What is the basis for the belief among Christians that only they and no

one belonging to other faiths merits going to heaven?In fact, I am even more puzzled why they think those people are condemned to hell.
I posted this after reading some of the ideas expressed by Gandhi in another thread.If he was not the most Christian man that ever lived, I don't know who is.And he was a Hindu by his faith, I believe. To me that contradiction alone should be enough to require rexamination of this unfounded belief.

I've always wondered about this. It is one of the reasons I'm turned off by Christianity.

driving to the city. he was comparing these islamic extremists to pagans and native american cultures with the bloody sacrifices...

every time he opens his mouth, he proves, yet again, what an ignorant, uninformed asshole he is.

nutcase.
I think they use the quote from Jesus that nobody will enter the kingdom of heaven but through me. I trully doubt Jesus even said anything like that. The Bible has been interpreted so many times and each one with his own bias.:shrug:

to heaven, doesn't matter which religion it is.

Thou shalt have no other Gods before (besides) me.

That is an Old Testament commandment (Old Testament for Christians, but for Jews The Bible (and the only Bible). It is exactly that commandment which is one reason why Jews will not convert to Christianity. For most Jews to worship Jesus is idolatry, plain and simple. Jews do not believe God can (or at least that he would) ever assume human form. God is infinity, untouchable and even for very conservative Jews unnameable. The great "I am that I am." Jesus just doesn't fit that bill for Jews.

That includes Mary. I always questioned why Mary was deified. I mean, "Thou shall have no other..." seems fairly clear to me.

on edit: with of course one exception to the rule; Christ

different Christians beleive different things some don't even beleive in the concept of "heaven" as such, and amongst those that do there are plenty who don't think the rest of us are going to hell.

This also applies to every other religion - there are Muslims and Jews who beleive only their small section gets the party in the afterlife and there are others who are a little more braodminded about stuff like this.

BTW - Gandhi as a Hindu wouldn't be heading "heaven"wards until he'd reached mukti.

"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man goes to the Father except by me". I don't feel like looking up the Book, Chapter, & Verse. There are many other verses in the New Testament that express the same exclusiveness.

All the quotes in which Jesus calls himself the only way to God were written a couple hundred years after his death. They're mostly from the Gospel of John, the last of the four Gospels to be written, and an attempt to reconcile Christianity with Greek philosophy. It's even later than Paul's Epistles.

The Jesus of the earlier Gospels is much less mystical and much less exclusive.

Also, even Paul in Romans 2:12-16 seems to indicate that "righteous pagans" are home free.

Further, there are fragments of the Gospel of John that have been dated to late first century.

John's gospel is indeed the last of the four written, but its historical dating by current scholars is somewhere around 65-70 CE.

It might help to understand John as speaking not only to the Greek philosophers, but also speaking against the rise of gnostic sects that were claiming that "knowledge" (gnosis) was the path of true enlightenment, and the way to God. Their claim was that this secret knowledge was known only to a select few.

John's gospel uses their language and imagery of light and knowledge (in the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was with God, and THE WORD WAS GOD). John's attempt to set the record straight with the early Christian communities (and the various sects around them) is reflected in his exclusive language.

Therefore, you get Jesus statements like:

"I AM the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life." (John 8: 12)

Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him." (John 14: 5-7)

**************

Now, taken out of context and used as stand-alone verses, they do sound like the Jesus of the fundamentalists. And nobody questions them, because after all, "IT IS IN THE BIBLE."

But if you read John as a clear message against the gnostics, you get a different picture. It is through Jesus that true knowledge of God is found - not through a secret knowledge.

That's also why Jesus and Nicodemus (a pharisee) met late at night to have an honest and frank discussion about religion. It's where Jesus tells Nick that you have to be "born again/born from above." He is telling Nick that knowledge of scripture alone is not enough. And it is in THIS context that you get the famous JOHN 3:16 passage.

(And before anyone jumps in with anti-semitic claims, it is through the JEWISH LINEAGE that all Gentiles are reconciled to God. Without Jesus, the Gentiles are completely left out of the picture. John is not writing to the Jewish community - he is writing to the gentiles.)

