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> Stance on abortion among your brothers in church Denominational stance is reluctance: https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-united-methodist

> Stance on abortion among your brothers in church Denominational stance is reluctance: https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-united-methodist-position-on-abortion https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-unite... > Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell I am not Baptist. But the ones I speak to, who are dedicated fundamentalists, seem to believe that I am going to hell since I am not and will never be "saved" in the way they prescribe. Furthermore, in their view, nearly everyone who existed before Jesus's time is condemned to Hell except for a select few who foretold of Jesus's coming. Crazy theology! Also, keep in mind that Baptists have diversity. The Southern Baptists are the firebrand fundamentalists. There are others that are almost indistinguishable from mainline Protestantism.

coliveira 6y ago
The idea of hell was widespread in ancient times. For example, the Greeks believed it. They also believed that everyone went to hell. This is exactly the mythology that christians spread nowadays. The only difference is that Christians believed that the few who accepted Christ would be rescued from Hell, the same way Eurydice was saved by Orpheus (hence the idea that the church is the bride of Jesus). It is all a rehash of ancient myths.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I think calling it a rehash is unfair. I would call it "independent discovery", where the same general lived human experience gives rise to the same general ideas about the universe and society and right and wrong. Religion is a technology for dealing with the experience of being a person.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    I don't think it is independent discovery, because Christianity was born at a time when Greek ideas were widespread (Palestine having been a Greek-dominated area for centuries before the arrival of Romans). I believe there was an amalgamation of elements from ancient Hebrew religion with other pagan myths mainly from Greece.
    - brundolf 6y ago
      "Independent" may have been overstating it, I just think something is being lost when we frame one religion (or even a subset of its concepts) as being purely derivative of another. Just because ideas are similar doesn't necessarily mean they have the exact same origin, and in fact I think it's much more interesting to look at the cases where they didn't have the same origin, because it tells us something about ourselves as human beings.

coliveira 6y ago

The idea of hell was widespread in ancient times. For example, the Greeks believed it. They also believed that everyone went to hell. This is exactly the mythology that christians spread nowadays. The only difference is that Christians believed that the few who accepted Christ would be rescued from Hell, the same way Eurydice was saved by Orpheus (hence the idea that the church is the bride of Jesus). It is all a rehash of ancient myths.

brundolf 6y ago
I think calling it a rehash is unfair. I would call it "independent discovery", where the same general lived human experience gives rise to the same general ideas about the universe and society and right and wrong. Religion is a technology for dealing with the experience of being a person.
- coliveira 6y ago
  I don't think it is independent discovery, because Christianity was born at a time when Greek ideas were widespread (Palestine having been a Greek-dominated area for centuries before the arrival of Romans). I believe there was an amalgamation of elements from ancient Hebrew religion with other pagan myths mainly from Greece.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    "Independent" may have been overstating it, I just think something is being lost when we frame one religion (or even a subset of its concepts) as being purely derivative of another. Just because ideas are similar doesn't necessarily mean they have the exact same origin, and in fact I think it's much more interesting to look at the cases where they didn't have the same origin, because it tells us something about ourselves as human beings.