I am a christian, and I agree - many christians will find this a challenging issue. If you believe in the redemption of the cross, then there are no choices - salvation has been completed and you go to heaven. And if you don’t believe, then thats up to God. (Don’t ask me - “judge not, lest you be judged” - I take that pretty seriously)
But…
if I could do anything to ensure the salvation of anyone else, no matter who, and risk eternal damnation to do so, I would.
Because that is what Jesus did, and I aspire (and fail) to be like Him. Thats the heart of Christianity. He did it for everyone - those who were, those who are, and those who will be. He succeded, and destroyed the power of death for those who believe in Him.
I can’t do that, because I’m me, not God. But I would be willing to try, because the bible teaches that everyone is worth it, and that Christians need to stand in the gap, for those who don’t know, even for those who choose not accept.
Of course, I say this from a position of firmly believing that even if I tried (in this life or the next) to swap places with someone so that they would be saved, I couldn’t do it. There is no basis for it. But I would try.
I would (hopefully - I guess you never really know until you are actually there) risk my life in the here and now for someone else, in the hope that they find salvation in the additional time granted to them. And I hope that my wife and kids would understand that.
Si, that is an unbelievably beautiful sentiment you’ve expressed. Wow. There should be more people like you, who in my humble opinion, represent the very best of their faith.
There are some literary instances of this that I know of: one Christian, one not.
The Christian one is in Huckleberry Finn, where Huck decides that his duty to Jim as a human being overrides his duty (taught to him as a Christian duty) to turn in an escaped slave. When he makes the decision, he says (paraphrased, been too long since I read it): “Well, I’ll go to hell, then!”
The non-Christian one is in the Mahabharata. The Pandavas (five brothers, who have been the heroes of the story thus far), climb the mountains to join the Hindu gods. Four of the five brothers die en route, and Yudhisthira (spelling highly approximate) is joined by a dog that goes along with him. Then the god Indra appears to Yudhisthira, saying he’s going to take him to heaven, but he has to leave the dog behind. Yudhisthira decides that it would be a terrible thing to do to abandon this dog that has been so faithful to him, so he turns down Indra’s offer of going to heaven to stay with the dog. (Then the dog turns out to actually be a god, and tells him he’s passed the test.)
Then, when Yudhisthira gets to heaven, he sees his enemies there, but not his brothers. He asks to be taken to be with his brothers, which is in hell. The gods offer to let him go back to heaven, but he refuses. (That turns out to be another test- he and his brothers do go to heaven at the end)
The first two seem to be different than the third- the person decides he can’t set aside his own morality to do what his religious training tells him is the right thing to do. The latter is more like what people have been talking about in this thread, though there’s no deal where the brothers (or one of them) can go to heaven in Yudhisthira’s place.
I’ll turn the question on its head- suppose your religion teaches that something is right and you’ll go to hell if you don’t do it, but you firmly believe that that thing is wrong (example: turning in an escaped slave, though I’m sure there are many others). Suppose also that you really do believe you’d go to hell for not doing it. What do you do?
An old man drowns trying to rescue his hunting dog and they both go to the gate of heaven only the angel there says that dogs aren’t allowed. The old man refuses to part with his friend and walks on. He comes to a second gate where he finds another angel who tells him that the first fellow he talked to was no angel but from hell and was trying to trick the old man into entering. Dogs aren’t allowed in because they’d know it was hell and warn their owners. So the old man and the dog both enter into heaven to go hunting together.
I like to think I’d do it anyway. If nothing else, I would never be loyal to an evil God, and he’d know I wasn’t loyal, being a god. Since he’d send me to Hell anyway, I might as well make my futile gesture of defiance.
'Course, you might, in the one blinding instant of being exposed to the pure light of God, understand perfectly and unmistakably why, after all, He was right and you were wrong. I personally don’t believe it’s possible to go to Hell knowing that you are justified and God is not.
I would not go to Hell for anyone. As I understand it, anything that can be usefully done in that line has already been done by God Incarnate, and it would be foolish and arrogant for me to believe I could do it better. But I also believe no-one goes to Hell unless they would find eternity in God’s presence utterly unendurable. Heaven is where they go who say to God “Thy will be done”; Hell, those to whom God is obliged to say “Thy will be done”.
'Sall very well wanting to laugh with the sinners, but that may not prove in the long run to be one of the options.
S’cool. Add to the above that I also believe that God’s concept of mercy starts a few light-years up from where I leave off, and any extenuating circumstance I could possibly think of for anyone has already been taken into account to the utmost extent.
I’m a sucker for the scene in The Dream of Gerontius where, just before the Soul comes before God for judgement, he sees the Angel of the Agony - the one who consoled Jesus in the Garden of Gesthemane, and whose duty for evermore is to remind God of the time when he became acquainted with fear and desperation, and remember what a high value he set on every soul. Quite possibly not a true view of the hereafter (though who am I to think I can dispute with Cardinal Newman?), but a nice image to hold on to.
Or, you could realize that God is evil or insane, you’re right and he’s wrong, and it doesn’t matter because he’s omnipotent. There’s no reason to believe that God is right just because he’s a god, and there’s no reason he couldn’t send anyone or everyone to Hell for an unjust reason - or even for no reason.
I dont care what anyone believes about hell, its clear that nothing anyone could do no matter how evil and despicable is justly punished by ETERNITY in hell. I mean, 10,000 years, 100,000 years for the likes of Hitler/Kim Jong Il/Bin Laden etc, possibly more, but come on! It makes absolutely no sense. Any definition of God that includes that as a potential punishment is beyond evil.
SO, I would rather go to where that evil God isnt, (meaning hell) than where he IS, because its likely that if he was capable of sending everyone that didnt follow the evangelical world view he would likely do something worse over the next 100 billion years to his loyal fans.
In short, I would go to Hell for everyone / anyone at all.
There are religious traditions that include the concept of hell, but don’t think it’s eternal. Judaism and at least some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism are among them.
