But, these are just my thoughts.
