“I want to invite you to consider the possibility that maybe the televangelists and the street preachers and the evangelical converts are wrong … I want to invite you to consider the possibility that maybe God really is Love unconditional.

I want to you to open your heart & mind to the chance – however small – that maybe the Fruits of the Spirit really are as beautiful as Peace and Kindness and Joy and Service and Compassion, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion; namely — intolerance, bigotry, hatred, condemnation, and damnation …

Don’t get me wrong, I humbly admit that there could be an afterlife, and yet more often than not all the church has done is promise us a life after death and use that promise as a ticket to impotently ignore the hellish suffering that surrounds us every day.

I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die, but about bringing God’s Kingdom of Peace & Harmony down to those in our midst.  After all, it was Jesus himself who taught us to pray that God’s will be done ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ … on Earth!”

~ inspired by Shane Claiborne

Growing up in Alabama, I heard my share of Sunday sermons proclaiming that accepting Jesus Christ as the one & only Son of God – and worshiping him accordingly – was the only way to get to Heaven after we die.  And growing up in Alabama, I also had my share of confrontations with well-intended friends who repeatedly told me that I was going to Hell for not being baptized a Christian – or for not confessing my sinful ways – or for not taking communion – or for not believing that Bible was the inerrant word of God.  I knew at the time that these attitudes could be found all over the world – not just in the American deep south – and yet wherever they were to be found, they were certain to have one thing in common – they just didn’t make sense.  They didn’t make sense to me as a child then, and they still don’t make sense to me today …

 

*How could it be that a God of perfect Love could allow a person like Gandhi (or Buddha, or Rumi, or Einstein, or Benjamin Franklin, or Voltaire, or Peace Pilgrim, or Thich Nhat Hanh, or Robert Frost, or Abraham Lincoln, or Mark Twain, or Epicurus, or Walt Whitman, or Isaac Asimov, or Susan B. Anthony, or Joseph Campbell, or Henry David Thoreau, or Socrates, or Clarence Darrow, or Ram Dass, or Thomas Edison, or Bertrand Russell, or Krishnamurti, or Carl Sagan, or Thomas Jefferson) to burn in Hell for eternity, merely for making the “mistake” of choosing the wrong religion?

 

*How could it be that a God of perfect Compassion could sit idly by and do absolutely nothing for the first 98,000+ years of humanity’s immense suffering, and only recently provide a way to salvation?

 

*How could it be that a God of perfect Justice could allow sinners to suffer for eternity for “crimes” committed over a far shorter period of time (using the same fallible brains that He himself gave us, no less)?

 

Like I said, even though I had to admit that it was possibly correct, traditional Christian theology didn’t make any sense to me morally.  And yet every time I mentioned these fundamental ethical problems to my Christians friends, I was met with scorn or ridicule or a meekly uttered “I don’t make the rules; that’s just the way things are.”
Well, after spending the better part of the last ten years studying the texts of the Bible – and spending the better part of the past 8 years radically putting its teachings to the test, I am here today to note that there is indeed another way to look at the Christian version of Heaven & Hell – a way that is fully supported by Scripture, a way that contains no factual contradictions or logical conundrums, and a way that is completely practical.  My Friends, there is indeed another way to deal with damnation, and there is indeed another way to savor salvation.

 

I wish you all great Peace while you contemplate this “Narrow Way” … and I wish you all the great Courage required to go forth and enliven the same.

Peace … S

“The work of salvation, in its full sense, is threefold:  first, it is about us as whole human beings, not merely as celestial souls; second, it is about our current present, not merely our one-day future; and third, it is about what God does through us, not about what God does in us or for us.”

 ~ inspired by N. T. Wright

Filed under: Preserving Paradise by Scaughdt