Rational Dreaming
Simple question.
And there’s a simple answer if, like me, you don’t believe Hell exists.
But for “Bible-believing” Christians the answer isn’t so simple, if Todd Friel of Wretched Radio is any guide.
How can that be? After all, it’s well known that Steve Jobs was a Buddhist, not a Christian, and according to the fundamentalists who believe in an inerrant Bible, there is no leeway for non-believers, no matter how great a positive impact they have had on the world. Steve Jobs has got to be in Hell, right?
But, according to Todd Friel, on Tuesday’s edition of Wretched Radio, the correct answer is “We don’t know.”
Hmm. His argument seems solid enough:
“What we do know is that if you have Jesus in your heart, you will go to Heaven. If you don’t have Jesus, then you won’t. We don’t know what was in Steve Jobs’ heart [the moment he passed away].”
Agreed, but I think you would also agree that the odds of Steve Jobs having a death-bed conversion after being a Buddhist almost all his adult life, are pretty slim. If the Christian fundamentalist concept of Hell is true, then Steve Jobs is almost certainly just getting settled in for an eternity of unbearable torment and pain in the Lake of Fire–agonies that will have him yearning for the days when all he was suffering from was terminal pancreatic cancer.
The funny thing is, these same Christians are far less reticent when it comes to the eternal fate of certain other people when they die–like, say, Josef Stalin, Timothy McVeigh, or even Senator Ted Kennedy (a favorite target of hate amongst the religious right). It doesn’t even cross their mind that these people might have, in their very last moments, been “born-again.” Evil people deserve to go to Hell, so it’s okay to talk about them being there. Indeed it’s only right that they should be sent there after all the terrible things they did.
But according to their fundamentalist belief system, every other unsaved person deserves to be there too, right next to the worst evildoers in history–including Steve Jobs, Mahatma Gandhi, that tireless Mormon charity worker who lived down the street, and that nice fifteen-year old daughter of an atheist neighbor who was always willing to lend a hand, and so on. Even the kindest, most generous people in history are screaming in agony right next to mass murderers and brutal rapists if they happened not to have heard about Jesus.
But Bible-believing Christians can’t go about telling everyone that–not unless they are trying to lead a bitter and lonely life with no friends–so if the question of a recently deceased, non-evil person’s eternal fate crops up, the weasel words come out: “We don’t know what was in their heart.”
I also suspect it’s a way to avoid thinking too hard about it themselves–to duck the full ramifications of just how cruel and nasty their doctrine of Hell really is.
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8 Responses to Is Steve Jobs In Hell?
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I’ve been a Bible loving Christian for like “forever” and I have a very different take on this subject, visit my blog and see a loving Christian response. http://www.rachelscottsblog.wordpress.com. None of us really know for sure where Steve is, but I offer good wisdom for those who want to throw stones. Personally his death allowed me the opportunity to thank God for his life and to be thankful for the inventions Steve brought the world.Steve’s life provided the opportunity to use his inventions to spread the love of God and the gospel around the world. The Christian community owes a lot to this man. We need to celebrate his life and let God worry about his eternal destiny!
Hi Rachel — just visited your blog, but all I see is an empty WordPress site, did something go wrong?
Without seeing what you wrote, I can’t really comment further on your comment, except that absent any further explanation, your response does sound exactly like the type of equivocation I was talking about. If you believe that only saved, Bible-believing Christians go to Heaven, then it’s almost certain (barring a last second change of heart) that Jobs, as a lifelong Buddhist, isn’t there.
Yes, there is a difference between “certain” and “almost certain”, but 99.9% of the time (at least) the outcome is the same. Perhaps Jobs was the one in a million of non-Christians who was (a) lucid enough at the end (b) frightened enough and (c) not indoctrinated in his own religious belief enough to be in a position to change his mind, but the odds would seem to be against it.
if steve jobs is in hell its because he stole from the great Woz or his employees often taking their innovations as his own because he treated them as work for hire (if you invent on my watch then its mine.
He had cancer and knew he could not get rid of it. All those years of drug abuse and eating the wrong foods damaged his pancreas and caused cancer as well as diabetes.
