At least in the christian denominations I'm familiar with, there is no dogma expressing a criteria for sorting out who "goes to heaven" and who "goes to hell", although Roman Catholicism perhaps comes close with the idea of venial and mortal sins and the requirement of sacramental confession and absolution. But even so my experience has been that most Catholics don't treat that as mechanically as the question seems to presuppose. Judgement and Salvation in christian teaching are generally something that are not transparently accessible to human understanding, except that we are told not to make ourselves the judge over others, but to be forgiving of them. Morality is very inward looking in Jesus' teaching. Be strict with yourself, be forgiving of others, which also helps explain why it's not that concerned with some objective criteria for salvation.

As far as the question about how likely it is that you could live without "sin", fundamentally it just seems like your understanding of what sin means in that context is different from the traditional Christian view. Sin is not typically taken to be only a matter of behaviors which are considered immoral, but anything that creates separation from the presence of the Divine. That's why even to be momentarily angry or lustful can be sinful. There is an idea that only the "pure in heart" can really experience God, and the standard is perfection because Jesus said "therefore be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." Not even just perfection of behavior, but perfection of being which includes every thought and word and action.

Hence, not perfect.

----

Your concept of God's involvement in salvation is very skewed. Theologically, people don't "earn" their way into heaven on the basis of their good behavior by "passing tests" or whatever.

Thanks, good post (edit: @well named). If someone has something to add then I'm still ears but i'm satisfied.

This hits it on the head. I was forgetting that while writing all those other posts (now that you say it, I remember Villanova cramming that down my head a while ago). Probably most of the reason for the dispute, you guys had that definition in mind while I was only thinking of behaviors. I do not think I'd be any "closer to the Divine" than anyone else. I just think I'd have the behaviors part mostly down pat, but that is no doubt the less important (more superficial) part of the equation (because even if executed well, it would largely be a pretending act).

Edit -- Forgot the quantifier, "a large percentage of the time." But irrelevant now, see above.

My argument was that the "pretending act" isn't so hard. I could be wrong about that too, but there's probably less disagreement on that.

When the incentives are eternal damnation and torment in Hell, or eternal bliss in Heaven, why doesn't everybody try harder to avoid such simple and petty emotions as anger and lust? There are people who do live like that, they're generally considered extremists and weirdos by mainstream society, but surely we should all be doing that? Is the idea of Hell not scary enough?

Also, Moses was a murderer but presumably he went to Heaven? God himself is no stranger to the application of great violence and suffering and apparently experiences negative emotions such as jealousy or anger. This isn't setting the greatest example. It's very confusing to the outsider looking in.

A lot of things confuse you. It's mostly because you persist in ignorance. Good performance isn't what gets people into heaven.

Moses is nothing next to David in the ol' examples-of-bad-behavior department, and he was a "man after God's own heart". But forgiveness is a very important thing in Christian soteriology.

I also think it's a mistake to reduce the discussion only to a question of "going to" heaven/hell in the future. Jesus said he came so that we may have life more abundantly. There are not two lives, one now and one "after death". There is only one eternal life, and eternity is not just the future, it is also now. If I aspire to embody the ideal of perfection that Jesus spoke of, it is not just towards the hope of being "saved" from some future death, but of having a peace and joy and fullness of life now.

"But surely we should all be doing that?" just gets back to the original question of the OP, and the original answers about human psychology and all of that. Although the point about examples is well taken if you mean Christians should try to set a better example. Jesus said "by this they will know that you are my disciples: that you love one another"

it sounds like OP is saying that when he was a christian he was sinless or close to perfect, and he doesn't understand how other christians are not the same. but doesn't the fact that he's no longer a christian crumble his entire argument, since the transition from believing to not believing would itself be a sinful progression, thus he was never sinless or close to perfect to begin with?

I've since backed off my claim of near perfection, Aaron and others made me see that it was foolish to think that. Let's just say that in my believing days, I was getting increasingly devout. I don't recall saying I couldn't understand how believers aren't perfect, I said I couldn't understand how all believers aren't devout and sinning much less frequently.

But your argument is completely asinine.

Claim: I was driving 70mph on the highway today for a while.

You: "But you're not driving now, so while transitioning to a stop you weren't driving 70mph, therefore you were never driving 70mph to begin with."

Okay.

