What do Christians think of other religions?

Great Debates
101

Joe,

Perhaps I was harsh. I am sorry.

You object to Lib’s understanding of the words of Jesus, with respect to many mansions. He believes that Muslims can go to Heaven. He believes Atheists are the beloved children of Christ. He is not alone in that understanding, although it is not unanimous even among the scholars of the meaning of the scriptures. I happen to think the many mansions in God’s house are there for all his children.

“I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Light.” is not so simple a thing to understand as you assume. You see it as an exclusionary caution against alternate theologies. I see it truthfully paraphrased to be: “Wherever you travel, I am. All that you can know is of Me. Wherever you turn away from the darkness, there I am.”

The simple truth that no one comes to the Father, but that he comes through the Son does not imply church membership to me. You interpret it as you see it. I interpret it as I see it. Seeking God brings you to Salvation. The unknowing moron, and the mystic hermit, who have not heard or understood the Bible, or of the name of Christ will come to the spirit of God out of love. They will come to Him through the Son, because the difference between God, and Christ is a matter of our limits, not His. Christ is the love of God, when you seek the love of God; you seek Him, whatever words you use.

I know that Christ will not abandon those who are too stupid to read, or too bone headed to keep their selfish wishes out of their prayers, or too broken down and weary to even care if they will be saved. They are just sinners like me. I certainly did nothing to deserve eternal joy. The gracious Muslim who set his table for me, when I was lost in his land fulfilled the bargain my Lord offered, and when they meet, hereafter, He will greet than kind soul as one of His own. Religion is for priests. Even faith itself is the precious gift of the few, and the blessed. The love of God is for all God’s children.

If you don’t want them to go to Hell, then welcome them with joy!

Tris

“The Way of Heaven is to benefit others and not to injure.” ~ Lao-tzu ~

102

Joe, I hope you saw my apology to you over on the other board where you took offense at what you saw as me accusing you of being effectively a Pharisee. If you didn’t, let me quickly say that, asking your pardon for having inadvertently insulted you, I said that, as your brother in our Lord, I felt called to point out to you that what you had had to say seemed to be taking a stance that seemed to be calling for following the Law and not repentance and salvation through God’s loving grace mediated through Christ. It was not an accusation but rather a third-party critique on how you might inadvertently not be showing others the Good News of the Gospel but instead the old rule-bound Judaism – and I pointed out that you and others have made it clear that I in turn have downplayed Christ’s call to strive for moral perfection and therefore seemed to be not only condoning but actively promoting immoral behavior in other Christians – and that I had taken that criticism of my witness to heart, and hoped you would understand my criticism of yours in the same light.

Like you, I understand my salvation, yours, and that of all men who accept it, to come from the work of the Incarnate Son of God, who is first and foremost the Logos, the Word, of God – the means by which He called all things into being and through which He redeems all things.

But I draw a strong differentation between adherence to a given theological construct and Him. God’s justice and God’s mercy transcend anything we know or can know – and I have no idea what He will do with a devout Hindu or Muslim who follows Him to the best of his or her own knowledge, though under a vast misapprehension as to who and what God really is. But I suspect to other posters and lurkers here the differentiation between what you and I and Tris and Lib and JThunder have had to say about God illustrates that none of the five of us has a clear understanding of who and what God really is, either.

Quite simply, my job is to lead people, as best I can, to a knowledge and love of Jesus Christ and His God and Father, through my words and actions, through the person I am able to show them online and IRL. It is not to decide who will be saved or how God will accomplish what He does to save them; it’s to witness to the one tremendous act of redemption performed by Christ and to the overwhelming love God has for the people He created and for whom He died.

In particular, it is not to take a verse spoken by our Lord to a disconsolate follower on His last evening before His Crucifixion out of the context it is spoken in as a definition that “you have to be a fundamentalist Christian or be damned with you” – literally – and whether you intended it or not, IMHO your posted views seem to suggest that, to me and apparently to others.

No one comes to God except “through” or “by” (kata) Christ. We have no argument there. How He brings people to God, and how He keeps them abiding in Him, is something on which I think you and I can disagree without injuring our mutual witness to Him.

I look forward to seeing your response.

103

Classic.

DaLovin’ Dj

104

Such an interesting thread. I see so many interpretations of the one book by people all claiming to be Christians. Seems some folks have picked out the idea that love is the real message in the book. Whatever you have to do to look at those words as meaning “love everybody”, that’s what you do. When it says condemned, that really means “love”. When it says he committed genocide, well that was just a part that may have been tainted by old humans (a notion Poly has entertained on several occasions). Anything that’s not love, well that’s not my god. If it isn’t love, it can’t be my god.

