See i dont get that because(being educated in a technicaly protestant(new testament followin) school well its a protestant country so the padre came and did th sing along bit and a bashin on a friday mornin)) i remember reading the bible and it does specificaly say god will forgive all your sins and accept even sinners to heaven.
I personally dont like the idea that someone can be born of a sin and convicted of one that was supposed to be commited by someone thousands of years before they were even born. I once had a RE teacher that was a big protestant and actually threw people that had come to talk to us out of the school for saying that children will go to [bleep] if they dont accept jesus, it was the funniest thing we ever saw in school.
Of all the religions that folow the main root from the god thing most dont accept jesus in the same way as the christian religion does i always find this very strange, that so many people follow a religion willing to condem so many it goes against what i have always seen in religion of people following the one most advantageous to themselves(unless of course they were brought up a particular way which is becoming a very rare thing now even in schools for specific religions, at least here in britain and europe as a whole every year there are more and more rejecting religions).
I disagree fundamentaly with any religion that persecutes people for not beleiving in what they believe i find this as an afront to the moral code to which i try to live my life.(very old fashioned me believe in honour, decency, truth, discipline and the right to live free as we chose to do so without any form of persecution from others, combined with good old fashioned manners of course) why should people be persecuted for ignorance and not beleiving in something that well is confusing and contradictory, i analyse everything i read with a logical eye so to speak and alot of the things in the bible are so open to interpretation because there is always some contradiction and ammnedment in a later part.
Its one of the few books that can be discussed forever because it doesnt agree with itself, you have all the end of the world persecute the non beleivers bit at the start and you have the eternal love and forgiveness bit at the end they are complelely incompatible with each other, they reflect the ages in which they were written ( a thing to remeber the bible was written by hand for millenia if ever there was an original its nothing like the one we know) the old part was written by people who were or remebered being oppressed for there beliefs and the attitudes of this are reflected in the text itself, whereas the new part was written in an ages where people strove to creat the ideal soceity and is full of what people thought to be the hallmarks of that soceity truth and forgiveness. (this is the stage where padres look at you funny with the bugger this person has logic and comes up with the Faith has no logic or some kind of other excuse for the fact that they cant answer the question.)
So under your interpretation as i know it from the lovely people that got thrown out of RE, a man who commited the worst crimes upon the earth can upon his death bed at the end of his workd ask forgiveness and embrace jesus and will go to heaven, whereas someone who has lived there life with honour and justice and saved the lifes of many and helped rid the world of evil will upon his death go to [bleep] because he didnt beleive in jesus.
This makes no sense to me, well theres my athiest or humanist or whatever you call people like mes view on the matter, what about everybody else, i am interested to find out the way other people from other religions view the question.
Please consider the fact that you weren't meant to intellectually understand God. You can't put God in a little box and make Him and all that He is conform to what you consider logical.
Romans 11:33 Oh, what a wonderful God we have! How great are his riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his methods!
1 Corinthians 1:19 As the Scriptures say,"I will destroy human wisdomand discard their most brilliant ideas."
1 Corinthians 1:20 So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world's brilliant debaters? God has made them all look foolish and has shown their wisdom to be useless nonsense.
1 Corinthians 1:21 Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never find him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save all who believe.
1 Corinthians 1:22 God's way seems foolish to the Jews because they want a sign from heaven to prove it is true. And it is foolish to the Greeks because they believe only what agrees with their own wisdom.
1 Corinthians 1:24 But to those called by God to salvation, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ is the mighty power of God and the wonderful wisdom of God.
1 Corinthians 1:30 God alone made it possible for you to be in Christ Jesus. For our benefit God made Christ to be wisdom itself. He is the one who made us acceptable to God. He made us pure and holy, and he gave himself to purchase our freedom.
1 Corinthians 2:7 No, the wisdom we speak of is the secret wisdom of God, which was hidden in former times, though he made it for our benefit before the world began.
1 Corinthians 2:13 When we tell you this, we do not use words of human wisdom. We speak words given to us by the Spirit, using the Spirit's words to explain spiritual truths.
1 Corinthians 3:19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. As the Scriptures say,"God catches those who think they are wisein their own cleverness."
Isaiah 64:8 And yet, LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, and you are the potter. We are all formed by your hand.
Isaiah 29:16 Surely you have things turned around. He is the Potter, and he is certainly greater than you. You are only the jars he makes! Should the thing that was created say to the one who made it, "He didn't make us"? Does a jar ever say, "The potter who made me is stupid"?
These verses were taken from the NLT