I already made a topic relating to this, but it's dead now, so here's the exchange, heavily truncated.
Me: I'm not christian but if I'm good can I get into heaven anyway?
Them: Nil. Gotta accept Jesus.
Me: I don't get it. Want proof.
Them: Bible.
Me: Bible has preconception of truth. Need other.
Them: All around you.
Me: Nil. Something concrete.
Them: You don't want to accept it. Have an open mind.
Me: Self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is where the topic died, I think.
Now I'm going to work on the presumption of my knowledge of a Christian God, here's what I will be using so tell me if I'm wrong:
God gives the gift of volition for life, takes it away at death. If you don't accept God (&Jesus?) you go to purgatory/limbo (for Dante fans), or Hell if you're "bad". Good and Bad are notions as exist in the bible, Ten Commandments and the flurry of myriad rules.
So I'm going to address several things here. Reply however you want, just no flames. And please keep it reasonably short, nobody likes 2 page replies.
Firstly, let's say God does exist, and there's a Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. What I gleaned from the last topic is that I'm not getting into that Great Gig in the Sky unless I accept Christianity. This totally doesn't fly with me, as was touched upon in the exchange above. If I'm a "good person" (I live according to my conscience), why will I be faulted for that?
God provides me no objective evidence of his existence, praying instead my faith. Since I was not raised Christian, but rather agnostic, I was raised to believe, more or less, to live by my morals (instilled in me by my parents and society). If that's how I was raised, and that is what I am most sure is correct, why will God fault me for living my life how I feel is correct? Unless God can provide me objective proof of his truth (not the Bible, remember), how can I in good conscience believe it?
And nextly, this is less personal: I want to know what happened to all the people before Jesus (or before Joseph Smith, Mohammed, or whoever your principal Christian prophet is)? Are they just screwed? Dante said they went to limbo, but he was a crazy 14th century Catholic.
I'm sure you can see a pattern with my thoughts about religion, and it centers on proof. I want to further the discussion (was it you, Digital_Savior, who was the principal replier to my posts?), so again refer to the summary atop this post to avoid redundancy.
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