Page 51 - Liberating Liberals V2

Liberating Liberals
Sorry for that conclusion. But we’re stretching our freethinking to as many possibilities as we can imagine regardless of their pain.
Another way to be optimistic about our direction is due to scientists discovering the background radiation left over from the Big Bang as a way to explain how the universe was created. In a world where we assume no God or other supernatural forces, one might still conclude that there’s some meaning that’s associated with the Big Bang’s background radiation. Perhaps each photon of it has a type of energy DNA that contains the blueprint
for the Golden Rule or the moral arc of the universe — or some other guides that we can follow. The silliness of this concept trivializes the wondrous feelings of natural and supernatural support that sometimes manifest in people’s lives. But we want to be as rigorous as we can in examining the basis of our optimisms or pessimisms.
A downside of such optimistic reasoning is: If there are positive supernatural forces, then there can be negative supernatural forces — and Hell is one of these. Yet, a Pew Pole quoted in a 2009 USA Today stated that only 59% of Americans now believe in a literal Hell. Pope John Paul II even described Hell as merely “the state of those who freely and definitely separate themselves from God, the source of all
life and joy.”40 And some Pentecostals are livid that Billy Graham once publicly stated: “The only thing I
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