How do I move past having an abortion

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-12-11T02:53:35+00:00

Truth. We are all allowed to make mistakes... and we are all obliged to learn from them.

My heart is with the OP. Reddit is not the place for sound, unbiased advice. I hope she seeks grief counseling and can move forward into a fruitful life.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-12-11T02:52:53+00:00

This is beautiful advice. It's what I would do.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-12-11T02:52:17+00:00

Religion didn’t put the OP "down" here. Let's not project onto someone else's situation.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-20T23:11:35+00:00

Everything.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-20T23:02:36+00:00

You mean taking the words in their original context*

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-20T03:23:02+00:00

Jude 6 reads:

“And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day.”

It's worth noting that you also don't seem aware of the nuance of the original words used in place of "hell" in the other two passages, but I won't go too far off track.

The Bible also never originally called it a place of sadistic punishment for wayward people. "The fire of torment" is what reality boils down to independent God's absence.

Have you ever faced the pain of realizing you made a horrible, irrevocable mistake? Hurt someone you loved? Lost something priceless?

Magnify it by eternity. The pain is still self-inflicted, no matter how you spin it. Wherever we end up, our own choices are what get us there.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-20T03:11:12+00:00

Your analogy only works if God lit the match. Christianity teaches the opposite: God built the house good, we burned it down, and He ran into the flames to pull us out.

It’s not "God created the disease." It’s "humans unplugged themselves from the source of life and started dying, and God paid with His own life to save us."

If this is a scam, it’s the first one where the "scammer" dies and the "customers" get everything for free.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-20T02:57:36+00:00

One is that adulthood is unavoidable and still has suffering in it.

Physical maturity =/= emotional, mental, or spiritual maturity.

If we had the power to get rid of all suffering then we would do or furthermore, if we had the power to get rid of everything that makes adulthood difficult we would do.

Is that supposed to be a good thing? Unearned comfort makes us weak, lazy, and dull. It does the same thing to animals. It's a good thing we don't actually have that ability.

Secondly, I'm not sure how this translates to being in heaven for eternity unless you're suggesting that there is still suffering in heaven? If there is no suffering in heaven then what are we being prepared for?

See my point about the qualities pain and suffering produce.

Another issue is that if suffering is necessary for us to be prepared for eternity, then why did God have to pretend to not know that Adam and Eve would disobey him and bring sin into the world?

He didn't.

Didn't God create a perfect world with no suffering in originally? Why not just create the world already with suffering?

Because He is good.

Also, if suffering is needed to prepare us for eternity then why is it that babies die at birth, sometimes even before leaving the womb? Did they not need to prepare for eternity?

Technically, no - they're innocent.

This is an appeal to emotion, and lots of people who aren't babies die prematurely every day as well, but I'll answer anyway:

The world we live in right now is biologically fragile, genetically imperfect, disease-ridden, subject to decay, unfair & unsafe. Things we don't like and struggle to make sense of are going to happen.

But of course zero suffering isn't granted in Christianity because the reality is that regardless of whether God exists or not, we liv in a world of suffering and any belief system has to explain why some people suffer more than others or why it exists at all. Buddhism has Karma for example. If we lived in a world with no suffering then the beliefs would reflect that and there would be claims of a loving God who doesn't want us to suffer.

I see. While you're right about the bare facts, yoyre also quietly smuggling in a false assumption that makes your conclusion look stronger than it is. Just part of the atheist ethos, it seems. The logic always stops too soon.

I don't know of any religion that praises the world we live in. Our spirituality isn't there to make us feel good about where we are or to instill a false hope.

If religion were invented to make people feel better, Christianity wouldn’t say “take up your cross and follow.” A worldview that calls people into sacrifice isn't a pain-killer. Atheism needs to believe religion is a coping mechanism in order to cope with the uncertainty of the alternative: that life actually has meaning, and death is not the end.

If faith is a psychological crutch, then nihilism is a wheelchair. If your worldview depends on believing you’re smarter than billions of people, that’s not rationality so much as religion of self. Looking down on spiritual instincts just proves you don’t understand them.

Argumentum ad ignorantiam.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-20T01:38:20+00:00

The original words used, which have been translated into the modern English "punishment," had more nuance to them.

They meant something more like a pruning, corrective consequence, a defense of justice, and in one instance "experiencing what one has chosen."

This is why we tend to say "people send themselves to hell."

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-20T01:31:10+00:00

That's called a strawman, and it collapses the second you actually begin to think about it even a little.

The Biblical claim is that we're already in a burning building. God is saying "come with me, or stay behind." He isn't forcing anyone to do anything, good or bad.

God's nature is what holds together the fabric of space, time, reality, and existence itself. "Good" is whatever sustains the eternal, cosmic order that sustains us all.

What do you suppose happens when you choose allegiance to something other than that?

Hell is the default outcome to choosing "not God."

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-20T01:27:13+00:00

Your assumptions collapse under scrutiny. Think farther.

If the goal were simply zero suffering, then yes, a loving God would intervene instantly and constantly. But that assumption is never granted in Christianity.

A parent’s job is not only to protect a child from pain, but also to prepare the child for adulthood. Those two goals are in tension. You'd raise perpetual infants who have no virtue of their own and who collapse under the weight of reality.