I don't see why it would be so hard for you to understand. He's pointing out that your life is a clear example. You were, at some point, a believer becoming more and more devout. You are, at this moment, not a believer, and not becoming more and more devout. Whatever process you went through is an example of how people who are religious can become less devout.

This analogy is asinine. Sorry.

Come on Aaron, I have a high amount of respect for you, but seriously? Obviously someone who is atheist will no longer be devout to a god they no longer think exists. I have no difficulty understanding why former believers aren't devout. All along I was talking about current believers.

And the only "process I went through" was thinking. (No I'm not making a lame joke that theists don't think, I'm saying my thoughts led to different conclusions.) My beliefs weren't very firmly set at the age of 12 as you can imagine.

Also, to the other poster, even when I was a christian I didn't regard "not being christian" as a sin. I believed for instance that a Hindu, if a good person, would get into heaven. I know not all brands of christianity agree with that but I never thought, "Jesus is the only way."

Yes. You're essentially pulling a true Scotsman here.

Right. There's a transition that happens in which believers become unbelievers. It's not an instantaneous switch in which a believer stops believing and everything comes to a halt. It's a process. Things change over time. That's the thing you've got to work out.

Your theology is whatever you want it to be. But you do have a lot of work to do. However, your viewpoint would explain why this conversation is confusing for anyone familiar with Christian orthodoxy.

Fill me in on the reference?

It wasn't instantaneous but it was pretty quick for me. Once I started thinking about the topics, I realized I had no defense for any of my beliefs, and only believed them because I'd never questioned them.

But what are you arguing, anyway? You're saying that during the transition, I was suddenly a much bigger sinner? Okay, even if that's the case, it's a total nitpick. Replace, "I was sinning infrequently until being atheist", with, "...until beginning to question my beliefs". Or are you saying that just having the potential inside me to question things is itself an evil demon that was in me all along?

Are you saying that most Christians believe all Hindus, Jews and Muslims go to hell?

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/no-true-scotsman

Well, the first thing I'm arguing is that your concept of sin is going to be very confusing in terms of framing what it is you're saying.

Let's take "sin" as meaning that you're doing something other than what "Christianity" would have you do. Does it make sense (under this definition) that becoming a non-Christian is against that which Christianity would have you do?

If so, then you're saying that you were doing exactly what Christianity was asking of you until you stopped. But somehow, that stopping shouldn't be held against you.

I'll leave myself a little room to parse that more carefully if necessary, but essentially yes.

You probably do need to phrase this differently. Catholicism is the largest single denomination of Christianity and this is specifically not a tenet of Catholicism.

In general, the same type of Christians who think that Buddhists, Muslims etc. are going to Hell tend to think that Catholics are going to Hell also, so it may be best to say that there are a disturbing number of Christians who pretty much think that anyone other than there little group are going to Hell, even if it isn't a majority.

Not specifically, but it's parsed out pretty carefully:

http://www.catholic.com/tracts/salva...ide-the-church

Changing "all" to "most" in the original statement will probably address the bulk of your concerns.

I'm not sure quoting the catechism gets you to what most Catholics believe. Unless I'm much mistaken, that same catechism also holds that masturbation, contraception, pre-marital sex etc. are frowned upon.

Also, it bears to keep in mind that Vat II marked a short period of reform in the church, which was then (starting in the 1980ies) followed by a period of institutional backlash. The CCC was commisioned in the 1980es and finalized in the 90ies.

The most binding documents on the matter are still those from the Vat II, LG prominently among them. From the Vat II writings, Extra Ekklesiam nulla salus can't really be deduced in a strong form. You'll still have statements such as "They could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it, or to remain in it." (LG 14) - but that's a much weaker claim.

Not sure what there is to parse, there were no riddles in my sentence. Pretty sure if we polled Christians on that question, you'd be in the small minority. I doubt it's mainstream anymore to think that 5 billion people are going to hell just for being born into a different culture. It was recently established itt that it's largely a mystery who goes to heaven/hell and that it's only for God to judge, so isn't it a bold/judgmental claim for a mortal to say that 5/7 mortals are going to hell? Are a lot of those 5 billion people good people who just got unlucky in a big game of Roulette? Or are 5 out of 7 people just vile, wicked persons based solely on the fact that they're not Christian?

