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"But have you ever asked a Christian if you'll go to hell for being an atheist? The answer is pretty predictable." I'm guessing you haven't asked a very wide v

by colomon 15y ago

"But have you ever asked a Christian if you'll go to hell for being an atheist? The answer is pretty predictable." I'm guessing you haven't asked a very wide variety of Christians that question? Because in my experience you'd get a pretty wide variety of different answers...

bad_user 15y ago
You must from the US and it shows :) From my experience there are 2 kinds of Christians: those that believe in the New Testament and those that reinterpret it here and there to suit their own feelings about what is right and wrong (after all, a father wouldn't punish his children for all eternity and why punish a good man, even if he's an atheist?). However the New Testament doesn't really leave room for interpretation on this one. Non-believers will burn, says so Jesus. And if you ask any priest from any of the major Christian churches, like Catholic, Eastern Orthodox (my own), Protestant, the answer will be without doubt Yes. Of course, there's always Jehova's witnesses, that simply rewrote the bible, but I don't think that counts. There's nothing wrong with inventing your own religion based on a good set of moral values, especially casting away anything that leads to hatred of other people (dare I say it, Jesus would probably agree) and I do that myself, however I wouldn't shout from the roof-tops that I'm a Christian as that would be a little bending of the truth.
- jtbigwoo 15y ago
  Since Vatican II, the official Catholic position is that salvation is open to non-believers. Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Anglicans believe similarly. In fact, most protestant denominations believe the same thing. Your opinion is not held by the majority of Christian denominations. (From Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: "The non-Christian may not be blamed for his ignorance of Christ and his Church; salvation is open to him also.")
pjscott 15y ago
I actually tried that experiment at one point, and there were surprisingly few popular sets of hell criteria. The main disagreement seems to be over the following questions: 1. What is hell, and does anybody go there? (Popular answers: nonexistent, some kind of vague "separation from God", or a literal eternal torture place.) 2. Do people get saved from hell by faith, or by good deeds? 3. What about people who have never heard of Christianity, or who were indoctrinated into another religion so thoroughly that they will never accept it? 4. What about children who die before they can learn about religion? These four questions cover the great majority of the variations in Christian hell-beliefs.
- colomon 15y ago
  Well summarized. Some surprising-to-me data points I researched last night while working on a longer response to bad_user I decided not to post: 1) Apparently (based on a couple of surveys) at least 25% of American Christians don't believe in hell at all. 2) Based on an admittedly quick survey, the four gospels seem to strongly emphasize the positive benefits of believing in Jesus. When they do speak of hell, like the Sermon on the Mount, it's all in terms of what will happen to you if you're not a good person: "Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire." 3) The strongest phrase I was able to find in the gospels was "...but whoever does not believe [in Jesus] is condemned already..." In that context (John 3), it seems to "be condemned" is to not have eternal life -- and then it immediately softens it up three verses later with "But whoever does what is true comes to the light..." All in all, I found a lot less Biblical support for "If you don't believe in Jesus, you will go to hell" than I thought I was going to. Perhaps I just wasn't looking in the right places...

by colomon 15y ago

bad_user 15y ago

You must from the US and it shows :) From my experience there are 2 kinds of Christians: those that believe in the New Testament and those that reinterpret it here and there to suit their own feelings about what is right and wrong (after all, a father wouldn't punish his children for all eternity and why punish a good man, even if he's an atheist?). However the New Testament doesn't really leave room for interpretation on this one. Non-believers will burn, says so Jesus. And if you ask any priest from any of the major Christian churches, like Catholic, Eastern Orthodox (my own), Protestant, the answer will be without doubt Yes. Of course, there's always Jehova's witnesses, that simply rewrote the bible, but I don't think that counts. There's nothing wrong with inventing your own religion based on a good set of moral values, especially casting away anything that leads to hatred of other people (dare I say it, Jesus would probably agree) and I do that myself, however I wouldn't shout from the roof-tops that I'm a Christian as that would be a little bending of the truth.

jtbigwoo 15y ago
Since Vatican II, the official Catholic position is that salvation is open to non-believers. Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Anglicans believe similarly. In fact, most protestant denominations believe the same thing. Your opinion is not held by the majority of Christian denominations. (From Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: "The non-Christian may not be blamed for his ignorance of Christ and his Church; salvation is open to him also.")

pjscott 15y ago

I actually tried that experiment at one point, and there were surprisingly few popular sets of hell criteria. The main disagreement seems to be over the following questions: 1. What is hell, and does anybody go there? (Popular answers: nonexistent, some kind of vague "separation from God", or a literal eternal torture place.) 2. Do people get saved from hell by faith, or by good deeds? 3. What about people who have never heard of Christianity, or who were indoctrinated into another religion so thoroughly that they will never accept it? 4. What about children who die before they can learn about religion? These four questions cover the great majority of the variations in Christian hell-beliefs.

colomon 15y ago
Well summarized. Some surprising-to-me data points I researched last night while working on a longer response to bad_user I decided not to post: 1) Apparently (based on a couple of surveys) at least 25% of American Christians don't believe in hell at all. 2) Based on an admittedly quick survey, the four gospels seem to strongly emphasize the positive benefits of believing in Jesus. When they do speak of hell, like the Sermon on the Mount, it's all in terms of what will happen to you if you're not a good person: "Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire." 3) The strongest phrase I was able to find in the gospels was "...but whoever does not believe [in Jesus] is condemned already..." In that context (John 3), it seems to "be condemned" is to not have eternal life -- and then it immediately softens it up three verses later with "But whoever does what is true comes to the light..." All in all, I found a lot less Biblical support for "If you don't believe in Jesus, you will go to hell" than I thought I was going to. Perhaps I just wasn't looking in the right places...