I was recently eating a meal alone at a restaurant when a couple at an adjacent table struck up a conversation with me. The conversation was pleasant enough (they were tourists and had many questions about the country) and after a while they got up to leave.
That is when the sales pitch began… The husband began to talk about how he truly embraced God when he was 35 (in a spiritual sense) and he wondered (aloud) what religion I observed. Being half native and growing up in an a-religious family, I have never (to be frank) cared for any religion or its trappings. Sensing that this was a sensitive issue for my new friends, I attempted to avoid the topic by saying that I hadn’t found anything that I felt was a complete answer to all my questions, yada, yada, yada. The husband seemed a little taken aback by this and sheepishly asked if I was contemplating “other” religions, because “those people are good… but they are just misled” and so on. In summary, Go Christian or be “misled”.
I let it go, because I have had far less pleasant encounters with overtly religious people and this guy was only trying to “guide” me. But I have been thinking about it for the last few weeks and came up with this question for him (yah, too late, I know): If being “not christian” is so bad, what do you make of all the people who came before Christ? I mean, it’s hard to be Christian before Christ was born. I understand there were people of faiths that eventually grew into Christianity as we know it, but do more recent Christian orders/faiths/etc. believe that being non-christian means no heaven, regardless of moral fibre?
I guess the question I am aiming for is this: Do some people belive that the Virgin Mary not in heaven because she was alive before the “true (or modern)” religions where founded. (Mormon, Lutheran, or anything less than, say, 2001 years old) and therefore she could not have embraced the “true” faith?
I alwys thought the guys Dante shoved into the Seventh Circle got a bad deal.
The Old Testement characters aren’t Christian. Maybe they’re “technical” or “default” Christians.
OK, I’ll stop being silly now. They were Jews, obviously. Jesus was a Jew. Do fundamentalist Christians accept that? So if Moses is in heaven, does that mean that all Jews go to Christian heaven? Or is it only pre-Christ Jews that go to heaven? A faint distinction, IMHO.
I don’t know about any faiths’ official policy, but there are certainly individual Christians who believe this. There are some who post on another board I frequent, who also say that not being Christian means not having any morals.
Yep, their spiel goes something like this:
“The reason America is so messed up today is that not everyone is Christian. Non-christians are by definition incapable of being good or moral. All they can ever be is selfish and hedonistic.”
I never thought to ask them about Mary, but I suspect they’ll just say that they meant non-judeochristian, not non-christian. Or else that back then Judaism wasn’t corrupted by all those depraved liberals.
The doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) provides for the “salvation and or exaltation” (heaven if you prefer) of all people, no matter when they were, are, or will be upon the earth. This doctrine is the primary reason tracing family histories is important to members of the faith. Yes, we believe Mary the mother of Jesus will get to “heaven”.
Since Jewish lineage is traditionally passed through the female line, can’t we infer that since Jesus was Jewish his mother was most likely Jewish too?
Actually, a lot of people get annoyed when you point out that Jesus was Jewish, except for a few who point out, “He believed in Himself.”
I’m sure Mary was Jewish. Nowadays, of course, she’s probably Christian. Not because of any dissatisfaction with her original religion, you understand. But have you known a mother who didn’t think her son was God?
Seriously, in Catholicism, I was always taught that Mary was “Assumed” into Heaven. Also, IIRC, they taught us that Good Folks, before Christ’s resurrection, were kept in a special place called “Limbo” (which is also where unbaptized babies go). I now think the name comes from “limbus patruum”, and is the same as that outer circle of Hell that Dante speaks of. They stayed in that vestibulke of Hell until Christ “descended into Hell” (as they say in the Creed) and liberated them in an event called “The Harrowing of Hell”, after which they got to go directly to Heaven. Back in parochial school we had religion books with pictures of this, and you can find interesting Medieval and early Renaissance pix of The Harrowing of Hell. All of this drives Protestants nuts, because there’s no scriptural authority for any of it, at least as they interpret the relevant Bible passages.
Have a look at a book called The History of Hell for more details. I’m agnostic now, but I’m fascinated by the richness of these images of the World Beyond.
Mary was a card-carrying member of the First National Tele-evangelical Church of North-Western Babtist Scientologists (known as the Babtist Scientologists for short), which was founded in 1957. She was known to be present at all the services because the large plastic icon of Mary that was at the altar always shed tears when the Church Flounder was particularly eloquent in his appeal for money.
Except that one time, when the hose was mis-aligned, and the statue of the Virgin Mary sprayed tears over the first three rows of the congregation, that was considered one of the greatest miracles.
In any event, a recent archaeological dig in Bethlehem uncovered a stone tablet, dated around 7 BC, that has been translated as Mary’s membership card in the Babtist Scientologists.
If I recall correctly, Jesus was a Pharisee. Or a Zealot depending on who you ask. He did like to single out the Pharisees in His sermons. I don’t know if that would tell us more about Mary or Joseph.
A book I’m reading at the moment, A History of God, suggest that the attack on the Pharisees was inserted into the Bible at a later date, to discredit the Pharisees during a political dispute.