I've heard the 'no man comes to the Father except through me' A LOT.

And I'm somewhat aware of the gnostics. But claiming the quotes come from within a conflict with gnosticism....this is FABULOUS.

You might want to check with one of your local pastors from a mainline protestant or RC church.

Let me check at Cokesbury and Amazon, and I'll get back to you.

a lot of good resources are available on-line.

I think he was affirming Gnostic philosophy, and helping to increase his follower's understanding of it. When Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth and the life..." he's not saying, to paraphrase, Jesus is the way and the truth and the life... He's making the most profound and clearest statement of enlightenment. He says, "I AM, the way, the truth, and the Life...", i.e. self consciousness to cosmic consciousness. The divine spark in each of us, the "I AM". When Moses spoke with God on the mountain top, he asked God who should he tell the people of Israel sent him/spoke to him. God's response was, "I AM that I AM". So Jesus told his followers that same thing. The God within, of which we are all seeking to know (Gnosis), the I AM, is the way, the Truth, and the Life. He further emphasized this when he said, "Ye are the Temple of the Living God."

It is a matter of faith that one believes it to be true. What is interesting is how so few believers even have a clue where the Bible came from (for example, when you tell a Protestant that the Bible is in fact assembled by the Church they freak out. Most believe the Church came after the Bible, how they figure this I don't have a clue. When you tell them it was assembled by the Catholic church they REALLY freak out. Of course who else would put it together but the church? And what other church was there? You can follow the Catholic hierarchy literally back to Peter in Rome.

as an answer to this question.

jesus is a man who found and evolved into the christ consciousness. herein lies the big split. concrete thinkers vs abstract thinkers. the concrete thinkers (the fundies) are stuck on jesus the man, son of god, cross, and literal translations of words and have missed entirely the christ consciousness part--the spirit of his words: LOVE UNSELFISHLY.

The quote you posted rings true. I think the variable words would be Father and Me. What is father and what is me?

A concrete thinker's literal translation would be an actual father and son in the human image (admit it, an image of 2 white men popped up in your head).

The abstract thinker's translation would be you cannot get to the Father (god, nirvana, enlightenment, heaven, atman, etc) without me (unselfish love, jesus christ, muhammed, compassion, etc).

after the start of Christianity.

Jews don't really have this thing about going to heaven. So, it was a powerful recruitment and conversion device to tell people if you believe in Jesus, you can go to heaven.

Heaven. Christians believe that Christ is God. They believe He came to earth, became a sacrifice, and thus fulfilled God's requirement that there must be a sacrifice to cover sin. It gets very complicated when you start trying to describe the Trinity as Christians believe it.

In the Old Testament, the priests were constantly providing sacrifices to atone for their own sins and the sins of the people.

Jesus' sacrifice was the end of the law for those who believe.

There's a lot of evidence to suggest that Christianity was originally a mystery religion, more similar to the Gnosticism of a century or two later than to any of the orthodox churches.

Mystery religous are sort of like Zen koans. You ponder on paradoxes until rationality breaks down and you pop through into enlightenment.

But that sort of thing isn't for everyone. You need time, and patience, and probably a certain level of brains.

That's why Christianity-lite was invented for the masses. No paradoxes, no meditation, no enlightenment. All you had to do was believe six impossible things before breakfast and whoopee, you were saved. No difficult mental gymnastics required.

Once that had happened, Gnostic Christianity was doomed. Mass religion will always swamp out elite religion, especially once it gets the secular authorities behind it.

They do have elements in common, and there were probably gnostic sects in existence in the early days of Paul's evangelical missions. Paul's concern was that some mystical and spiritual elements were corrupting the message of the gospel. He spoke out against incorporating certain things as necessary for salvation (i.e., the "gift of tongues"), and instead, states that God bestows a VARIETY of spiritual gifts to the Christian community.

