How to advise newly-Christian friend who thinks that only Christians can go to heaven

[poguemahone]

A friend has recently become a Christian, and is very happy and excited about the whole thing.

She's having a bit of a tough time, however as she's getting into conflicts with people who don't share her beliefs. In particular she holds that only Christians will go to heaven. She's traveling in a non-Christian country so I can only imagine upset for everyone concerned.

We knew each other years ago when she was a lovely sweet girl but a bit wild, and she recently sought me out, probably because I've always been a Christian. She's keen to pick my brains on things like this, and I'm feeling a bit of pressure to get the advice right.

I've told her that:

• I believe people of all religion and none can go to heaven if they're good people.
• Although Christianity makes utter sense to me intellectually and emotionally, not everyone has been exposed to the same (cultural) background as me.
• God's fair if nothing else, so for example to discount millions of people who've never heard of Jesus, would just be unfair. (Likewise for people who've not seen great examples of Christians, who're happy with their own religion etc)

But she's asking for more info and I'm really no expert on this. Any advice?

seeker, please don't repeat your posts, this thread has enough of a Groundhog Day feel to it already

But nobody answered it and I think it's an important point!

I think seeker asks a good question and I'd like to hear a "serious Christian" answer to it.

.

lol

[tumbleweed]

Hell-oooo? Seee-rious Chris-tians??

[drums fingers]

Hmmph. Have been 'casually' following thread. I was hoping to hear an answer to that too.

OP - refer your friend to Matthew 7.1, 1 Corinthians 4.5 and 5.12, Romans 14.10 and especially Luke 6.37. It is not up to her to judge people on their beliefs. The other piece of advice you can usefully give at this time is that telling people they are not going to heaven isn't the best method of Evangelism...

seeker - they can pray as much as they like for me. If that is their belief then fair play, it's not for me to judge, but I don't believe I will be converting.

Please note that by answering that question I'm not classifying myself as a 'serious Christian'. I am Christian however I am but a child in terms of faith!

[projectile vomit]

MUST you use this terrible affected phraseology, it really is off-putting

If you were referring to the last bit of my last post I was poking fun at myself [poking fun emoticon]. For the others that just happens to be how I speak. So sorry if that gets your goat, old thing. [repeat poking fun emoticon].

lol, yes I meant the "child in faith" bit

I have heard so much of it from moony-eyed evangelical Christians when I wasa student I am permanently at saturation point

Apologies then! I tend to use it in a slightly sarcastic sort of way...fine, a very sarcastic sort of way....with the subtext that I don't know everything but then neither does anyone else. And they can't throw 'child in faith' back at me if I've used it myself first.

The way this thread has progressed is really depressing. I must have been somewhat naive probably, but the amount of blatant obsessive christianophobia revealed here shocked me.

The language and attitude of most if not all non christians on this thread is truly disgraceful.

Onegar, what do you propose should be done to put your idea, that children should be protected from indoctrination of christianity, into action ? If you had the power would you send social services to snatch my boys because, horror of horrors, I tell them there is heaven and a god that knows them by name and loves them ?

Would you put a gagging order on me and my husband forbidding to ever mention the name of Jesus in any other context than that rebel Jew from another millenium ?

Express our faith in any way only past watershed ?

Would law enforcement officers be sent to my house because a salesman reported noticing a cross on my hallway wall and also a toddler poking face through the kitchen door ?

Is this your ideal of a society ?

Than poor you, certainly born in a wrong country, wrong time in history.
What a wonderful nation Soviet Russia was !

What do you fear so much anyway ? Shouldn't you rather worry about violent gang culture, knife crime, identity fraudsters, handbag snatchers or lying polititians , rather than a happy clappy love thy neighbour bunch of people ( like me ) who very occasionally might happen to approach you with conversion attempt ( wanting to share ) and in absolutely most cases retire after your polite no thank you. WHAT IS THE BIG DEAL ?

I do not share the beliefs of Jehova Witnesses. They would most certainly tell me I would not be allowed to enter god's kingdom , theirs being one of the most fundamentalist of faiths.I don't believe it, doesn't bother me.

Once a year some would turn up on my doorstep with their ' the end is nigh', am I offended ? I smile, say no thank you , they're always smile, leave their literature, I allow them ( why not broaden my horizons, see what others come up to ). That's it. Do I run to mumsnet to write how dared they, no , I'd honestly rather have JW or Mormons than a boring double glazing salesman after my bucks.

If a Muslim friend prayed for my conversion....cross my heart all I would think great friend, truly caring about me. He/she believes theirs is the path to happiness , I totally understand , nice of my friend. If I one day wake up with great awerness of the truth of Koran and great will to follow its teachings,knowing all along that my friend was praying, then I might convert. But I know it would not happen in RL, as I don't have muslim friends ( just happens so ) and totally believe christianity is THE WAY.

What breaks my heart is hardline atheist mums telling their children no darling, when you die, this is it, you are no more . I just read it recently here on MN, a mum admitting just that.
Also , I cannot get my head round it why someone would choose to be an atheist . For me THAT IS a fairy tale that us loving, laughing, poetry/ music making, admiring beauty creatures were just a complete random accident .
And I just can't help but think you must be quite cold hearted to , especially once you become mothers , just accept that inevitably one day you will say goodbye to your family forever and ever, that's it. I'd honestly rather be deluded and live in hope ( luckily I KNOW I'm not deluded ).