If you walk up to a Hindu and say, "Oh btw there's this fellow named Jesus and Hinduism has it wrong...", and that doesn't compel him to drop his lifetime religion to convert to Christianity, that's a sin punishable by eternal hell? Yet when a Hindu tells you, "Btw there are these gods Shiva and Vishnu..." and you don't convert to Hinduism upon hearing that, that's not a sin for you? How fortunate that the double-standard works in your favor. What about people in remote places who never get to hear about Christ? Their hell-worthy crime is what, being born in the wrong place?

It's not about riddles, it's about subtleties in understanding.

It depends on a lot of things. It depends on the region where you're doing your polling. For example, American Protestants hold a particular viewpoint fairly strongly:

http://www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=19349

(I have no data to support the viewpoint, but I think that Pentacostal churches internationally tend to hold a form of exclusivity of Jesus as the path of salvation.)

The reason that parsing carefully is important is that the specific ways that people use words and interpret statements matters. For example, there is a Pew Report from 2008 linked here:

http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/...-majority.html

The difficulty in interpreting this is that you have to look very closely at the claim. This is similar to the catechism that I posted earlier. I would expect that American Christians (let's narrow it to Protestant Christians because I'm more familiar with Protestant views than Catholic ones) would say that the "normal" way to get to heaven is through faith in Jesus, but that there are people who *CAN* get into heaven otherwise. See this blog, for example:

http://www.toughquestionsanswered.or...-the-only-way/

So there's a lot of work to do to get at the answer to the question. I would agree that the purely exclusive view is a rarity. But within (Protestant) Christianity, I would be very surprised that the generally accepted viewpoint is that if people just try to live good lives, they'll get to heaven. There's something to be understood in the idea that "Jesus is the only way" but there's a lot more to it than the level of theological understand that you've put forth thus far.

I want you to think about your use of "anymore" in that sentence. What do you think the view was "before" the "anymore" happened? How long-standing do you think that view was?

Whether it's bold/judgmental is really irrelevant. Let's say that it is bold. So what? Let's say that it is judgmental? So what? That's not where the question is.

It depends on your theological perspective of heaven, hell, and human nature.

Again, your theology of sin (and theology in general) is going to make this very difficult to parse in a meaningful way. Before any of this can begin to make sense, you need to actually talk about what these things actually mean to you, and how you understand their nature. You don't need to be absolutely precise in your words, but you need to say enough to give someone who doesn't know what you believe a sense of what you're trying to communicate.

I don't believe Hinduism really has a concept of "sin" that looks anything like the Christian view. So I'm not even sure how to interpret some of what you're saying.

Fair enough.
Didn't include it at first, but then thought, maybe in the days of Columbus it was the common view. They thought it was God's Will that they go and "civilize" the subhuman non-Christians for their own good. Also the days of the Crusades. Whereas these days, societies have progressed some, so views of, "Everyone who isn't exactly like me is going to hell" are less common. I can't answer when that started though. Might not have been too long ago.

I was asking you.

It sounds like you're kind of making up stuff off the top of your head here. The way you phrase it makes you sound like you've got a naive narrative in your head about how the "progression" of beliefs occur.

My theology of human nature is that we're naturally predisposed to do evil. And by doing evil, we bring punishment on ourselves. Heaven is not earned, but received as a gift by those who accept it.

I wasn't around in the past to poll christians in the past. But if many of them thought anyone with different skin color was inferior, they probably didn't think those people were going to heaven. If Columbus and crew could commit genocide in the name of Jesus, he probably didn't think the victims were going to heaven. If the British were colonizing every land that couldn't defend itself, they probably didn't regard the natives as heaven-bound people. If they did, they wouldn't be able to justify what they were doing to them.

We're mostly repeating ugly history these days (we might not have progressed that much), but with different justifications than before.
Okay, so why do you need to know my theology from age 11 or 12 to answer my earlier questions? It sounds like the answer to the first one is, Roulette. Everyone is equally predisposed to evil, yet 5/7 of the population has the misfortune of being born into a different tradition with its own (often similar) ways of striving for good. Since they don't believe their god once took the form of a human named Jesus, they're SOL.

I don't think that the theology of heaven and hell played any a primary role in their decisions to perform those various acts. At many points in the history of Christianity, the impetus of action was not framed around the afterlife, but the present life. And it's far from clear that some of those actions were particularly theologically motivated.

Also, the last sentence is particularly eyebrow raising. Put that into the framework of any other war, like the US Civil War. It's not a Catholic/Protestant war, but a north-south war, primarily between Christians and other Christians. How does your logic work there? If the north viewed the south as heaven-bound people, there could be no justification for engaging in a war against them?