I truly believe that "Christianity-Lite" (an EXCELLENT term!) is an invention of Frontier American Christianity. And I blame a good part of it on my own Methodist heritage, where they appointed "local pastors" who served as preachers, but had very little theological training. We are still reeling from the after-effects of that, with people who claim "you don't need a seminary degree to know what the Bible says." (sure, there's some truth to that; but where else does one encounter historical/redactical criticism? And how many of you reading this even KNOW what that is?)

With the rise of frontier Methodism, Christianity became more of a populist rather than authoritarian religion. We believe in Apostolic Succession: that the faith we proclaim is the faith of the Apostles. But many of the evangelical churches cannot make that claim. They have usurped the Bible to make their own claims. But paradoxically, people still maintained their faith in the "preacher."
(in fact, many of them claim pastoral over institutional authority.)

it comes to abortion and gays. Everyone who doesn't hate those two things is marching straight to hell.

is probably an pagan European blend into the Judaeo tradition that best can be seen at its legalistic worst in extreme pharasaism, lawkeeping. Merit and honor corrupted the clear understanding of grace so much that its inclusion into orthodoxy beyond simple dogma may have aggravated the the reformation splits.

It's about authority, God as your typical emperor, therefore characterized as your typical Euro barbarian liege king. Conservative Catholic texts using that terminology appear cold, masculine, dominant, demanding of allegiance and submission. The Old Testament into the New emphasized the personal, parental and transcendent view of God. But in the end after the same old brutal "World" mentioned in John 1 absorbs the organization into its culture, God becomes an affirmation of the ruling monarchical warlord system. The heart is guitted and left to powerless feminine mysticism in the hovels of the serf.

Luther almost gets free of it though by relying himself on the protection of rebellious sublords. No one merits being a child of God. Demerits don't build up a definable blood debt that can be scaled and piecemeal atoned for. Nor is the tribal exclusivity of the world as practiced by nations and kings a fitting model to feedback into the sheer universality of the Gospel message. The parable of the sheep and goats shows the only merit is ACTING with compassion and justice and even ignorance or denial of the tenets of doctrine has little bearing. BEING like or with God is more or less a blind date I suppose- Whether God exists or not, that is the message of Jesus. The man made accretions are not always so "godlike" and make a false idol of a refashioned monster..

She was a Southern Baptist, but she wasn't a fundie type. She believed if you were a kind and decent person, you would go to Heaven and you didn't have to be a Christian to get there although it helped because then you got directions. She also believed that bad people went to Hell but not forever. They stayed there until they had paid for all their sins, kind of like prison time. Once they had paid their debt, then they too would be allowed to go to Heaven.

Your grandmother and I have similar theological ideas... :-)

I've always liked the idea of a purgatory where people had to go atone for their "sins" in proportion to how much unhappiness and suffering they caused during their lifetime. Not necessarily the fire and brimstone treatment, but somewhere where they had to confront and dwell upon the misery they caused others, and maybe experience prolonged separation from any other people and/or God.

Alternatively, you could incorporate the Hindu model of cycles of reincarnation into this and have people be reincarnated to experience in their future lives the suffering they inflicted upon others in their past lives. At some point they would break the cycle of suffering and be released into heaven or non-being or whatever.

In any case, I've always thought that if there is a God, he/she/it would be merciful and not sentence anyone to eternal torment.

-SM, hopeful agnostic....

Armed agents will arrive soon to send you to re-education camp.

Works in religion, politics, life. Dispenses with the need for responsibility, introspection, taking charge of one's destiny. The feeling of superiority combined with the hatred of the different one soothe primitive, devolved psyches.

of Gods mercy and they were pagans looked down on by the Jews. He also told one of the thieves on the cross beside him he would be with him in heaven. I think if you actually pick up the Bible and read it that there's a lot of things he said that could be taken either way or outright repudiate the way some of Christian churches put forth the message.

Everything happening right now has religious overtones.

I have several questions. Is George Bush using his Christian faith to facilitate Armageddon? Will he sit back and allow Iran obtain nukes in two years? (Experts say that is the time line.)Iran will use nukes offensively. Israel says they will not allow Iran to obtain Nukes.
Is this a set up, like 911 was a set up, by standing by and letting
Armageddon begin. Armageddon brings on the return of the Messiah for
some right wing nut job Christians.
Being Christian, I resent the heretics that have high jacked my personal savior for there personal financial gain and total lust and greed for power and control over. They are evil incarnate.

They think they got it going on, huh?

Funny how they think THEY have all the answers and are the only ones going to heaven.

I don't categorize all Moslems as terrorists or beheaders, etc.

I don't want to be categorized with the fundamentalists either.

What would you need to start a "Christain Left" movement, it was quite effective with civil rights in the '60's. There are plenty mixed in at mass with the wacky ones, they are a quiet minority.

arose after the death of Jesus. The Christian religion was separating from the Jewish Jesus sect and needed its own identity. As myth makers, the Gospel authors and the polemicists like Paul needed to (a) make the myth special through special and unique salvation and (b) appeal to the weaker sectors of the Roman Empire, a prime audience, by giving them something, special and unique salvation, that made them superior to their material masters and the secular intellectuals.

Any of this sound familiar? There will be a quiz at the end of the day.

I am a Christian and I can assure you that the God I worship is not a God that is convinced that the world is going to end and is going to hell because the world is basically evil, as well as all religions that are not Christian are going to hell as well. And that God hates a fallen world and perhaps if we are all lucky and follow some religious fanatics such as the born again end of the world people (like the Republican Taliban) then we will then have a ticket to heaven.

In my opinion God gave us a mind and he does not want his people to worship him out of fear of going to hell but rather because of our own free Will, and we can worship him in any religion or spirituality that makes a person happy.

Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange whom from (1909-1960) taught fundamental, dogmatic, and spiritual theology at the Angelicum in Rome, and served as a consultor to the Holy See (The Vatican) said that truly supernatural and mystical contemplation is certainly possible outside the visible church, since God is the master of his gifts and wherever
there is sincerity and an earnest desire for truth, he will not deny the gifts of his grace.

He would call them hypocrites and shun them. Nuff said.

A methodist pastor (me) dies and goes to heaven. She's met at the gate by St. Peter, and tells her that things are a little backed-up in the admittance line, but since she's probably going in anyways, asks her if she'd like a tour of heaven.

He takes her to the vast, open fields, where she sees all the animals, including her favorite pets. She's delighted to learn that animals go to heaven.

He takes her to heaven's bowling alley, and she learns that her mom was right: thunder was the sound of the angels bowling.

He takes her to the holy city of God. There she sees other methodists, lutherans, catholics, baptists, presbyterians. She notices that there's a place for the mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses. There are also Jews, Muslims, Hindis, Buddhists, and members of all kinds of religions and faiths.

She is surprised to meet many agnostics and atheists there as well.

St. Peter says, "Well, that's about it. Do you have any questions?"

"Yes," she replied. "I noticed that one group of people were way off in a corner by themselves. Who are they?"

St. Peter whispers, "Shh...those are the fundamentalists. Be very quiet. They think they're here all by themselves."

I'll have to use that one.

Just as there are plenty of theists who don't condemn me to hell, there are plenty of us atheists who have zero problem with religious folk and we can differentiate between fundies and everyone else.

Quick version:

Going back in time to pre-man, we have the fall of lucifer. Lucifer rebelled and was promised a final punishment.

Man comes along, God's new creation. Satan knows God's one weakness. He is the same always. Satan leads man away from God into sin, satan wins as God must give the same punishment, death.

God figures out a way around this. Someone must pay for the sin, so he chooses himself to save us. He comes here as a man, lives life without sin, dies for us, and takes on the punishment meted out (thus restoring balance to the equation). We are saved.

We have only to accept this idea, his gift, and it is ours. Some will not accept it, some will reject it. The good news is we are not bound by the same rules and punishment that lucifer was, we have an out. Our sins can be hidden and therefore god can remain consistent and true and allow us eternal life without him going against his own rules. Lucifer's logic trap failed as he did not take into account God's creativity. God smashed the head of the serpent (ie his ego) by outsmarting him.

the good news to mankind is that even though we started off as lucifer ended, we can evade the same outcome. The laws of 'spiritual physics' are not able to keep us from his promise because he filled in the equation with himself. If you don't accept this gift, how can you use it? God does not want any to perish, but he wants all to have the choice.

At any rate, as mentioned, this is the short version of it. God is not all powerful in a sense as we know it. He has rules he has made he has to follow, else he would not be God. Lucifer knows those limitations and uses them to destroy those God loves, and God must play that game because he made the rules and cannot go back on his word (ie, I am the same yesterday, today, and forever).

Not definitive, but my take on it from years of study and being everything from Baptist, penecostal, lutheran, agnostic, atheist, tibetan buddhist, new ager, and back to christian. I speak only for myself and this is only a generic opinion related to me and may not represent the view of others who have the same self described label of 'christian'.

But it seems that some would prefer to complain about the color of the lifeboats. I'd much rather see forgiveness offered freely than see everyone called to account based on what we all deserve (which wouldn't be pretty)

Heaven, Hell, Death, Eternal Life, "Sin", Redemption- they're all in your head. Do with them what you will, or don't. Spend your life stressing out about those things, or spend it feeling superior because you've got "the answer". Worry endlessly about what's going to happen when you inevitably shuffle off this mortal coil, or keep yourself busy by preaching at people out of "concern for their souls" all the while smiling smugly... Bend your brain coming up with logical "explanations" for things no one will ever have a definitive answer for, not in this Universe at least.

...or, blow them off entirely and use your time on Earth and your grey matter for other things.

There. You're redeemed.

and people will do what you want. The boogieman is a time tested and well proven technique for encouraging children to do what you want. Unfortunately most people never reach adulthood and remain children all their lives so the boogieman remains an effective technique for coercion.

Sweeny Tod, Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, Terrorists, have all been the boogieman at one time or another. Many Christians feel the need to align God with these illustrious humans in order to enforce their beliefs.

I wonder what God *really* thinks of people who tell others that he is the ultimate boogieman. Fundamentalists might get a pretty shocking surprise when they stand in front of his throne and watch him pull the lever that opens the trap door to hell.
Heh heh heh. Could it be that there really is justice in the universe?

OK, so Pentecostals are Christian, right? And Methodists are Christian, and every other little store-front and pole-barn church is Christian, right?

Well, then how come you can go into churches where you will be told that you are in the ONLY place where the "TRUE Word of GAWD" is taught, because the pastor of THAT church has the "Annointing", and all those other churches are teaching false doctrine.

I have heard this. I have been told "Iffn ye don't go to MY church, yer goin' t'HELL, boy!"

It ain't just other religions, it's other CONGREGATIONS of the SAME denomination!

What a way to resolve your paranoia and feelings of self-worthlessness. Find a church where you can gather 2-3 times a week while some guy who got his divinty degree from a matchbook cover tells you that YOU are the TRUE "chosen one", and everyone else out there that conspires to hold you back will "get theirs come Judgement Day".

but by me." John 14:6

I don't necessarily interpret that to mean that only christians will go to heaven, but many other christians do.

My church teaches metaphysical Bible interpretation. They teach that Jesus was the man of Nazareth, the carpenter's son. They teach that the "Christ" part refers to a type of consciousness, that gives any who embraces the teachings a part of that consciousness (think of an all-good version of Jung's collective unconscious being like "the force"). We believe that the "Kingdom of Heaven" is not necessarily something that comes after death, that it is something that humanity, when in touch with the consciouness of greater good, can bring about on earth. We also believe that you see glimpses of it when you look for it in daily life, in other people. These beliefs are not necessarily only for those who "accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior" and are now "washed in the blood of the lamb".

www.unity.org

The one with the subject, "I don't think Jesus/Christ was speaking against the gnostic sects..."