Without Jesus Christ life is ultimately futile.

Responses: >> "How exactly does self propagation give your life meaning?" Knowing that one has succeeded in passing along pieces of oneself in others is a meaning of the highest sort. It's not only metaphorical evidence, but PHYSICAL evidence that you existed and actually DID something with your life. Completely independent of Christ. >> "Does your own life somehow 'transmit back' meaning to your great, great, great , great, great Grandfather?" In some ways, yes - I have traits in common with all my ancestors, and all my progeny will have traits in common with me. It's not that meaning is "transmitted" back - it's that my great (x5) Grandfather found meaning in creating offspring. >> "Your uniqueness is actually lost the more descendants you have." That may be, but it is never lost entirely. Furthermore, the fact still remains that procreation gives meaning. >> "As for serving/benefiting others etc, is not any endeavor ultimately meaningless if everybody you help and all their descendants (and everybody they ever help and so on) eventually die?" No, because life is what matters - not death. It is silly to say that you have meaning to yourself or others like you after death. Meaning to who? Do you talk to dead people? You can still have plenty of meaning to those who are alive. >> "As I will show, acceptance of Jesus Christ IS ETERNAL LIFE and so cannot be separated from giving the above activities (pro-creation, charitable works etc) real, eternal meaning." This is laughable. Animals procreate all the time. Do all animals believe in Christ? >> "A simple explanation of what heaven actually is, is all that is required to explain your understandable error." Considering you have no proof for the existence of heaven, and I have abundant proof for the existence of Earth, your entire argument on this point is moot. >> "The problem, Tarzan, is that we cannot send you straight to heaven.. Because God is utterly Holy, and cannot by His very nature have sin in His presence." God can't send me straight to heaven and wash away my sins all in one fell swoop? Some God... I thought he was supposedly omnipotent? Furthermore, the Bible holds that God knows our nature and our being before we are born - thus, we as persons exist before we are born, and God could send the un-born, non-sinful us straight to heaven. This is a pretty simple notion. >> "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. ROMANS 3:23" Rom 5:14 - "Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned." 1 John 3:9 - "Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. " >> "We are all naked before God, He sees directly into our hearts, all the petty vengeful rivalries that dominate our inner lives. The solution to this nakedness is simply to 'clothe' ourselves in righteousness." So in other words, cover up our sins with good deeds - you make no mention of repentance. >> "There is only One who is righteous before the Father, His Son." 1 Pet 2:8 - "For that righteous man [Lot] dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;" ************************************************ After these painfully immaterial, but still somewhat humorous assertions, my very befuddled opponent finally outlines his argument: 1) If life without promise of heaven is futile; AND 2) We cannot enter heaven without being clothed in righteousness; AND 3) If there is only one who is righteous ---------------------------- :. Life without Christ is futile. This argument has some obvious logical flaws. For one, the first and third premises are If-Then statements. Second, all three conditions are tied by an AND. Thus, negating any one of the conditions causes the entire argument to fall apart. I have already shown that God considered Lot to be a "righteous" man (Or at least the Holy Spirit did when it guided Peter in writing am epistle). Also, Jesus is very explicit about what one must do to have eternal life: "but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments" and "go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me" (Matthew 19). This obviously says nothing about being "clothed in righteousness." Furthermore, the analysis of futility is a subjective consideration. One's life may not be futile to oneself, though it may seem futile to others. Datcmoto obviously considers life without Christ to be futile. However, by the same token, I am free to consider life without Christ to be NON-futile. Since I am a better authority on my life than Datcmoto is, my consideration obviously takes precedence. I would next like to point out that my opponent has done nothing to actually refute the positions I put forth in the first round. He offered a very weak argument for why God can't simply send people straight to heaven, but this argument utterly fails unless God is not omnipotent. On my first point, my opponent has not addressed in any substantial way the notions of a successful organism in passing on one's genes, or the effectiveness of my life at affecting the lives of others. All of these considerations are completely independent of Christ. NEGATED.