Then cats like Joe_Cool come in and say well he’s jealous and can be a hell of disciplinarian. He can be other things besides love. But they have read the same book! There are thousands of groups of people with different interpretations. Within those groups there are probably millions of different overall interpretations. Each one adjusting the text to conform to their own morality.

It seems to me that this tells me very little about the nature of a creator, and quite a bit about the nature of the people interpreting the text. Like a big “Rorshac Test” (sp?), where you look at ink spots and what you see reveals more about you than it does about the inkblot.

I would have to agree with the idea that love is your best tool in dealing with other humans. I agree with Poly, Tris, Lib, Joe_Cool & Jersey Diamond, dreamer, and many, many others that preach that love should be the way. Still, this tells me mostly about humans. I can reach this same conclusion without any belief in a specific god. Perhaps it takes fear of a god to keep some people based in love (instead of greed and selfishness), perhaps it takes absence of fear of the unknown to convince others. But for some of us we can reach the same conclusion without any of this propaganda, so we have no need for belief in myth and legend to keep us in line.

Propaganda is a human creation used to take advantage of our emotions. We have and inherent attraction to love. We cry at movies where love and triumph are portrayed with swelling music. So people can use this knowledge of this tendency to take advantage of us (even if the goal is to make us civilized – a lie is a lie). That book itself has nothing going for it which shows it correctly describes a creator. To act like it does, or that the god it describes is the only possibility, or that one’s own theories about the nature of reality are infallible and undoubtedly true is the main foolishness (a conceit) that these otherwise kind, intelligent, and thoughtful people tend to make.

If there is a creator, and it does wish us to know it, then it seems to me the best way to know it would be through absolute truths (axiom/brain-in-a-vat arguments aside), instead of metaphorical and philosophical theories based less on evidence then on personal whim and emotion.

And as for personal experiences with a god, those are personal experiences interpreted as connections to a god. Typically the people feeling them don’t hear voices, but are filled with a great love and desire to love. Again, this reveals to me more about the person then about any god. If love in you is proof of love in a specific god, then what does the existence of hate, pain and violence prove?

I also am seeing a kind of new agnostic version of Pascal’s Wager developing for myself here. The suggestion that as long as I love, there is no way the creator could be mad at me for picking the wrong denomination got me thinking down this path. If there is a creator, odds are that it wouldn’t be so petty or small to hold my dismissal of myth, nor my love of testable truths against me, so I’ll just feel safe in my decision to blow off religions until such time as they produce reasonable evidence in favor of a specific theory. Basically, if we were created, than staying true to ourselves really shouldn’t be held against us. At least not by an entity that would be worth loving. So I don’t see why Jesus becomes any more important than a useful tool to unite the barbaric back in the day. Given human advancement, perhaps it’s time to sell the message of love without the religious trappings that so often just cloud, confuse, and complicate that noble message.

No one can see the elephant yet. Let’s not swear up and down that god has to be a tree before we cure our blindness.

DaLovin’ Dj

105

DJ, I am so happy that you saw past the surface disagreements to the fact that Jersey Diamond and Joe Cool concur with Tris and I, and others, on the real nature of God.

One of the key points, however, and the reason why we seem to disagree, is in the nature of what God expects of His people. For example, let’s take the old classic shibboleth of Christians on this board – how to treat gay people. For conservatives such as Joe and Jersey as much as for me, Tris, and others, they are human beings for whose salvation Christ gave His life – and whom He commanded us to love.

But what is the proper way in which to show that love. Certainly respect for them as individuals. But if you hold to the belief that the passages in Leviticus, Romans, etc., indicate that God is adamantly opposed to gay sex under any circumstances, to the extent that He is likely to condemn them for sinning in that way, then showing love for those people consists in standing firm for what He had to say in Scripture and warning them that He said it’s a major no-no and that “when Daddy comes home (=the Last Judgment), you’re gonna get it.” (Some conservative Christians, though not Joe and Jersey, can’t help but convert that into a taunt of sorts, which is why I used the little-kid phrasing in that last paraphrase – and I hasten to stress that I was not including those two in it!)

