Such a pleasure it is to read your answer, Bob. Christianity would be a good thing for everyone if they could see the Holy Spirit from this personal point of view. So, just as I thought, the answer lies within. If you can admit to where you are now and know where you want to go - it isn’t a matter of judgment at all but of the personal journey. Funny, the journey is what has moved me in my daily search all along.
There will always be zealots and it isn’t fair to hold them up as our guide. They seem to forget that when it is all said and done their pure and elitist attitude will only push them further away from the Light that they are so drawn to.
Matt. 7:1-5 Do not judge lest you be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.
Yes, God always watches us and hopes for the best. The highest will, the most supreme legacy, the most exalted honors, and deepest course into the routes of expansion prime and gear us up for the level that God knows that we have to be at. Those who are weak, shallow, without emotion or emblems of divine guidance falter, succumb to the easy way out, flicker away from life, and fail, ties down by their own puny negativity.
But, if you find inner peace, harness the flow of God, act from the sacred heart, and channel the most wise orders from the virtuous, then it’s love, life, purity, and endless oceans of joy everyday, painted and restored into pristine form for you (your reward, your judgment from God)!
The problem with this thinking imo is that it’s based on a literal reading of the Bible which is inherently exclusivistic (new word?) and leads to what I believe are wrongfully elitist doctrines.
The Bible is, as Swedenborg noted, a book of correspondences. Salvation–what one is saved from–is difficult to define because the symbolic language of Scripture, which states we’re saved from “sin”–references effects, not the actual cause. (The cause is value itself; we’re being saved (cleansed) from falsity, the denomination of value in human essence that corrupts and causes sin. Humans literally have a spiritual disease.) The concept of sin qua sin is like pornography: you know it when you see it but it’s almost impossible to define. Organized Christianity has ripped the title “God’s favorite” from the Jews and held it up triumphantly like a championship belt. The Jews didn’t get it, and Christianity doesn’t get it either: God doesn’t have favorites. Everyone is saved already in eternity, life is a big play wherein hell is instituted in time against the falsity we create within ourselves and fuels our acting. This reality is what is really expressed in the Bible in a unified, coherent allegorical system in virtually every book of the Bible.
We all just have to act out our parts on the stage of matter in time and space. The Jews saw the other nations as the bad guys. Christians generally see the Jews as the bad guys. (Those who say they don’t are disingenuous if they believe only Christians are saved.) The point of the Jews’ rejection of Christ is not that they’re bad guys, that was just the part in the play they had to perform. Their rejection was the symbolic presentation of everyman. They are us and we them. When we see the evil the Jews and gentiles committed, we’re looking in a mirror at ourselves, at every man, woman and child ever born. They were a representation. Hitler played his role, Idi Amin played his, Joan of Arc played hers. None are bad, we all just have a role to play. We learn by making bad decisions, falsifying our souls and are cleansed in the purifying fires of hell to restoration before entering eternity. This isn’t what the Bible “says” (literalism), but it’s what God teaches in it.
I’m not dissing Christianity as bad. We’re all bad and there’s a lot of truth in even the literal. Just saying the literal is not and should not be the focus of the book.
I hold that force is truth. Value–reduced to two simple denominations, truth and falsity-- is for me an abstract quality that exerts force in the ‘real’ world. The falsified soul has, by virtue of its fragmental falsification, a propensity to act falsely (sin). The delusion that one can sin with impunity is grounded in a misunderstanding of what the Bible actually teaches, as re “…He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed.” (1Pe 2:24) Christ didn’t die so we can sin with impunity, He died that when we kill ourselves with our willful sin He destroys the root cause of that sin (falsity in essence) and resurrects us–fragmentally and progressively–to life by restoring the destroyed parts of essence to a true state. Death and resurrection. Thus, Paul isn’t contradicted: " “…the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus…” (Rom 6:23) One suffers the death of death (falsity) by their own sin. This is like the dog throwing itself in rage against its own hated image in a mirror…with each crash, his hatred is lessened until at last it learns to love what it sees. Its falsity is removed and it is able to unite with the truth, wherein love resides.
By destroying the root of sin, the desire to sin is gradually removed in those who practice faith. This is the work of hell, the destruction of falsity and its restoration to a truth state, worked out gradually in those of faith in time (sanctification) from a more theologically orthodox point of view. This is open to all humans; thus, the moral atheist or Muslim can, by virtue of conforming to Truth (Christ) in time and being cleansed and strengthened internally, gain the salvation of faith in time. It’s well known that psychotherapy generally seeks to bring one to face personal falsehood. This is necessarily performed gradually; no one willingly walks into a fiery death, but if the patient can be burned a little at a time, he can often be brought to the truth about himself. This is man working with Christ to perform a spiritual function, introducing a broken person to the fires of hell (truth) so that the false can be destroyed.
When Jesus said, “…you shall die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am He, you shall die in your sins.” (Jn 8:24) He was speaking beyond the manmade religious requirement to believe in a man (Jesus), which breeds elitism, to hear and obey the call to believe in truth. “Believe in Me” in its broadest meaning is “Believe in prescriptive/moral Truth”, and this is to all persons regardless of religious demeanor. The ‘devout’ Christian thus theoretically could suffer cleansing hellfire with the unbeliever in an “all at once” event [most likely at the precise moment of physical death, prior to entering eternity), but this results in a restoration to a wholly true state the ‘hard way’, which those of faith avoid.
Another possibility is that every person is cleansed in various areas in time just in proportion to their union with Truth, and the same “all” yet proportionately suffer the harsh and immediate cleansing of “hell” in those areas of the soul that yet produce a stubborn clinging to false beliefs. There is no more fair and just scenario than this; everyone gets exactly what they deserve. In the end, all are reclaimed and wholly restored to a true (perfect) state.