"By their fruits you shall know them." Unlike Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, I have no way of measuring anyone else's faith, but I do know a thing or two fruit inspection.
I have faith that whoever is in charge of this universe has greater wisdom and a larger sense of justice than those who claim so loudly to be his only followers.
I do not believe god makes junk or gives us reason and a sense of wonder and a strong sense of right or wrong only to have it count for nothing if we don't answer a single historical trivia question to his pleasing. More importantly, those who wrote the book you cited (but perhaps have not gotten around to reading) do not state this either, certainly not with the clarity you would like it to.
I find the idea of hell offensive, intellectually and morally, and oh-so-conveniently unprovable. Its invention and propagation are traceable to declining church or temple attendance by a rightly skeptical audience who wanted to explore more generous and compassionate faith traditions or none at all. It may exist but so are a thousand dancing virgins or blissful oblivion or a very long game of Tetris.
I don't know and either does anyone else. We may believe it, we may even want it, but we cannot know it in the sense that non-psychotic people use the term.
If I had to tally all of the religions that believe all the other religions are going to hell then the resulting list would probably be longer than one of the lineages from David to Joseph (either one, take your pick). From the suppression of the Aryan doctrine** (forever after known as the Arian heresy) in 325 to the the mutual "I excommunicated you first!" tit for tat of the Great Schism to the pointless religious-fueled cruelty in Northern Ireland, this game of mutual condemnation only seems to end when there is no one left to kill, or people suddenly wake up to the idea that midnight bowling is at least as entertaining as Midnight Mass.
I have faith that whoever is in charge of this universe has greater wisdom and a larger sense of justice than those who claim so loudly to be his only followers.
I do not believe god makes junk or gives us reason and a sense of wonder and a strong sense of right or wrong only to have it count for nothing if we don't answer a single historical trivia question to his pleasing. More importantly, those who wrote the book you cited (but perhaps have not gotten around to reading) do not state this either, certainly not with the clarity you would like it to.
I find the idea of hell offensive, intellectually and morally, and oh-so-conveniently unprovable. Its invention and propagation are traceable to declining church or temple attendance by a rightly skeptical audience who wanted to explore more generous and compassionate faith traditions or none at all. It may exist but so are a thousand dancing virgins or blissful oblivion or a very long game of Tetris.
I don't know and either does anyone else. We may believe it, we may even want it, but we cannot know it in the sense that non-psychotic people use the term.
If I had to tally all of the religions that believe all the other religions are going to hell then the resulting list would probably be longer than one of the lineages from David to Joseph (either one, take your pick). From the suppression of the Aryan doctrine** (forever after known as the Arian heresy) in 325 to the the mutual "I excommunicated you first!" tit for tat of the Great Schism to the pointless religious-fueled cruelty in Northern Ireland, this game of mutual condemnation only seems to end when there is no one left to kill, or people suddenly wake up to the idea that midnight bowling is at least as entertaining as Midnight Mass.
If the divinity of Jesus is so painfully self-evident that its questioning merits eternal punishment, as some fundamentalist Christians insist, why - fully 3 centuries after the birth of Jesus, did half of his followers not believe in it, and why did it require a decree by the Nicean Council in 325 to settle the matter (by fiat, not argument or persuasion, and mainly for political reasons - in an attempt, ultimately unsuccessful, since the Western half of the Roman Empire was to collapse a few decades later)? Why did so many who read the original Greek texts, such as Isaac Newton come to the conclusion Jesus was not divine?
Those who are confronted with textual counter-evidence from the book they like to thump so much more than read will sometimes counter that unless you first have decided to believe what you are going to read in the Bible, you will not really understand it. That is a strange, circular observation that does not apply to any work of literature or textbook. Even granting that reading a text with a certain spirit of generosity may make you more likely to overlook the glaringly inaccurate or just plain weird parts, it is intellectually dishonest to claim that only those predisposed to believe this of all texts claiming to be sacred and vying for our attention have faith.
A child who believes in Santa Claus has a certain form of faith; one who realizes it was his father dressing up all along, after overcoming the initial shock, is now free to have a much more honest and fleshed-out perspective of the world, his parents, and personal responsibility. He now must do right not because someone can magically read his thoughts and bring him presents if he is good, but because doing right is the right thing to do. There is no more evidence that those who do not believe in god suddenly go on killing sprees, freed from the inhibitions of a punitive father in the sky, anymore than those who have such a fearful vision of an all-knowing, all-powerful, judging god are any less likely to start wars, launch crusades, or turn planes into cruise missiles.
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