For future reference I thought it would be a good idea to write a little about my own personal spiritual beliefs, since I will be writing about certain topics where this will come up.
“To hold to a doctrine or an opinion with the intellect alone is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by. If a man lives by the love of God, and obedience to God’s law, as far as he has recognized it, then whatever wrong opinions the man holds are outside of him. They are not true, and they cannot really be inside any good person. At the same time, no matter how many correct opinions another man holds, if he does not order his life by the law of God’s love, he is not a child of God. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks.”
This quote sums up much of what I believe. A person can hold many opinions about what is real in the spiritual world and what is not. Some people do not think there is a spiritual world. My personal thoughts on the matter are that there is a God, and that humans are spiritual creatures who will live forever; however, what I think is not the most important thing. It is how I live my life on a regular day to day basis that really matters.
If I bring up Christianity often, it is because when I was growing up, I had quite a bit of training in that particular religion, and as a result I have a fairly good grasp on contemporary Christian thinking. I am not anti-Christian; however, I disagree with much of what is currently held as Christian doctrine. I feel that there are many errors being taught as solid biblical teachings that are not really in the bible, but are rather extreme slants and interpretations. For example: A very common and widely held Christian idea is that unless you say a certain prayer that goes something like “Dear Jesus, I accept you as my Lord and Saviour and ask that you forgive all of my sins.” then you are not “saved” and you will go to hell forever when you die.
This idea is a very strong drive for the people who hold it to do as much as possible to convince other people to accept it as true, and to say the prayer so that they won’t go to hell.
In my own studies of the bible, I have not found this idea. I think that it comes from incomplete understanding of what Jesus taught rather than a deep grasp on biblical teachings. Specifically, there is a verse in the new testament half of the bible that says something like: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever should believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
Even if you accept this verse to be 100% correct, it does not follow that people who have not accepted Christianity will be going to hell. The idea is far too problematical. I can think of, off the top of my head, 3 different situations where it would be simply ridiculous to think that God would send people to hell simply because they did not “accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior”
- what if a child dies before it learns to speak. Will that child be doomed to hell?
- What about all of the humans who lived before Jesus was ever born, or, lived on a continent where it was impossible to have heard about Jesus?
- What if a person’s only information about Jesus comes from a psychopath who has a completely skewed version of Christianity and as a result, that person rejects Christianity on the grounds that it is the ravings of a lunatic and cannot be the true teachings of a loving God.
In each of these situations, it would be difficult for any thinking individual to imagine that a God who is based on love would send someone to be tormented forever simply because they were not “Saved Christians”
Yet, many many people hold to this very idea. They may come up with some clause that exampts certain instances, such as saying that children under a certain age are not responsible for themselves, or that people who were born before Jesus will be given a special chance to become Christians.
But to me, these clauses are stretches that are simply trying to enforce the basic idea that you have to hold to a certain opinion of Christianity are else you are doomed to hell.
Really, what all these clauses reveal, is the fact that it is impossible to attribute unfair practices to an all-powerful God while at the same time saying God is Love. The two ideas simply are at odds with each other. There is no stretch of belief-system that can make these two things dwell together happily.
What I have gathered from the Bible is that Jesus taught that if you live a certain way, you will come to develop a love for your fellow humans, and as a result, you will come to love God. When this happens, it will be like being born again, because your life will take an entirely new meaning: where before you may have been a selfish, greedy person, you will now try to think of other people. Where before your main worries were to accumulate money, you now trust that God will take care of you, and that the more important thing is spending time with people.
So consider for a moment that Jesus really did teach living a certain way as a gateway to knowing God. What would that lifestyle be? Loving others as yourself, Give to the poor, Don’t commit acts of violence, Trust in God to take care of your needs. These are all very basic teachings, but imagine if people started to live these type of things on a daily basis.
This brings up other religions. If other religions teach similar things, and Jesus taught that living like this was “following him”, then it could possibly be surmised that people who were making an effort to follow after these type of lifestyles might actually be living like God wanted them to be. Still further, God could be just as pleased with a Muslim or Buddhist who was living a certain way as a Christian who was trying to live a good life, or even an atheist who rejected the idea of God complelety, but still held to core beliefs that his own appetite was less important than other people not going hungry.
Would being a Christian suddenly be invalidated if all this were true? I do not think so. Spiritual beliefs are what guide us through our everyday lives; but if these same beliefs become a tyrannical idea that rejects everything else, then it may be time for a re-evaluation. Christianity is not the only religion prone to this sort of fault. For almost every opinion out there, there is always some person who starts thinking that everyone else needs to be converted, and that they hold the key to ultimate truth. Fortunately, we are not subject to these tyrants in our inner-selves.
“.. we are in no way bound to accept any explanation of God’s ways and God’s doings, if the explanation does not commend itself to our conscience.”
-George Macdonald
Posted on February 28th, 2009 by endle
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