First up I will say that im not a religious person, if being an athiest is believeing in science then I guess im an athiest. But im not a die hard, faith hating bastard.
I have a few questions i’ve thought about over the years that im sure are common.
What happens if say, a tribe of people are raised on a remote island and never gain access to the bible or Christianity, yet they live a moralistic and natural existance. What is thier judgement? (heaven/hell ect.)
Is god universal or limited to Earth?
Why did the bible change from the old testament to the new testament? and is the bible updated?
If a person lived the majority of their life as a cruel, hateful and violent person, but on his/her deathbed GENUINELY felt remorse and regret for his/her actions and also opened his heart and life to god, would that be enough to grant him a key to heaven.
Actually, i’ve forgoten most of the questions I was going to ask so i’ll stop there.
I don’t think religion is bull, I belive many people benefit from things such as prayer, confession, faith, trust in god ect. but I believe that is related to the way the brain functions more than anything.
These are all very good and significant questions Mat. I will answer to what I believe to be the right ones. My answers will be based from a Christian standpoint.
That question has intrigued me for awhile. While it is stated in the New Testament of the King James Version of the Bible that no man will got to the Father (God) except through the Son (Jesus), God may have exceptions ot variations to this thought. That is why God admonishes to people following Christ’s Word to spread the Gospel of the Word. My honest opinion is I don’t know how God will deal with those situations.
2.God is omnipresent in the whole of the universe since in my opinion he created it. I will not expand further unless you would like to hear more.
3.The Bible being in two parts concerns the Jewish people believe in the Old Testament while both are relevant to Christians. The New Testament describes the New Covenant between God and man with Jesus being the intercessor for our sins, Christ was/is the ultimate sacrifice for mankind. For some reason the Jewish people who were waiting for the new Messiah did not recognize Jesus being Him. So, they still hold to the Old Testament as their word for guidance to God.
Mat as far as I understand, if someone who repents at their point of death and asks Jesus to accept them to be their Saviour, they will become a Christian to be taken to Heaven. This happened with the two people who crucified along with Christ at Mt. Calvary. The parable of the Prodigal son describes the same principle with which I would be glad to tell you about if you would like to know more.
No one knows for sure, and there are passages in the bible that could swing either way.
Again, it’s not an issue that the bible speaks directly to. The bible takes the position that God is the God of heaven and earth, and the stars in the sky. That’s pretty universal but doesn’t deal with aliens or any other more modern question.
Basically, the OT is God’s dealing with man before Jesus and the NT is God’s dealing with man after Jesus. Jesus changed everything.
The bible is updated in the sense that scholars are continually updating small inaccuracies that arose from the continual copying of manuscripts. There are many. many, many, very old copies with small differences and people work hard to decipher which version of each text is the most accurate. For example, most modern translations are a great deal more accurate that the King James version simply because many manuscripts of bible texts have been uncovered since the KJV was made.
Absolutely, it would. This is both the beauty and the offense of the gospel. It doesn’t matter how bad you’ve lived your life, God will always accept a sinner who repents.
IMO it has nothing to do with living a perceived subjective good and moral life, its all a sliding scale compared to any absolute, so its apples to oranges in the worst way.
However I will say that I believe (based on pure provable logic) that Salvation has nothing to do with these subjective ideas but instead is based on the Absolute of accepting Truth and reality that is presented to us all by nature, and giving in to it as above you, nothing more.
So to answer the question, in my opinion anyone anywhere under any conditions (even Helen Keller) can accept Truth and reality and accept it as their good master, then this would be sufficient for salvation to any good logical God. Otherwise God is a liar according to all the evidence I see.
In response to this, I felt I needed to start another thread that focuses specifically on question 1, which I feel has not been answered satisfactorily.
A good book on that is “Eternity in Their Hearts” by Don Richardson. God never leaves Himself without witness. He judges them based on how they have responded to the revelation they have received.
He created the universe, including the Earth. I’m not sure what you are asking exactly. Do you mean, if there is life on other planets, does He care about that life, or just life on Earth? I’m sure He would care about all life in the universe.
The Old Testament was foreshadowing… preparation… for the New Testament. The Old Testament used the old sacrificial system which had to be repeated over and over… symbolic of the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus.
If the repentance is genuine and not a “just in case hell exists” sort of thing, then it doesn’t matter when it takes place… God will hear it. Jesus spoke of this in the parable of the workers who got paid the same wages even though they just barely started working.
Im not a christian (in most peoples eyes) but I do take offense at anyone who says that beliving in science makes you an atheist. Science does not know if God is real nor does it care.
to answer your questions from my understanding of the christian.
1.The bible never lists the people who are going to heaven or hell. It talks about the only way to find eternal life is via Jesus, I dont belive that it says anything about how you find jesus, or wether you even have to find him in this life, my personal favorate is the belife that it doesnt even matter what you belive, just that you hold up the ideals that Jesus upheld.
Christians would say universal and so would I
“Heaven hell and the world move on”
Lady of the lake (merlin)
The earth changes, it makes sense that the rules would change to fit. What is best for mankind at one time will not always be the best thing for it.
