The comment was made tongue in cheek, but my point remains the same throughout this thread: nobody has given me a compelling reason why religious people ought not *for intellectual reasons * be religious exclusivists. Frankly, the ‘one God, many paths’ view seems more like a contemporary feel-good position rather than one based in good theology. I’m willing to be corrected by the more theologically-knowledgeable posters on this board (God knows there are plenty of those), but as I noted above, Paul for one seems pretty explicit that if you don’t have faith in Jesus then you are screwed.
In my view all religions are good for the ones that use it for good, All religions were founded by humans, any and all writings were done by humans. and all declarations were only human declarations. To me it is like a medicine, some people are helped by a certain medicine and it could harm or kill another. It is up to the need of a person as to what they believe or not. If Christians worry about if Jews are converted or not most Jews have known this for 2000 years. I do not see why the Pope says anything they have to take it to heart. Their 2000+ years of praying still hasn’t produced much change.
Not necessarily; only by human logic, but not necessarily by Divine logic. Three quick ways to reconcile: (1) Jesus will be the Messiah when he comes again; (2) “none are saved” means “none among the Christians.” I’m always surprised that so many monotheists, who believe in a single God, think that there is only one path to that God. Why would God be so exclusive? Judaism, to the contrary, believes that each people (nationality, group, religion, ethnicity, whatever) have their own path to God (read: righteous, charitable, behavior, if you don’t like me interjecting God.) Hence, as noted above, the notion of the Jews being “chosen” means they were chosen for a particularly difficult path that includes many (many!) obligations, and are held to a higher standard of moral behavior.
BTW, I’m amazed how that one sentence (“none shall be saved…”) has been interpreted in only one way. It doesn’t say: “… but by faith and belief that Jesus is God.” It could, for instance, simply mean that Jesus is like a gate-keeper, who gives a nod of approval before letting anyone in.
Although, I, of course, think that Paul was just wrong on this, as on so many things.
They can believe what they want, but the problem is 1800 years of history when they foist their beliefs on others through torture, inquisition, murder, etc. After all, since those other guys are damned anyway, it’s perfectly OK to let the mobs beat them up, rob them, evict them, and rape their women. This is not merely historic: such activities still go on – perhaps less violent in the U.S. nowadays, but still there. And, of course, this is the justification that the Moslem terrorists use to slay the infidels.
See my prior comment. The doctrines that Jews are damned unless they convert has led to persecution, segregation, and tromping on human and civil rights. They therefore DO “actually affect Jews.” Again, the U.S. is perhaps more tolerant, but the Pope’s declarations go out to countries where non-Catholics are still victims of abuse.
I also want to note that Christianity is all about personal salvation after death; those who believe the right way go to heaven, the rest burn in eternal torment. Someone above quoted Paul as saying that this salvation comes through faith and faith alone, not through deeds.
Judaism is NOt about that. To the contrary, Judaism is about deeds: what you do here and now on earth. Belief/faith is not as important: a person who does good deeds but is an atheist is still doing the good deeds, and that’s much preferred to a person who is a strong believer but (say) steals from the poor. Judaism does believe in an after-life, but the purpose of existence is to do charitable deeds on earth, for their own sake, and not for some reward. We have no “promise” of an afterlife like the Christians think they do; we have only our trust in God. And we have no consensus on what the after-life might be like – it’s generally thought to be just like earth today, but with no war, hunger, illness, or strife… and it might come about when humankind makes it so.
Think of it this way: Say you have a man who used to beat his wife. Before he would beat her, he would say certain things. He recently changed his ways, and stopped beating her. But she still gets nervous when she hears him say stuff like what he used to say before he beat her, even if the things he would say are not abusive in and of themselves.
The Catholics are using some of the same language and talking about some of the same ideas that they used to do before they would come after the Jews. This makes us Jews nervous. The Catholics have a right to do it, of course, but we wish they wouldn’t.
I’m not buying it. If you are saved by faith (not works), then the obvious question is, “Faith in what?” And for Paul, the only answer to that question could be, “Jesus.” I mean, if you press Paul, he isn’t going to answer, “Faith in the innate nobility of the human spirit,” or “Faith in some God or other, as long is it is recognizably a God.” So if you believe you have the path to salvation, and you don’t share it with others, you’re kind of being a dick. Sort of like having a cure to cancer, but only sharing it with your friends and relatives, and not the world at large. At least, that is how I would think if I were a Christian.
Yep. Religious exclusivists don’t have the best track record, morally. But that doesn’t show that the doctrine is false.
However, I think we ought to clarify the context. On one day of the year (Good Friday), one of the prayers recited at the liturgy is a litany of people for whom the church asks for help from God (from a Catholic perspective, of course). This includes numerous separate groups. In the older Latin Tridentine rite, the passage that prayed for the Jews asked that their blindness be removed. So, the pope has removed the allusion to blindness in the single two-line passage of a prayer referring to Jews that is spoken–only in Latin–one time a year, for a very tiny number of Traditionalist Catholics.
If someone is interested in being upset, they might concentrate on the RCC’s recent revival of interest in evangelization and examine whether the church is acting in an offensive manner toward Jews under that program. (Unlike the Baptists, the Catholics do not yet have anything resembling “Jews for Jesus” at this time.)
Shrug is Judaism a “contemporary feel-good” liberal creation? Its roots are a lot older that Christianity, and yet it does not, apparently, see any need to adopt a “believe in our religion or go to hell” attitude. There are in fact plenty of religions who have much the same attitude - Christianity and Islam are I think the outliers in this respect.
I’m with you but only to an extent. Way I see it, there is little threat of a new Inquisition against Jews, and the Pope meddling in the wording of this religious formula really isn’t much of a big deal, because it is unlikely to actually have any real-world impact on Jews. If I thought it would, I’d be more concerned about it.
