How To Get To Heaven When You Die

Oooooh. saw this today:

How To Talk About Your Religious Beliefs (And Not Be A Total A-Hole) | john pavlovitz

I was really hoping for more preaching. I felt like I was on the cusp of being saved from my heathen ways.

 

This thread has convinced me that perhaps Christianity is not the way to go.

 

I'm not here to preach at you, I would like to answer questions and understand reasons WHY you don't believe in Jesus Christ. Because that's where the evidence points, to the Bible and Jesus Christ being true.

 

You're bible might.
Mine not so much.

 

Why? Because I prefer to believe that we all have our own truths. And I don't have to believe yours. I choose to believe other things. Because I have free will and I choose not to believe in someone else's god.

 

Like I said, "the evidence points" to Jesus only if you accept the Christian scriptures as sacred text (and therefore persuasive because of their sacred nature) and accept Christian readings of the "Old Testament" as authoritative. However, if you do not accept Christian scriptures as sacred text, or Christian readings of the "Old Testament," then there is really no persuasive evidence to support Jesus as being anything more than another unfortunate Jewish wandering preacher killed by the Romans. Apparently a good guy, with legitimately good intentions, who probably taught some good stuff. But nothing more than that.

I am a Jew. Therefore, I do not believe in Original Sin, nor the Devil, nor Hell, nor in any kind of inherited sin, or in the necessity of any kind of intercession in order to obtain God's forgiveness for genuinely repented transgressions. So, without even getting into the mammoth theological problems (from a Jewish perspective) inherent to many if not most Christian understandings of the trinity and the divinity of Jesus, as a Jew, I do not believe in any of the things for which Christianity postulates that a savior is needed in order to provide salvation.

Also, as a Jew, I have my own tradition-- the tradition that actually produced the Hebrew Scriptures, for the record-- which tells me how to read and interpret the Hebrew Scriptures (the "Old Testament"). And it does so in ways that exclude Christian interpretations, which are usually incompatible in various ways with Jewish understandings of our texts. And I have my own tradition's lessons about what God wishes of my people, and how to try and fulfill those wishes; and what Christianity teaches about those things is often incompatible with the lessons of my tradition.

And, as a Jew, I have an entirely different definition than does Christianity of what it means to be the messiah, and what the messiah should do if he showed up, and how we would know if someone was the messiah. And by my definitions, Jesus just manifestly is not the messiah.

I don't believe in Jesus, in the Christian sense of that term, because I have no reason to believe in Jesus. I have no inclination to believe in Jesus. And I feel nothing lacking by not believing in Jesus. I am entirely satisfied and fulfilled by Judaism. And I have no reason whatsoever to believe that God is not entirely satisfied by my being Jewish.

And, to be honest, not only is it intrusive, arrogant, condescending, and annoying that certain kinds of Christians come along on a regular basis and tell me and mine that our three-thousand year old faith is wrong and insufficient and ineffective, but it is beyond intolerable that such Christians should have the gall to continue to do this after the way that Christianity oppressed Judaism for most of the past 1800-odd years.

One would really think that after untold centuries of Christians inciting pogroms against Jews; of massacring us during Crusades; of tormenting us with Inquisitions; of labelling us deicides and Christ-killers; of promoting blood libels and other slanders against us; of persecuting us with Jew taxes, stigmatizing clothing, forcing us out of most occupations and preventing us from owning land or even being accounted full citizens or subjects of the lands in which we lived; of banning and publicly burning our sacred texts; of forcing Jews to convert on pain of death; of forcing us to defend our faith in public disputations on pain of exile or deaths or exorbitant ransom; of exiling us at whim, and a hundred other kinds of cruelty; that Christians today with a desire to missionize would have the common decency to be too ashamed of the sins Christianity has committed against the Jewish People to even consider approaching us.

 

I'm probably being too hard on Christianity. I think they could turn it around, they just have to change their marketing strategy.

For starters, they need to stop having their worshipers do the recruiting; they definitely can't close the deal.