For those of us who tend to see Scripture as the work of men inspired by God, and therefore carrying a large amount of human fallibility rather than Divine inerrancy in its contents, the understanding is rather that God wants us to let them, along with everyone else, know that He loves them and wants a personal relationship with them – and that their sexuality, just like ours, is something they need to bring into accord with His will. For us, the grasp on this topic is that all of us are looking for gratification – and that God says that sex is part of a permanent relationship, not merely a means of feeling good. Which means that their sexuality is properly used within a committed relationship, just as ours is. Jersey and Joe would, I believe, extract the literal commands from Scripture that there is never a time when gay sex is in accord with His will; we’d see the commands about sex, straight or gay, as against casual gratification, not against sex as an expression of a committed love. Besides which, I for one tend to take the commands not to judge and to show respect and caring equal to what I myself would seek from another as calling for absolutely no speech that would be perceived by a gay person as in any way criticizing his sex life – while Joe and Jersey, no less motivated by love, would see them as dancing gaily (;)) on bridges over a precipitous drop, and feel it incumbent on them to try to coax them back from likely disaster.

I trust you see the underlying caring that we all are expressing and how it can be expressed in different ways depending on our understanding of God’s will and the circumstances surrounding a specific situation – and since “Christianity vs. gays” has been a classic discussion topic here, analyzed at length, using it for an example seemed singularly appropriate for demonstrating both halves of the equation.

106

But, Poly, why would this god that you claim to personally feel be so different than the god many claim to have felt (supposedly the same god)? Why can one Christian “feel” god, look to the book, and find a view that excludes gays (or muslims, or wiccans, or adulterers), and another can find an interpretation that includes them?

Doesn’t the existence of so many interpretations, and so many denominations, and so many other religions tend to reveal that religious belief is an expression of personal preferance rather than a factual description of the nature of a creator? All who turn to “him” don’t feel the same him. Instead, they feel what they imagine to be ideal. They want their opinions to be reinforced, because they feel it themselves, and they project them onto their god. The lack of any indisputible common interpretation among Christians tends to show me that the text “The Bible” is no more than a giant ink blot test and Jesus was no more than a brilliant memetic engineer and great philosopher. The gazillion interpretations out there, the inability of the information to predict any future events, the inability of the information to be tested, and the requirement of “faith” lead me to conclude that the whole thing is a big con.

That means that when you (the average Christian, not you personatly) send a message of love to me, and at the same time cram down my throat repeatedly that this god you percieve MUST be the real god and the real reason for love, well you just cloud the issue with unresolvable debate, frustrate me with your conceit, and amuse me with your hubris.

Love for the sake of love instead of for any god sounds far more noble to me. If a past viewer were to reveal that the stories of the bible were concocted, nothing magical ever happened, no god ever wrote any commandments, no Jesus ever existed (he was just a legend or a composite charachter), and there is ample evidence that the people who wrote those texts were selfishly motivated and just basically lied or adapted old myths and stories (born of ignorance) for their own gain - then what? Does your desire for love fade away with no Jesus? With no god? With no divine text? With no promise of an afterlife? Without all of these things, is love still your chosen tool for dealing with people?

It should be. Thus, love should be a strong enough message in and of itself without having to bring up things that can obviously be interpreted millions of diferent ways, and have often led to violence. And if love would still be your choice, then would not that show that it was in you all along, without any need for a deighty? Even if that made it easier for you to think you understood these feelings.

DaLovin’ Dj

107

Because, my friend, you and I, and Joe and Jersey and John Shelby Spong and Fred Phelps and Jerry Falwell and everybody else, are “sinners” – by which I do not mean malefactors against a heavenly penal code so much as people out of tune with God’s will and how He would prefer to have the world run.

So each of us brings to the word of God our own spin on the issues. Reverting to the gay issue once again, how many people have you seen say that God condemns homosexuality in the Bible? He does not; even on their take, he condemns gay sex acts – a quite different thing. (Let us for the moment ignore the end of Romans 1, on which interpretations are as controverted as a plate of spaghetti.)

So I have particular emphases. Libertarian has others, only slightly at variance with mine. DDG (who tends not to get into religious debates here) has others, also somewhat at variance. Likewise RTFirefly, Techchick, Homebrew, grienspace, and so on. Jersey and Joe have still others, quite at variance with mine.

But they all are based on what we bring to Scripture. They are eisegesis, not exegesis – bringing presuppositions into the reading of the Bible, not drawing out what is already there. And they do not affect our mutual underlying commitment to follow Christ, and to try to persuade others to do likewise, in accordance with His command.

If you want a set of rules to live your life by, they’re readily available in many faiths. Chaim and Zev can give you the procedures for proselytizing into Orthodox Judaism, probably the finest system ever devised for honoring God by following His Law. Ethicists galore will be glad to devise you a set of ethical codes – based on their own opinions of what is morally right.

Like Zen, Christianity looks not for a logical system but for the insight into how to live. Unlike Zen, though, we find it in the precepts and example of one human being, whom we consider to have been the human expression of who God is – and though that’s less than a total definition of the Incarnation of Christ, it is an accurate if incomplete summary of it.

