This. At least then we could cut through all the bullshit.
Please?
What would I accept as minimal amenities to die for in a place I will spend Eternity at the cost of major effort on my part right now. At the the very fucking least I don’t want to live with assholes holding grudges. That’s the hell we live in.
My Prayer
Forgiveness, Now.
As I understand, there is exactly one way to get into Heaven. The Lord decides you belong there. And His ways are mysterious. All we have are the words of the prophets, etc, on how to live, but just because you live by them is no assurance you will enter heaven, nor is it sure that not following them will keep you out. To insist otherwise is to say that you have dominion over the Lord’s choices. And that’s just blasphemy.
There is no Bible passage which talks about how to gain an afterlife in heaven. That’s because Jesus and the First Century Christians did not believe in heaven as a destination for humans.
Early Christianity was an apocalyptic Jewish sect which taught of an end times in which the Kingdom of God would be revealed on earth. At that time, among other things, certain Christians would be resurrected in their bodies. A fully bodily resurrection, as opposed to a spiritual afterlife. Their graves would open up and they’d walk out, like Lazarus. They would then enjoy eternal life, not in heaven but on earth. This would be a restoration of Eden - kind of like a reboot to the conditions of Adam and Eve pre-Fall.
Early Christians did not teach of Hell. (Jesus mentions a Greek hell in one of his parables, but doesn’t teach that it literally exists).
Thus, the Bible teaches that everybody dies forever and rots in their graves, except that some people might be resurrected in their bodies at the end times to live an eternal life on earth. Nobody goes to heaven. Nobody goes to hell.
So who gets resurrected? Now we enter the realm of educated conjecture. You see, Jesus was a Mystery Teacher and the methodology of preparing one’s body for a bodily resurrection at the end times was a secret guarded behind parables and mysterious sayings. We have only hints. So, you’ll find no Bible quotation that tells you point blank who gets resurrected and how.
But we can make some educated guesses based on what we know about the early Christians. For one, baptism must have been a prerequisite. This would have been a full body dunking in a body of running water, not just a few sprinkles on the forehead like some Christians practice today. The baptism was a ritual cleansing of sin. Since sin represented decay, you needed to be cleansed of that decay to be assured a resurrection. Second, partaking in the ritual of the Eucharist would prepare the body for a resurrection in imitation of Christ. By eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ you physically participate in the resurrection. Third, it appears that early Christians took a radical anti-sex stance. In fact, early Christians even preached against sex within marriage, because procreation is all part of the slavery of the cycle of birth, death, and decay. To resurrect bodily, we would have to break that cycle. And there may have been more steps needed.
So it looks like baptism + Eucharist + no sex gives you a shot at a bodily resurrection at the end times.
As for all this nonsense about heaven and hell, that all got invented later and got grafted onto Christianity. If you want to know about that stuff, ask a Sunday School teacher. But there’s nothing in the Bible about it.
So, under the beliefs taught by Jesus, it would seem that our hypothetical Amazonian tribesmen have hardly any hope of getting resurrected. But then again, the early Christians thought that scarcely anybody would be resurrected anyway.
Skammer, this quotation has nothing to do with a spiritual afterlife in heaven. The statement is expressly directed at the Jews and refers to “salvation.” For the Jews, “salvation” meant only one thing: a national salvation, i.e., liberation from Roman oppression. It did not refer to a spiritual afterlife. Just as Moses brought “salvation” to the Jews by delivering them from Egypt, the author of Luke/Acts is predicting that a resurrected Christ would destroy Rome and restore the nation of Israel at the end times.
Gotta be an “either/or” instead of a “both/and”?
In Luke & Acts, I see a lot of Gentiles & Romans called to faith in Christ, no warnings of destruction of the Empire, but a lot of warnings of destruction to Judea.
Also, no calls in any of the Gospels to radical celibacy. SOME early Christians advocated it, a few orthodox but more were Gnostic.
The concept of a spiritual afterlife was well known to the Jews, as the Apocryphal & Pseudipigrapha shows, and was accepted along with the physical resurrection and Earthly restoration by many Pharisaic Jews. Jesus also refers to a spiritual conscious Paradise & Hades in Luke 16, promises Paradise that day to the repentant thief at the Crucifixion, and throughout the Gospels teaches a general resurrection in which many peoples (all humanity perhaps) will rise to face Him, either for aionion life or judgement.
I didn’t say I memorized the Bible so what is the point you are making? I also do not remember the names of all the kids I went to school with, so I am not going to argue the point, but I am glad that you were able to memorize it and save me time of looking it up.
How can you prove what you see or believe is truth? I respect your right to believe, but do not think much of your God, and try as I may, it makes no sense to me. I guess I could say God inspired me to not believe in your God.
Believing is seeing,
Well, it’s inferrable from the text, which also has some evangelical points to it: “If you get there and find all the stores have been closed, with The Word you can get what you came for.” 
“Heaven” is an abomination unto Nuggan…
then again, what isn’t an Abomination unto Nuggan…
Between memorizing it and recalling any of it is a lot of ground. I’m puzzled why you don’t ever seem to occupy it.
Using what definition of “seeing”?
Let me rephrase: All perception is the reflection of projected belief. Seek not to change the world, but rather, change your mind.
Again, look within.
No it isn’t. Have you been watching that What the #$! Do We Know* movie or something?
IMHO the idea, starting point, of a new god may represent the offspring of a established god, or it can be a remake of a existing one.
Saying to God’s Son Jesus that you accept Him as you God is too hard?
If it’s intended to be sincere rather than an empty attempt to game the system, yes. I’m pretty sure that God, if he exists and has the attributes that the Abrahamic religions ascribe to him, would know the difference between sincere expression of belief and invitation and someone saying the words, “just in case”.
If He can’t tell the difference, then He wouldn’t be much of a God, would he? Makes me wonder about people who say “I have accepted Jesus” (mouth the words) and then proceed to violate pretty near all of his teachings.
Why assume that one set of verses is the entire set of requirements? Why assume that you can know whether the other person has truly forgiven or not?
Most Christians I know base their indecisiveness on Romans 14:4
[quot]eWho are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
[/quote]
(I’m sure there are similar verses elsewhere, but I tried to memorize Romans as a kid*.)
*It’s for something called Bible Quiz, where you they asked you quiz bowl like questions about the Bible. In your teen years, it focuses on a particular book, and all the best quizzers have the book memorized. I think it’s cool that it didn’t get into the theology.
Why not? If A then B, if not A then not B. Seems pretty cut and dried to me. But let me further explain.
As to your other question,
, I don’t believe I have.