to all atheists, page-275

Hey Bevter,

Without going in to it too much - while I'm sure Petersen's translation is all well and good, the King James mob did a fairly thorough (though subjective) job too. And herein lies the problem. There can be no definitive claim as to a correct interpretation. The first question you might like to ask is - what exactly was he translating? As Dub correctly points out, the oldest codices were copies of copies and, from what we can judge of their remains, contained numerous contradictions between each other (due to their disapora - different geographical locations forming different oral and written traditions of the original scriptures. Constantine tried to rectify this of course, but even by then the traditions between the copic desert dwellers and the oriental Xians, for example, were quite different). There are also semantic and technical issues in translating any individual one of those texts. While many a lay preacher with a Strong's concordance and an Interlinear will have a go at 'translating' the Hebrew and Greek, it just ain't that simple. Did you know that in some traditions the Torah was written with no vowels or spacing, so that the Rabbi's reading of it was consciously an individual interpretation? At least it's honest.

And as for the hell/grave interpretation of 'sheol' or 'hades' - you can't apply 'grave' consistently to either without getting odd results. Read Luke 16 - the rich man going to hell. Odd if in 'the grave' he's begging for water, being continuously tortured, etc etc etc.

For me, translating 'hell' as 'grave' is a sop to the conscience and makes the xian God a little less horrific, but it's fundamentally dishonest. This is one thing that turned me off Christianity. There's no escaping the notion of hell. Ok, ok let's say for peace's sake that 'hell' is 'the grave' - if you're a baddie, you get one glimpse of what could have been on the day of judgment and then everlasting nothingness.

Even given that gentlest of scenarios - could you, as a reasonable person, sentence another human being (let's say a kind, honest, good mother) to eternal nothingness for simply failing to 'believe' in you - despite the fact that you deliberately hid yourself from view and essentially made it a complicated proposition to 'believe'? (And a more literal scenario would be a God who happily tortures dead eight-year-olds for all eternity because they happen to be raised Buddhist).

I pondered this for a while and came to the conclusion that I personally could not do this.

This led me to the realisation that sending anyone to 'hell' or 'the grave' not for wrongdoing, but for a simple lack of belief (which after all is the difference between the saved and unsaved in Xian mythology) was a morally reprehensible act.

Which led me to realise I couldn't have faith in a God whose sense of morality was worse than my own.

If your punishing, vengeful God does exist, I for one am happy not to be one of his followers. I'll go to the grave as a matter of moral conscience. Consider my soul a protest vote.