As for your final comments, I’m on record here that if I were to somehow find that Christ and the God whom He followed and in whom He participated were total fiction, I have found so much more personal fulfillment and happiness in the life I now live than in the one I endured before He began reshaping me that I would still choose to do as I do now – with the obvious exception of not making a nuisance of myself witnessing to Him! So I have a very hedonistic reason for my ethics – I like me better as the person I now am than I liked the guy I was before. That’s not to say that this would be valid for everyone – but I can speak only for myself.

108

Theology is very hard for me. Biblical scholarship is certainly not the best reason (if there are any) to listen to anything I have to say. I don’t deny that it is a worthwhile thing for people to do, but it has very little to do with my own experience of faith. I certainly find the Bible to be a source of connection to the Lord, for me, and I often encourage people to read it. But I first encourage them to look into their own hearts, and prepare their hearts to be a dwelling place for the Lord, before they begin.

Anything can be a Rorschach ink blot for people. Interpretation is a necessary aspect of verbal communication, in every case. What and who you are must be a part of what you read and what that means to you. No matter how sure you are of your understanding of the true meaning of scripture, it seems to me quite perilous to assert that another spirit must hear the word of God with your understanding. While fellowship and bible study are certainly spiritually useful, those who choose to lead such activity place themselves between the Lord, and those who have the personality type that accepts authority easily. Not wanting to do so does not change that.

Many people prefer not to make difficult decisions. Some don’t like any decision making at all. Following leaders is comfortable for a very large number of people. Bringing to these souls the message of God is a duty most Christians believe they must perform, but very few people understand that it includes not becoming the intercessor of their faith. I am vehement in denial of authority to those who propose that their beliefs are the one and only true message of Christ. Even more I deny the authority of one sinner to judge the heart of another.

All that said it is true; as well that I believe that Jesus is Christ, the Son of God, and that He is the spirit of the love of God for Man, made human, and that He lived and was Crucified, and died, and was Resurrected from the dead. To me that was a promise, to me, and to every soul born of men that we too shall live again, if we follow Him. Following Him is not an intellectual exercise.

Why believe what I believe? Don’t. Seek the truth. Ask for the truth. Look into your heart, and find there a place for God to dwell. Don’t believe in God? OK. What about man? Is there a place in your heart for the love of all mankind? I believe that is the same place where God will be. It doesn’t matter what I believe, though. You can make your heart a place where love lives. The salvation part will come later.

Poly

I too hold in my deep heart the promise that proof is pointless, and if the Lord is not, and Heaven will never be, and death is all that waits for us, still I shall love my Lord. He has loved me, when I was unloving, and bitter, and if it comes, I could not abandon Him, simply because He did not exist. Rather I shall join with all those who believed, and we shall love who He would have been, and who we know in our hearts He was. The spirit of Love is greater than even divine death.

Tris

" It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching." ~ Saint Francis Of Assisi ~

109

DJ, I think you make very good points here and though we’ve had our disagreements in the past, I respect the fact that although you say this -

and this…

You still continue to ask questions.

I have a relationship with my SO. My SO’s brother, best friend, co-workers, also have a relationship with him. None of these relationships are the same though he is the same. So not one person who turns to God is going to have the same relationship/experience as anyone else, just the same as we do not have the same relationships with each other. My relationship with God is not ideal. Ideal meaning - “existing only in the mind”. If that were so the love that comes without understanding would be a valve that I could shut on and off without guilt, without fear, without any emotions because it would not exist in my heart. I know that “love” has many meanings, but IMO is mostly a condition of the heart which is shown by our actions toward one another. One could argue that the “actions” are a choice made by our minds, but when it is given repeatedly to others in an “unconditional” way, (in forgiveness of those who have wronged you etc), then that is far beyond a “choice” that our minds can understand. As I see it we love because we are loved by God and he gives us the power to love others (or at least give it our best shot), the way he loves us.

110

Do you believe “the mind” and “the heart” are two different things?

Why?

111

Metaphor, Drastic. The “heart” refers to emotion and will, the seat of integrity and of compassion. The “mind” refers to rationality. But each is and should be influenced by the other – because human beings are not creatures of pure reason but beings with feelings and the ability to decide and act – and these draw on both “heart” and “mind” – at least ideally.

112

The problem is, it’s a bad and simplistic metaphor; leading to what I call the Myth of the Vulcan on the one hand, and misanthropic anti-intellectualism on the other. They’re intertwined, not separated powers acting on the other from a distance.