Steve Jobs is dead, some morn and many rejoice as Steve Jobs was a greedy d**bag. Steve Jobs worked his employees like slaves, screwed them out of benefits, took credit for their work. Steve Jobs back-stabbed his business partners, forced employees or contractors to suicide like workers at Foxconn’s plant that lost iPhone prototypes. Steve Jobs abandoned his daughter and her mother and forced them on welfare while he became a billionaire. Later on after her hardships Jobs put his daughter Lisa Brennan Jobs through Harvard.
Steve Jobs stole ideas from others. Before founding Apple he stole the idea of a computer kit from Altair and he and his buddy Steve Wozniak built the Apple I computer and sold it.
Their marketing slogan was “We’re not IBM!” and people flocked to the Apple computer for only $666 in cost. After a deal with Chase bank to give Apple a loan and investors and before you knew it the Apple II came out. The Apple III failed and later came back with technology stolen from the Commodore Amiga to make the Apple IIgs system.
Steve Jobs worked his employees hard and did not give them benefits. Steve Wozniak did more work but Steve Jobs’ net worth was more. After seeing that Apple employees did not get stock, Steve Wozniak decided to give some of his shares to the employees. Steve Jobs did not.
But before that Steve Jobs stole the best ideas from Xerox, Visi-On, the Xanadu project, and other ideas to make the Apple Lisa (named after his biological daughter Lisa whom he never visits) and later when that $10,000 monstrosity failed the Apple Macintosh for $5000. It didn’t sell to well because it cost too much and the $299 Commodore 64 loaded GEOS to do the same things and the $1000 Apple //e ran GEOS as well and did the same things as the Macintosh.
The board of directors fired Steve Jobs because they claimed the Mac wouldn’t sell and he ruined Apple. But Steve Jobs did not give up, he formed Next Inc. with H. Ross Perot a Texas Oil guy and snarfed BSD Unix and the Mach kernel to make Nextstep and NextOS. He ripped off Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST, GEOS, GEM, and UNIX designs to do so.
The Steve Jobsless Apple ran through CEOs like water, the Apple CEO office had a built in ejector seat. The Macintosh was not a success but Apple kept making new models. The Macintosh SE basically a Macintosh Plus with a NuBus slot, the Macintosh II copied after the Amiga 2000 but with a 68020 processor and NuBus slots. Apple learned that the Motorola 68000 processor series was not good enough and partnered up with IBM, Motorola, and made the PowerPC chip to replace it. But it became costly, Intel made cheaper chips and the PowerPC could not get the speed to match Intel. Apple went to the PowerMac series and ran old Classic Mac 68K code.
Next could not make a profit, but Steve Jobs sold stock anyway and bought Pixar from George Lucas. Steve Wozniak was screwed out of his Apple shares and position at Apple after a plane crash, you see, and the Woz started up his own companies and wanted to help Jobs, but Jobs told Woz he wasn’t part of his social clique anymore. Anyway Next shared OpenStep with HP and Sun. An open source version of the Nextstep GUI and framework for HP-UX and Solaris/SunOS systems. Woz decided to teach children how to program and use computers with his Wheels of Zeus organization, while Steve Jobs just wanted to get richer and richer instead.
Meanwhile a former Apple CEO Jean-Louise Gasse ripped off the Amiga to make BeOS. Somehow PowerMacs ran better on BeOS than Mac OS 7.X and Apple lost even more money. Be Inc put Commodore Amiga out of business and tried to take over Apple, but Apple refused to release new PowerPC and PowerMac info to Be Inc so Be turned to Intel PC systems instead as NextOS eventually had to do in order to try and turn a profit.
So Apple had a choice, buy out Be Inc to get BeOS or buy out Next to get NextOS and Steve Jobs. Yes Apple bought out Next and Steve Jobs saved Apple to make it profitable by massive layoffs and cutting out products and support for existing customers and then make deal with the RIAA to allow Apple iTunes to sell songs for iPods and the new iMac a lower priced Mac and merge NextOS and MacOS to make Mac OS X. The deal worked and Apple was profitable again. Later for movies Apple made a deal with the MPAA.
Well Mac OS X was a success, so was the iMac, and Be Inc was driven out of business like Commodore Amiga. But at the cost of Apple employees losing their jobs as Steve Jobs said “Nobody should work for Apple for more than five years.” after laying off employees to keep Apple profitable.
