abaya

Yes, without a firm belief in those (and their impact on your eternal soul--another concept that you have to believe in), Christianity doesn't have anything on other religions. You have to believe in a need for personal redemption--not just in the here and now, but in a very real afterlife--in order to have a need for Jesus.

For me, once I stopped believing in hell, it was all over. Slippery slope, all that jazz. Sure, I was still able to get behind the idea of redemption in the here and now, sin being that which we do to hurt ourselves and each other, grace as in the undeserved forgiveness and acceptance of ourselves and each other after enduring those hurts--but I could no longer make sense of how these principles would apply to an afterlife, as a way of "gatekeeping" some eternal place of glory vs. punishment/separation from God.

So I ceased being able to believe in that kind of sin and grace, and there was no choice but to stop calling myself a Christian. It would not be fair to those who do subscribe to, believe in, and truly live by those principles. I have no patience for hypocrisy in religious individuals, least of all myself. It's all or nothing, to me. There is no room for half-assedness in my understanding of faith.

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran