Dark Knifer said:
Let's pretend that you are Jesus in the supernatural sense, like walking on water etc. How would you go about things?
Personally I'd get heaps of followers and crowd surf everywhere. Get some angels on electric guitars and go crazy. What would you do?
[sub]That pun was unintentional[/sub]
Well since I'm a Christian you can guess what my answer is. I'd probably do nothing different.
subtlefuge said:
The second paragraph sounds like a plot for a Dan Brown novel.
As for your first, I'm almost certain that Jesus was a universalist. The idea of Christian-exclusive salvation doesn't even appear in the Bible until after he died. I feel if more people felt the same way, the world would be a better place.
And yes, Jesus said that salvation was for both Jews and Gentiles (the two big cultural groups back in the day), it essentially meant it was for everyone. The message Jesus gave was perfect, simply love people and know God who loved you first, but we the people mess it up. As for it being Christian exclusive salvation, I know what you're saying. I think Christian is way too much of a separating term as it is a simple label in today's society. But you also have to remember that Jesus said He is the way, the truth and the life. No one goes to the Father except through Him. That ties into that when he was killed on the cross, the punishment we deserved from all the stuff we do wrong in this life was put onto Him so that we could be with the Father and know His love because all the stuff separating us from Him has now been taken away. You've seen the same sort of thing in the movies, bullet travelling towards someone in slow motion, you think 'they're a gonner', but then their saviour dives in-front and takes the bullet.
So anyway, as far as heaven and hell go. Jesus' message about that was very urgent, what you do with this life now matters. You have time on earth, why not love people, do good and bring heaven down here instead of twiddling your thumbs waiting to be taken up to it. Do I think God's mercy only extends to this one lifetime and this earth? No, I don't. I don't think hell is the eternal end for the so called 'unsaved' to go and suffer eternal torture and agony for what they did as mere flesh-sacks for 0 - 90 earth years (a flash in the pan as far as God's concerned). I think it's simply a place where we may go to learn the consequences of our bad actions in this life until we learn our lesson, in the same way a child gets sent to their room and grounded for being naughty in some way. I think God's mercy is everlasting and universal, so powerful it defeated death. As far as the bible goes, I get this idea from Ezekiel 16:53 where God declares He will restore the fortunes of all the cities and nations He previously devastated as punishment for their wickedness (as a bit of perspective, one of these cities is called sodom, where do you think we get the term sodomise from?). Sodom was destroyed back in the time of Abraham, in the old testament when God's wrath came unabated because no'one had made ultimate sacrifice like Jesus did. So that place and those people will have not gone to be with God for quite a while, you'd almost think He'd sent them to 'hell', but they will be restored one day.
But yeah, the one thing I always say to people who don't really understand my faith and call it a 'religion' is that the person I follow, Jesus, spent a lot of His time on earth basically slamming the religious people of His day for being pompous, arrogant and generally horrible. He even calls them sons of hell at one point! Using their own terminology, he totally slags them off! He essentially tells people to break away from all the chains of the oppressive religious law that had been created for them and to be free under the single law of love. So yeah, I personally can't stand religion the same way Jesus can't because all it does is drag people down into this hollow shell of ritualised emptiness. True Jesus following and true love breaks down the four walls of a church building and seeks to restore life and goodness.