Forgivness is divine. Alot of people dont understand the benifits of forgivness but when someone is truely repentant it means that they have changed, that they are not the same as they were when they commited the acts and the person that they have become should be given mercy.
I consider myself influenced by esoteric Christianity, so I’ll try and answer the questions in that vain. My explanations will of course differ from others.
You’ve got to understand what hell represents. It represents a mental state in which the man comes to wisdom and realizes that he has thrown away his life, or done wrong to his brothers and sisters, etc, and this sends him into a state of utter despair. The whole ‘being consumed by fire’ thing, represents being enlightened, for fire was often used around the time Christianity appeared to represent intellect (hence why the ancient Egyptians worshipped the sun and the Zoroastrians worshipped fire - light/fire/gold all represent the Divine Intellect), and hence being thrown into fire represents being intellectually enlightened about the truth. If a man has wasted his life, this realization will understandably pain him greatly, knowing that he did not do with his life what he was supposed to do, and there may well be “much weeping and gnashing of teeth”.
As for people on a remote island, you don’t specify whether they have their own religion, as all religions are different ways of expressing the same fundamental truths. But if they don’t, then it’s hardly their fault that they haven’t come to an understanding of God and life. If a person doesn’t have the truth available to them (whether it be fuller truth or common exoteric basic truth) then how can they be blamed for erring? I don’t see how they could come to the hell state if they’ve had no way of knowing the way they were supposed to live. Even if we were talking about a literal hell, it would be wholly unreasonable for any God to send them there because they were ignorant. This is like hating a child for erring, they don’t know any better.
This is rather a complicated question. The Christian God is what I call the ‘Divine Intellect’, though other religions, and even mystical Christians often focus on a higher God (the Hindu Brahman, or Plotinus’ ‘One’ for example) which is itself the root of God, but is much more esoteric and complex to understand.
It seems to me, from my religious studies, that there is more than one universe. These other universes are what we might call the afterlife, and is expressed in the Jewish/Islamic conception of the ‘seven heavens’. These multiple universes are all of a different density of matter (ours being the densest), and the reason for matters seperation into these numerous spheres is to make it easier to convert matter gradually into mind (to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth). (As for where these other universes are, I’m not sure yet, but I’d say they are separated not on our 3 dimension, but on a fourth dimension of space, hence how heaven is often described as being ‘within’). The Christian God is an intellect, whilst matter, though not being wholly other, is a lower manifestation of ultimate substance than this intellect. God is, through creation, attempting to raise matter to his own level. To bring it out of its abject state towards the light. (I perhaps should have explained all this first, but it’s rather complex). The seven heavens are created according to what Gurdjieff called the law of seven or ‘the law of octaves’. To illustrate how this works simply, I’ll picture it like this:
Do - Divine Intellect
Re - Seventh density of matter
Mi - Sixth density of matter
So - Fifth density of matter
Fa - Fourth density of matter
La - Third density of matter
Ti - Second density of matter
Do - First density of matter (our universe)
I believe it is separated out in this manner to make the process of transformation easier, as you might separate out a complex equation into parts. This way you can first change the first into the second, and then that into the third, and then that into the fourth, until you get to mind, rather than having to change all densities at once. When we die, I believe we move onto the second density of matter. The less dense the matter (ours being the densest) the easier it is for the Divine Image (Plato’s forms, the Christian ‘Word’) to manifest itself. The purpose of creation is moving from the one ‘do’ to the next ‘do’, changing the vibration of matter, if you will. To answer your question, God presides at the top of all these universes, and so is essentially universal, though it’s more complicated than that.
The Old Testament is a collection of Jewish holy scripture, whilst the New Testament is a collection of Christian holy scripture. The relation between the two is that Christianity essentially builds on the Jewish framework, presumably because the part of the planet it was given to was largely Jewish, and so it was easiest to represent it in Jewish terminology, etc. Christians who claim the Old Testament to be wholly literally true are fools. Jesus himself is portrayed as criticising aspects of the Old Testament. For example, he specifically goes against ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, which appears in the Old Testament numerous times. He says that this is wrong, therefore he says that parts of the Old Testament are wrong, and so any Christian who takes the Old Testament as literal truth is an anti-Christian, for they disagree with Christ himself.
Anyone who is willing to accept the truth can ascend through the heavens towards God. It is only people who refuse this truth, and refuse to give up their self-will that do not evolve and remain in a perpetual hell-state. To wholly give oneself to God you must renounce yourself, and most evil comes about because of the Ego, and the error and ignorance which it leads one to. No man does what he thinks is wrong, but rather what is right for him. For a man to truly regret his actions, he would have to understand why what he did was wrong, otherwise how can he regret it. This might not have answered your question, but that’s because I consider it largely the wrong question, as I don’t consider heaven and hell to be two different places, either one of which you are assigned to at death.
I hoped this helped answer your question, though be aware, this is not a traditional Christian answer, but rather a mystical / esoteric one.