Agree that Judaism is about deeds and not belief of course. Some Jews believe in an afterlife and some don’t, or don’t care - it just isn’t a big deal either way. My wife was raised a Catholic, and this was the most difficult aspect of Judaism for her to accept - that theology, belief, and an afterlife wasn’t really a major part of it.
I know I risk offending everyone by saying this, but in some ways Judaism seems to me to be the most logical religion based on the most absurd premise - the end result of thousands of years of some relatively sophisticated, intelligent and civilized people taking seriously the notion that a primitive and barbarous tribal diety hurling thunderbolts for violations of taboos (and ordering massacres of tribal enemies) actually exists. Christianity is somewhat the opposite - the original inoffensive premise of a philosophy of love and personal salvation worked on by a couple of thousand years of relative barbarians, resulting is some very bizzare abberations indeed.
Not to say that there haven’t been very sophisticated and intelligent Christians, or barbarous Jews, of course. I think the difference is one of power. Throughout the last couple of millenia, Jews were generally not in any positions of power, and so no mechanisms developed for the powerful (and barbarous) to impose their views by violence on the others - so persuation had more effect (in a social-evolutionary sense) than compulsion. A Jew wishing to establish an Inquisition to root out thought crime with burning had no way of practically doing it. In the case of Christianity, until the Enlightenment, the opposite was the case. These different histories have marked the character of the two religions, even into these times when, in the West at least, compulsion in matters of religion has more or less altogether ceased as a force.
This may have to do with Judaism beginning as a tribal religion, not a proselytizing one like Christianity and Islam. Plus, I don’t think Judaism even had a concept of hell as a place of punishment until much later in its development. Even during Jesus’ time on earth, there were the Sadducees, who did not believe in a life after death.
ISTM that to have the “believe or burn” concept, a religion has to have the idea of rewards and punishments in the afterlife, as well as being a proselytizing religion that seeks converts. Animist and tribal religions lack one or both, and that covers a lot of religions.
Paul also said elsewhere that the gospel has been preached to the entire creation. (By “the heavens and the earth” whatever that means. This is in Colossians somewheres.) This indicates that people who haven’t physically heard the spoken words “Jesus Christ” have nevertheless had the gospel “preached” to them in some fashion. Meaning, apparently, that it is available to them to live in faith in response to this gospel–even if they don’t know the physical word for what it is they have faith in.
So it may be that people can only be saved through faith, indeed, faith in Jesus Christ, yet this does not mean they require explicit, physical interaction with Christians and spoken introduction to Christian concepts. The gospel (and so, presumably, faith in it) exist outside their expression in the Church.
I agree with that, and would expand on it to note that religions which develop out of a more primitive belief such as animism or polytheism find it relatively easy to take a philosophical tone that in effect allows them to accept that other religions are either basically the same or have a grasp on some sort of truth simply expressed differently.
The Greeks, for example, saw no difficulties with believing that (say) the Egyptian religion was in a sense “true” or similar to Greek religion, allowing for considerable syncretism (as evidenced in Herodotus).
Thus, far from being merely a touchy-feely outgrowth of modern liberalism, this notion is in fact well-established – except in Christianity and Islam.
Well, there is that. I mean, obviously I take the whole thing to be kind of silly, since I’m an atheist. But I remember when I was a kid, and I believed in God, and I would hear my dad say “Godammit” sometimes, and I was scared he would go to hell for that. It’s a natural impulse to worry about the spiritual welfare of those you care about. (Not that care and concern have been the primary motivating forces behind most attempts at conversion in the Church’s history.) And religious pluralism loses some of its plausibility when religions are making factually incompatible claims (e.g., Islam says Jesus isn’t the son of God; Christianity says he is.) But I agree that it would be silly for God to send a bunch of people to hell for believing the wrong thing. Actually, scratch ‘silly’ and replace with ‘fucking evil.’ But these are just some of the aspects of religion that seem a bit incoherent to me, and lacking any straightforward resolution. Maybe that’s why I’m an atheist.
No, but it’s also not a “one God, many paths” religion. Not to offend, but the OT would suggest it’s more of a “one God, one path, we’re on it, and neither we nor God really gives a rat’s ass about the rest of you” sort of religion. Contemporary Judaism isn’t like that, of course, but IMO that’s because contemporary enlightened theists just ignore the parts of their scripture that sound too much like Iron Age barbarism.
True; I forgot about the part where Paul said “the gentiles have the law written on their hearts” or something. But the stuff you are talking about refers to people who haven’t heard of Christianity, not those who have heard of it and rejected it, right? For the Catholic Church, contemporary Jews would of course, by and large, fall into the latter category.
“Contemporary” Judiasm is just about as old as Christianity, though. Jews haven’t literally followed the OT since at least the distruction of the Temple (aprox. 70 AD). Judaism is more about the Talmud than it is about the OT.
It is IMHO a serious mistake to read the OT and think that one understands Judaism, somewhat equivalent to reading what Julius Ceaser had to say about the Britons and thinking that one understands the English.
I think it’s funny . . . but then I would, given my name.[ul]
[li]Stake — check.[/li][li]Fagots (not faggots) — check[/li][li]Lighter fluid — check[/li][li]Matches — check[/li][/ul]
This came up for a fair amount of discussion at the “Taste of Judaism” class I’m attending at the local Reform temple. The notion that the Covenant imposes additional obligations on Jews (rather than excluding Gentiles from the favor of the Most High) was a small-r revelation to some of the more orthodox Christians present; and while I was reasonably familiar with that concept, the idea that each nation has its own calling came as something of a surprise to me as well.
