Racoon in the room,
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Originally Posted by Racoon
This has always perplexed me. 
The goal of Judeo-Christian and Islamic beliefs is to be good and get into heaven.
With Christianity and Catholicism, the only way to get into heaven is to believe in Jesus Christ.
Which never really made logical sense to me. |
It doesn't make sense because it is one of a number of things that Christianity, as a religion, misunderstands;
they misunderstand what Jesus meant when he said:
"No man goes to the Father except through me.
All who find the Father, first find me. If you know me,
you know the way to the Father."
This was his way of speaking to common fishermen. All men and women who believe in God will find Jesus as the
Son of God in the next world, no matter what any human being thinks of Jesus in this life
in terms of their particular religious path; their chance of personal survival is not directly affected by their lack of knowledge of, or belief in, Jesus. Jesus does not torture for eternity those who never heard his name, or otherwise cannot discover Jesus, or those who practice some other approach to finding God.
Jesus brought a revelation of God; those who know and serve him by serving others accept a gift of eternal life. To survive this life puts you into the next world, a spiritual world created to transition those who have survived this life in the flesh; there is one spiritual universe, and the path from this world through death leads to only one next place, a world in a universe created by Jesus the Son of God. Quite literally then, no man who goes to the Father will get there without first journeying through the universe creation of God's Son, Jesus.
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You could be a great person, and help millions, but if you didn't accept J.C. as your lord and savior,... well then its Dante's Inferno for you pal. 800 degrees of hot with no water to quench your thirst. 
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Hell is another one of those things.
How reasonable is it to believe God is all-merciful, but cross a certain line and he's willing to torture you for eternity. The ghastly notion of Hell might have scared a few pagans into the fold, but it does not intimidate a son of God who takes salvation for granted, and knows a God of love and divine mercy would create no such evil place.
Those unfortunate creatures whose life is so conducted as to not evolve an immortal soul that survives death, have thereby chosen to cease to exist; physical life is temporal, the rejection of the spirit world and eternal life is a freewill choice; such persons are the architect of their own destiny just as every other being is.
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Where is the place we all want to be in the end?
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The end of what?
If you mean the end of this life, and the Christian idea that they are somehow magically catapulted into a spiritual status of perfection— then that's yet another of those things.
You'd think after a rather consistent lesson in this life that refining personal growth to high levels of even human maturity is a continual round of experience working towards various types of personal mastery— or not. Odd they would just assume God changes the rules of experience and freewill just because they survived the initial life in the flesh.
The journey to Paradise is going to take a long, long time. Our trek through the universe, which some have noticed is incomprehensibly vast, is one of ever ascending levels of personal growth through experience, but it's not handed to us like a diploma for having finished kindergarden. The spiritual growth necessary to stand in the presence of an Infinite Being is not going to be thrust upon every Tom, Dick, or Habeeb who decides to drink the coolaid or flies a jet into a building for Allah; You pick up over there right where you leave off down here.
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What,When, and Why have been answered.
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By whom?
Many religions refer to this location as Paradise, but since Christianity
generally have such a meager idea of what Paradise is like, the term
heaven, referring to someplace above the sky, has become adequate shorthand.
Do you believe there could be a geographical center of infinity?
If you do, you may also be equipped to imagine that is where God,
the first source and center of all things and beings, chooses to reside.
Paradise is the geographic center of infinity, and as such it is not a part of universal creation, existing outside of time and space; the "central Isle" belongs to the divine universe; Paradise is an eternal and exlusive existence, as well as an eternal and exclusive place.
If you had the time and means, were spiritually qualified, and had the necessary guidance, "you could be piloted through universe upon universe and from circuit to circuit, ever journeying inward through the starry realms, until at last you would stand before the central shining of the spiritual glory of the Universal Father." In other words, it's just as possible to find the personal presence of God at the center of all things as to find a distant city on our planet.
Keep on truckin',
—Saitia