I think the Supreme Being needs to come down and tend to things personally. Now THAT would be something that would bring in the masses!

Can you imagine how awesome Sundays would be if they were more like THIS?

 

He's not talking about inherited sin, he's talking about the sheer gall it takes to ignore that history when you try to convert a Jew to Christianity.

 

There are two answers for that.

First of all, when I say that I don't believe in "inherited sin," I mean that in a theological sense. I believe that God holds us, as individuals, responsible for only our own actions.

Second of all, while I don't believe a person should completely hold themselves guilty (in a non-theological sense) for the misdeeds of their individual predecessors, I do think that when someone is a member of a people, a culture, and/or a cohesive faith community/tradition, they need to accept some measure of shared culpability for the wrongs of their predecessors, in much the same way as they would likely be willing to accept some shared glory for the rights of their predecessors. They need to do this, if for no other reason, in order to properly reject those wrongs, to solidly embrace and pursue a more positive ideation of their peoplehood/culture/community/tradition.

At least in Jewish ethical law/philosophy, repentance for a wrong is achieved not only through admitting that one has done wrong and committing to not doing that wrong again, but in making restitution and reparation to those whom one has wronged-- not only in the basic sense of passively refraining from a negative action, but in the greater sense of actively replacing negative action with positive action.

In this sense, it is not enough for a Christian merely to refrain from oppressing Jews and admit the wrong done by prior Christians to Jews, but should commit to pursuing respectful and beneficial relations with the Jewish People. Which, let's be clear, a huge number of Christians-- probably a majority of Christians-- are doing. Several of the Eastern Orthodox Churches have been making great progress in this for over a century. The Catholic Church really led the way in the Western world with Nostra Aetate in '65. Several of the major Protestant sects, and a number of the somewhat smaller ones have followed suit-- Anglicans/Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, SDA, UCC.... But there are still a number of Protestant sects, chiefly among the Evangelicals, which are slow to completely follow through with doing this.

Ironically, they often protest their staunch support for Israel as proof of their new-found philo-Semitism. But since that support is usually based less on reasonable principles one might expect, and more on the perceived importance of Israel as a symbol in variations of apocalyptic prophecy popular in certain fundamentalist circles. Real respect for the Jewish People isn't about making an ultimately self-serving donation to AIPAC or the United Jewish Appeal. Real respect for the Jewish People starts with acknowledging that the Jewish People have a right to be who they are, that they have the right to be left alone and not pestered or hounded about their religion.

In short, one cannot simultaneous claim, as a Christians, that one has completely shed the ills of Christianity past, while at the same time holding on to the idea that Judaism ill suits the Jews, and they must instead become Christians.

Obviously, the same principle holds for Christians and many other cultures and religions as well-- I am only speaking about the Jews because of the proximate conversation.

 

The vast majority of "Jews For Jesus" are not, in fact, Jewish. They are mostly Christians, with a light veneer of Judaizing masking their nature as derived from American Protestantism, mostly Baptist and Christian & Missionary Alliance. Which makes sense, of course, since Jews For Jesus is not any kind of Judaism, but a particularly insidious evangelical sect of Christianity, which specifically constructs its missionizing materials to confuse and indoctrinate mostly young Jews with little (if any) Jewish education.

As for the few genuine Jews who are part of Jews For Jesus, there are people in any cultural community, any social group, who become indoctrinated against it, or turn against for various reasons, which usually include ignorance and/or self-hatred, occasionally combined with negative experiences with authority figures. When they leave that culture or group or religion, through deliberate assimilation, or accepting citizenship in another nation, or religious apostasy, it doesn't matter what they then call themselves. They are no longer representative of what they originally were. This is especially true if they new identity they claim is actively antithetical to their previous one.

 

Given the baggage that apparently comes with being a Christian, I'm much happier as a heathen.

Christianity probably has a few issues with your scissor-stabbing ways.

 

That's why I want to be a part of a snake-handling church. They could be my minions...in the name of the lord they bite dumbasses.

 

Sooooooo wrong, Fancy Pants.