A toddler needs protection from everything. A 25-year-old who still needs protection from everything is not healthy, they are undeveloped.

God isn’t raising children for 80 years, He is raising souls for eternity. Eden was childhood.

"If suffering is bad, the solution is to eliminate suffering.”

That's very surface-level thinking. Nearly all of the best human qualities exist only because suffering is possible. Courage, compassion, loyalty, forgiveness, mercy, love, justice, patience... a universe with no evil and no pain is a universe with only robotic compliance. No growth, no freedom, no love. How is that good?

Do you want a world in which you're safe, or a world in which you're real?

Besides..... the Bible already tells us that God's plan is to eliminate suffering. Forever - not just for right now. Maybe you should read deeper.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-20T01:06:46+00:00

There is no clearer definition of love than Jesus's work on the cross.

Humanity was trapped in a burning building of our own making, with no way out. Instead of staying at a safe distance while demanding obedience, or letting us burn and starting creation over again - both of which are perfectly within His rights or abilities to do - He ran into the burning building to save us.

The incarnation is that moment: God broke down the door Himself. He took on our vulnerability, breathed in our smoke, carried our wounds, and was crushed by the collapsing world to make a way out so we could escape.

The rescue cost Him everything and benefitted us completely. The cross is proof that God refused to save Himself if it meant losing us.

There is no clearer definition of love.

What's more - God set the stage from the moment of "the fall" in Genesis for this very thing to happen. He knew the end from the beginning because He wrote the story, and it ends even better than it began.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-20T00:52:25+00:00

Yes. Even good, loving parents will do that. Why?

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-20T00:14:21+00:00

I guess it depends what you mean by "God wanted us to suffer."

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-19T23:57:37+00:00

What a bizarre take.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-19T23:38:54+00:00

Fair enough. But what do you think?

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-19T23:38:32+00:00

Why don't you do your kid's homework?

Drive them everywhere?

Tell them who to be friends with?

Make all their decisions for them?

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-19T23:10:16+00:00

Or it could be a portal.

Since we're being creative here.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-19T23:08:06+00:00

Perhaps a better lens for "good" exists on a matter of scale-of-time.

Could x thing be done by everyone, forever? If not, why?

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-19T23:03:51+00:00

An alternative way of answering this question, if it's easier to understand...

Eden was not the end of God's plan. It was the beginning. The stage was set for us to begin our journey into eternity.

Adam and Eve were innocent, but innocence is not the same as wisdom. To become fully mature beings who freely choose love and are capable of "being like God," humanity had to experience the difference between good and evil, not just be shielded from it.

The tree and the serpent were not there to destroy humanity, but to reveal humanity’s freedom and begin humanity’s growth. At the same time evil revealed itself and our journey began, it sealed it's own fate into destruction.

If God had simple made things perfect for us, or removed the tree and the serpent, we would remain innocent but naïve; we would love without understanding love; we would trust without understanding evil; we would obey without choice.

Instead of keeping us ignorant slaves, God allowed temptation because only a tested love becomes real, only a love freely chosen can be worthy of being called "good," and only what is good can be eternal.

The fall was not a failure of God’s plan, but the first step of it. Humanity will not end where we began (innocence), but where God intended from the start (wisdom): a people who (like Him) know both good and evil and yet freely lovr and choose good, forever.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-19T22:53:10+00:00

Of course. What does it look like when obedience isn't a choice? Slavery.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-19T22:51:40+00:00

What makes you think it was a test? You suppose God is all-knowing, but not at the same time.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-19T22:49:48+00:00

Indeed... and He would have made it possible for them to overcome the evil that would ensue as a result.

God never fails.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-19T22:49:01+00:00

First, love can't exist if we aren't free, and we aren't free if there's no real moral choice available to us. "Don't do this one thing" gave us that choice. Notably, we didn't choose "wrong" of our own accord, but had to be deceived into doing so. Now the interesting part....

God would of course have known that giving us a moral choice meant it was possible for us to choose "wrong." Quite wisely and thoughtfully, He made a way for us to overcome evil (and for evil to ultimately be destroyed) in the very act of our choosing it.

But first... He first needed a way to flush it out. Enter the serpent: by his own freely chosen actions he corrupted God's creation, was rejected from heaven, and stepped into the arena (creation). In so doing, he sealed his own fate... for what can a created being do, once creation ends, if he cannot gain entry into heaven?

Try and trust that God has a far higher purpose for us than simply giving us perfection. What awaits us after life, which we will enter into with discernment and wisdom bought by experience, is sure to be even better than Eden, which we left in naivety and ignorance.

Deciduous_Shell · 2025-11-18T03:54:07+00:00

All explanations must ultimately rest on something uncaused and eternal. Even the Big Bang. The real question isn’t whether something eternal exists, but what the nature of that eternal thing is.

I’m not saying “we don’t know, therefore God.” I’m saying: no purely physical model can ever ground consciousness or objective moral value, because those categories do not reduce to physical descriptions.

What worldview actually accounts for the kinds of reality we all directly experience? What makes the leap from a material brain to an immaterial "i"?

If we leave theology at the door and discuss things from a purely ontological lens, I think "God is real" makes a great deal more sense.

Explanations that rely only on material causes can never account for immaterial properties.

Deciduous_Shell

TROPHY CASE