Samsara would suit a just, loving god's purposes better than Heaven and Hell.

Imagine an infinite sheet of paper with an infinite line on it, eternal in both directions, without beginning, or end. Now if you could start at any point on this paper, and begin to draw a separate line, how long would it take to make your line as long as the first one? Even if you had forever, you still couldn"t make your line infinitely long. Why? Because your line had a beginning, and no matter how long you make it, it will always have a cut off point. This illustrates the difference between the Creator God, and the created. We will never catch up to God because he is infinitely ahead of us in all his attributes. So I do hope that Pro isn"t suggesting when he says "become divine," that God"s purpose should have been for us to eventually become gods ourselves, just like him, because in that case Pro is saying that God should have attempted to do the impossible! Pro"s model involves God splitting his consciousness up into pieces, and put these pieces of himself into the first human bodies, giving himself amnesia (each person forgets he is divine), with the hope that each one will one day realize he is God, and when he does, far from achieving God"s purpose for man, he loses his individual personhood, and God is back to square one with no separate person to have fellowship with him. I believe God created man to worship him, and have a loving relationship with him. You say that God made man to experience his glory, I disagree; but even if that should have been God"s reason for making man, samsara obliterates any chance of man as the individual he is experiencing that glory, because when he comes to the realization that he was divine all along and his individuality was just an illusion, and he loses his personal existence. The personality that once existed dies, he goes out of existence. So all you are seeking by all these rebirths is your death. But in heaven, in the Christian view, God will have many people with him, forever experiencing his love, and showering him with their love, freely. How could being loved by people who freely choose to have fellowship with you be "meaningless?" If love, in this perfection that exists in heaven, is meaningless, how much more meaningless would our love be in this fallen, sinful world! So Pro is incorrect when he calls the bliss of heaven meaningless. Losing one"s existence is what I would call a very meaningless end to a long cycle of rebirths in Pro"s twisted version of nirvana. With reincarnation, people can"t even remember their former lives as cats or dogs so that they can learn from their mistakes. Without being able to remember the past, they may forever be in this state of reincarnation, always repeating the same mistakes, so Pro"s model mere tries to replace hell with countless rebirths that could literally go on forever. This would only give someone who is evil more opportunity to cause harm in their next life. Maybe they will be reborn as a dog and bite someone innocent. But with hell, the truly wicked are locked away for good where they can cause no more harm, forever. They only get to cause suffering to the innocent in one life time, but in Pro"s model Hitler would get to cause suffering in many lifetimes. At this point I can"t resist asking the question: when someone is reborn as a cat, what exactly do they do to redeem themselves to gain a better rebirth? Do they stop chasing rats? And what does a spider do? Does it stop spinning webs in my house? On Pro"s model, God "never would have personally condemned anybody," so Pro prefers for a God, infinite in holiness and goodness, not to condemn sin? So when God sees what Hitler did to the Jews, he should not punish this man? What kind of parent does not discipline his children? On Pro"s model Jesus would not need to die, but first of all, on the Christian model he didn"t have to die either. God did not owe us salvation. He freely choose to save us, and Christ freely choose to suffer and die for our sakes. Secondly, one your model, the same person who dies today will have to die millions of times over and over again as he goes through the endless cycle of rebirths. I can"t fathom that Pro would argue that God, as he is now, should have done things contrary to his own character; so Pro must be arguing that his idea of what God should be like is better than what Christianity teaches he is like. But interestingly, Pro is a Buddhist, and Buddhist don"t believe in a personal God! Pro proposes a model that makes no sense whatsoever. He says the more like God you are, the more bliss-filled your life becomes. So in a world where men have free will, what is to prevent someone from persecuting those who are like God? Will their free will be taken away? Or will the righteous only get this bliss in the next life? If so, how do you know they will be any better off in the next life when the baby born without memory of his past bliss-filled life is starting from scratch all over again? But if you are reborn as an ant, God didn"t make you that way, samsara did it, and who created samsara and programmed it to make people like you into ants in the next life? God! So Pro is saying he prefers a model where God contradicts himself. Pro says that "as soon as he grows weary of this separation he will seek God's law," but how can he grow weary of lives he can"t remember? If the purpose of these rebirths is to get a chance to do better, without knowing what past acts one is being punished for, how can one repent and improve? Or will you now try to amend what the Buddhists actually teach to make your model better? All people have to do to be saved is to repent, and give their hearts to Jesus as their Savior. They won"t live up perfectly to all that he requires all the time, but God gives them the strength they need to live a live that honors him. All we need is the desire to do what is right, and God gives us the strength to do it. And in heaven, having perfect bodies that are free of sinful lusts, it will be easier to do what is right throughout eternity; so yes, heaven accomplishes more than what samsara does. Pro prefers God to have created us "so that Love could become known by someone who was previously ignorant," but on his model, God himself has to become the one who is ignorant by inhabiting these bodies and giving himself amnesia. God himself would be the one, on Pro"s model, who enslaves the blacks, killed Jews in the holocaust, raped women, told lies, and invented the doctrine of hell, all because of his own self inflicted ignorance when he divided his consciousness into subjective parts. If God himself were the author of all this, how then does Pro have a problem with hell? In Buddhist terms, the basic idea of salvation is liberation from the laws of Karma and samsara, as well as the attaining of Nirvana. What is Nirvana? The word itself is said to mean "blowing out, extinguishing." Thus, some define Nirvana as cessation of all passion and desire; an existence free from all sensory feelings, such as pain, fear, want, love, or hate; a state of eternal peace, rest, and changelessness. Essentially, it is said to be the cessation of individual existence. The Buddha taught that enlightenment and salvation"the perfection of Nirvana"come, not from any God or external force, but from within a person by his own effort in good deeds and right thoughts. This raises the question: Can something perfect come out of something imperfect? If no one is able to have total control of his actions even in simple day-to-day matters, is it logical to think that anyone can work out his eternal salvation all by himself? Just as a man mired in quicksand is not likely to free himself from it on his own, likewise all mankind is entrapped in sin and death, and no one is capable of extricating himself from this entanglement. (Romans 5:12) This is why God has to come down to save us, but on Pro"s model we have to save ourselves. No, the Christian model beats samsara any day.