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From: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Zonker T. Chuqui)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: morals, and the low correlation with religion
Message-ID: <1730@nsc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 28-Oct-84 14:27:56 EST
Article-I.D.: nsc.1730
Posted: Sun Oct 28 14:27:56 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 29-Oct-84 03:26:20 EST
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Organization: The Warlocks Cave, Castrovalva
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> The question of what happens to dead-non-christians is by no means settled.
> The NT largely punts on the question of virtuous non-believers, tending to
> divide people into believers, "sinners", and the desparate.  

The best interpretation of the Christian ethic I've ever found is not in
the Bible at all, but in Dante's works 'The Inferno', 'The Purgatorio', and
'The Paradisio'. Hell is a series of circles to which the sinners are sent
based upon the evil of their sins. The outermost circle is reserved for the
pious pagans-- their eternal damnation was simply that they lived died
without accepting the Christian God and therefore were denied access to
heaven. I went into the books because they are very interesting from a
literature viewpoint; I found that they also helped clarify for myself many
of the reasons why I turned my back on the Christian pantheon and the Bible
as the basis for my religious beliefs. The God that I see in the Bible is
not so much something that man was created in the image of; He was created
in the image of man, with all of the pettyness and foibles and jealousies
of man. A true God doesn't NEED you to worship Him, He wants you to worship
him. There are many very positive teachings in the work of Jesus--
unfortunately most of his 'followers' tend to be very selective in
following them.

> I do agree with
> the principle that no man is good enough to "deserve" salvation.  
I disagree. Every person born deserves salvation. Whether or not they earn
it is another matter. There is no free ride to salvation, and no other
person or being can take your sins from you. You don't ride to heaven on
others coatails...

> And besides, who gave any man the right or ability to discern who is not
> going to inherit eternal life?
The ONLY one who will be able to know if someone is going to heaven or
not is that person themselves. If you can look over your entire life and
honestly say to yourself and your God 'I am a good person' then you deserve
it. Not 'I was a perfect person' or 'I always did right' or 'I went to
church on Sundays' (with the VCR taping the Rams game, of course), but if,
on balance, you did more good than harm. Nothing else really matters in the
end.

-- 
From the Department of Bistromatics:                   Chuq Von Rospach
{cbosgd,decwrl,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui  nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA

  I'd know those eyes from a million years away....