After a while Jobs read his second contract and learned that Apple had to switch to Intel chips and make the iPhone and later iPad. Steve Jobs took Mac OS X to make iOS later on to make tablet computing possible. No biggie just let the Chinese in the Foxconn China plant do all the work, and force workers to suicide when they lose prototypes because they are slaves to him anyway. Human life means nothing to Apple’s profits.
Steve Jobs made the nerdvirgins cream their panties over the iOS and Mac OS X systems. Apple killed the Microsoft Zune and put Blockbuster out of business once iTunes sold movies and TV shows and also rented them and the Apple TV came out. Even Netflix felt the competition from Apple’s iTunes. Consumers lost freedom of choice and Steve Jobs was turning Apple into another Microsoft as Apple captured the smart phone and tablet market.
Steve Jobs humiliated his employees and got a kick out of it. He bullied them, called them names. He had an offer to apply for CEO of Apple and an Apple technician applied only to not get the job and get an humiliating email from Jobs’ best friend Larry Ellison. It was a fake contest, of course.
When Steve Jobs learned he was sick with cancer instead of getting it treated, he continued to work to earn even more money. To humiliate even more Apple employees. He’s go to new age healers for crystal treatments and drop LSD to see unicorns and rainbows. His doctors told him to slow down, get conventional treatments and maybe he’d live longer. But he thought he could beat death without them. So he hid his condition from stockholders and the public, only announcing a liver transplant, nothing to see here, move on.
The more people bought Apple products and services the more powerful Steve Jobs got, and then the richer he got. Steve Jobs trained Tim Cook to take over, and when Jobs died of cancer everything passed on to Tim Cook.
Steve Jobs passed away, Tim Cook danced on his grave. Billions of nerdvirigins mourned on The Internet to visit the Apple web site announcing Steve Jobs’ death. Apple’s web site was Slashdotted for a while and none could see it. The iPhone 5 was not released and instead the iPhone 4S was released.
Let us take a serious 15 seconds of silence to morn the loss of Steve Jobs, the iCEO, the visionary, the deadbeat dad, the founder of Apple, the stealer of great ideas, the insanely great or greatly insane computer guru, the think different dictator, the guy who backstabbed all his business partners for financial gain and stock option fraud but was only paid $1/year if you don’t count stock options and stock, Internet Legend in his own mind, and now a corpse and worm food.
If Jobs or anybody is in Hell then its because they deserve to be there.
Wow Lexx, bitter much?
[...] jobs death bed conversion” which was taking them to the post I put up entitled “Is Steve Jobs In Hell?” To be perfectly honest, I realized as I was typing the title it would probably make good [...]
Maranatha. I agree with your whole article -although according to scripture, Satan is not in hell/hades/sheol-hades yet, nor does he or will he ever ‘preside or torture’ anyone there.
He is the prince of the power of the ‘air’ and will NOT be thrown into Sheol-Hades until the beginning of the millenium,
The antichrist/beast/and the false prophet/false messiah will be cast into
the Lake of Fire (not Sheol-Hades) at the end of the Battle of Armageddon.
Satan the devil HImself is cast into the Lake of Fire (where the Beast and the False Prophet ARE) at the end of the millenium.
This unholy Satanic trinity does not even stand at the Great White Throne Judgement – God deals with them swiftly as the Word of God plainly demonstrates. When it comes to Hades or Gehenna, they preside over nothing, but are punished like all those who are there.
Steve Jobs is in Sheol-Hades in the ‘holding cell’ in torture, awaiting the end of the millenium where he will be judged at the Great White Throne.
His name, missing from the Lamb’s Book of LIfe will result in his being cast into the Lake of Fire – Gehenna, with all other unbelievers of every age. Only THEN will he and they ‘be’ with Satan, AntiChrist, the false Prophet and every demon AND every unbeliever… they will be in eternal fire and scorching darkness ‘alone’ and ‘eternally lonely/guilty’ … forever in Eternity.
Believers will be in the New Heaven and Earth, and in the New Jerusalem.
Unbelievers will be in Gehenna, being tortured in the presence of the Lamb and the Heavenly Angels … ” The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: ” Revelation 14:1
Maranatha John 3:3, 3:16
larrt ellison will die abd go to hell