This is why I think you sound naive.

It's important because the gap between what you think about Christianity and what I think about it is very large, and framing the question clearly is extremely important.

A lot of life is roulette.

No. Everyone is predisposed to evil. Don't expand my statements.

Striving for good is not what it's about. So even if we strive for good in a similar manner, that's utterly irrelevant.

That's not what the theology says. You're taking it as the extreme exclusive form which I've already told you is rare.

There are two steps you need to take if you want to continue in this conversation.

The first is to slow yourself down enough to think about what you believe. The reason is that you are repeatedly applying your framework to what I'm saying, and it's causing you to miss big pieces of the puzzle. The way you use the word "sin" doesn't not resemble how I would use it. The way you think about "heaven" is nothing like the view of heaven that I have. Your expectations for what it takes to get to heaven does not look anything like what I've just told you it is.

The second is that you need to stop and think. Your objections at this point come from a very shallow place. You're raising objections that sound like your only understanding of Christianity is a child's Sunday-school understanding. That's probably because that's as far as you got. So take the time to look at it from a more intellectually mature place, and think about what is being said. (I'm not saying that if you think from an intellectually mature place that you would agree with anything I'm saying. I'm just saying that you need to come at the conversation from a more intellectually mature place.)

you're comparing being increasingly devout to driving at a fixed speed. Instead you should compare it to driving at an accelerating speed. Thus your analogy should read:

Claim: I was driving at ever increasing speeds on the highway for a while.
Me: But you're not driving now, so while transitioning to a stop you weren't increasing in speed, therefore you were not always increasing in speed.

The fact that you are no longer devout means just that, that you haven't always been devout. If you yourself are no longer devout, how can you question other people's devotion? That is not meant to sound harsh, like I'm saying how dare you question anyone, but that you should sympathize since you are in the same situation, being a human being with doubts and selfish inclinations.

"For a while" is not the same as "always", unless the domain of "always" is restricted to that "while" interval. If I say, "I was doing X", and you make an argument with the conclusion, "Therefore you were not doing Z", then that's an irrelevant argument.

If you did mean to say "for a while" instead of "always", then the argument becomes relevant but blatantly invalid. For 10 seconds today I was accelerating. Then I stopped accelerating and started decelerating until I came to a stop. That happens all the time, every time anyone drives and gets from 0mph to 30mph and back to 0mph. By your argument, there would be no such thing as acceleration in physics or the everyday world. Or a graph that curves upward before curving back down.
At no point itt was I judging people. I just genuinely couldn't understand the psychological phenomenon. For me, christianity really was an opiate, for a while (uh oh here we go again lol) I didn't have a single unhappy day. Itt I was just trying to understand how such beliefs don't have that effect on other christians. But people have made good posts addressing that.

What I was questioning was how people with a christian set of beliefs can at the same time lack devotion / high enthusiasm. Not how someone can lose their beliefs (along with their devotion by default). I didn't lose my beliefs as a result of losing devotion, I lost my devotion as a result of losing my beliefs. I feel like you guys are trying to get extremely technical to make it as though that last sentence is impossible. Alright, beliefs have to be included in "devotion", so technically it had to happen at the exact same time, but you know wth I mean. My loss of beliefs came before, or was the cause of, my loss of enthusiasm toward christianity. Ah there, instead of talking about before/after, I should have been talking about cause/effect.

I misspoke. I meant, every group of people, every regional population, is equally predisposed to evil. The avg person of each group. Would you agree with that?

Alright, well I don't know the theology and I made the same mistake twice in a short interval. I also didn't know it when I was 12. This conversation started with me saying I never believed all non-christians go to hell. You quoted that and said it was at odds with christianity. Now you're saying it's partially at odds. Whether it was my own oddball belief or what, that was my belief, and now I'm forgetting what the point of all this was lol.

I agree. Their decisions were motivated largely by greed and selfishness. Without religion they'd just think of some other justification or maybe just flat-out say, "Yeah I'm selfish, deal with it," though for some reason no invader, past or present, ever seems to admit that. They want to think to themselves that there's some kind of just cause.

The civil war wasn't about plundering resources, both sides probably thought they had legit causes. Whereas going to some foreign land, enslaving people, killing children, raping women and stealing resources, that's not as easy to justify if you think the victims are people worthy of heaven.