If I could not bring myself to believe in any established religion, I 'd rather just admit I just don't know what life is on about but still live in hope that life has a greater meaning and there is some afterlife.

Atheists who claim they absolutely know there is no god, nothing out there, just here now and any religion is 'opium for the masses' , aren't they fundamentalists themselves ?

Looooooong post , sorry , got carried away !

Just want to clarify what I meant by disgraceful behaviour of many posters here.

Total lack of any respect and constant unnecessarily over the top ridicule of the christian faith.

You're at your computers but have you actually noticed this is not virtual world of some game but real people here posting and reading.

I am quite happy to tell my children that I don't believe in an afterlife. Because I don't, and I have no intention of telling my children stuff that I don't think is true (I don't do FC either). It doesn't make me unhappy, so why should it make my children sad? I am not a hardline aetheist either, just a fairly ordinary one. I've not noticed that my friends of faith have noticeably happier children than mine, nor do I recall caring much one way or the other about heaven and hell as a child (I was brought up Catholic).

I have yet to meet a tortured (in spirit) aetheist, but I have come across many people for whom having faith or religion was a real burden, causing them great anguish when making decisions or doing things that someone in authority in their religion had told them was wrong for religious reasons.

That said I'm not an angry aetheist. I know my parents and sister pray for me, and so long as they don't expect me to say more than "that's a nice thought" when they tell me so, then it doesn't annoy me too much. But some Christians (I have had Muslim and Buddist friends, but can't remember ever being approached by one to convert) can be very aggressive (I'm happy to believe that at least some of them for the very best of reasons) and it is very off putting to say the least.

I understand the urge to evangelise, but my salvation is my business.

I'm an ex-Christian and have thought long and hard about many of the issues mentioned on this thread, which is why I would like to contribute to it. I do not wish to cause offence to anyone with my comments, I just welcome the opportunity to engage in a discussion about my own thoughts.

Like a couple of other ex-Cs mentioned on this thread, being a Christian brought me anything but joy or happiness or security. It made me very anxious all the time about everything. I felt that the whole "grace" thing, that has been mentioned many times, meant I could never be good enough how matter how hard I tried. This unhappiness with my life and above all myself, led me eventually to wonder about why exactly I had wanted to be a Christian in the first place. Some investigation, heart-searching and general life experience brought me to the following conclusions.

1. In general humans seem to be frightened by the unknown and prefer to have an explanation for why things happen. Religion provides this for us. It reassures us that at least someone knows what is going on and why. In fact, one of the most sensible explanations to why athesism has gained more converts in the last few hundred years seems to me to be the fact that science has been able to explain to us many of the things that most scared us (for example, freak acts of nature such as earthquakes, hurricanes etc etc.) God or gods are no longer completely necessary for this.

To give an example already mentioned on the thread: Children are often very scared by the idea of death and not existing anymore. They find the idea of an after-live comforting. This certainly was true for me. But, when I got older I was able to understand, thanks to my education that the very idea of "me", the soul that I wanted to live for ever, was really just a construct of my consciousness. My soul, "me", could easily vanish anyway if I got dementia or Alziemers (sp.) or something similar. It is dependent on my physical existence (my brain) and once my brain is no more, neither is my consciousness (and thus my "soul"). Sine my brain cannot live forever, the idea of eternal life is a bit unlikely.I could not have come to this conclusion in the Middle Ages, quite obviously. For people who lived then it was quite obvious that humans had some kind of "soul" which animals did not possess. They looked to religgion to explain this for them.

1. If we study the history of Christianity and middle eastern monotheisms in general, it quickly becomes clear that the main tenents of Christian faith have many common origins. We can see how Christianity and Islam evolved from a common heritage in Judaism and Zoroastrinism (sp.). In the case of the teachings of Jesus, research has shown that many of his ideas were already common currency on some Jewish sects prior to his alleged existence.

Similarly, the idea that the Bible is the revealed word of God (I think this is the best way of putting it) is put into question. The Bew Testament as we know it today is not the collection of all writings on the subject of Jesus and his life/teachings/death. Rather it is the result of careful pruning by early Church elders who decided to endorse or reject a huge number of texts that were circulating in the early centuries of the Common Era. It seems that the Church created its own doctrine according to its own ideas. In other words, man seems to make religion on his own terms. Again we can see this today, even on this thread: you can be a Christin and not believe in heaven or hell for example. A more radical example might be the fact that the C of E is radically divided on the question of homosexuality and the issue of women being ordained. Uk culture has come to accept homosexuality and women working as as a normal thing and this is reflected in some people's theology. If we read what Paul has to say about women, we can see that such ideas were not common currency when he was alive. Liberal Christians will say that he is reflecting the prejudices of his time and we need to take him literally. Some fundamentalists would take the opposite view and say the fault lies in permissiveness in society.

1. As a religion, Christianity doesn't seem better or worse than the other options available. It is undeniable that terrible things have been done in its name, as have been done in the name of most other religions. It is also true that many good things have been done in its name, as with most other religions. I for one still think the maxim "do unto yourself as you would be done by" is probably the most moral position that any human can adopt. I try to stick to it with varying degrees of success.

All this lead me to the conclusion that there is no Truth, no One Way to salvation. I may be a bad person at times, but this does not mean I am a miserable sinner who requires God's grace to be saved. God is not my Mum or my Dad writ large who I want to please and be loved by. Moreover, life has no one simple explanation; neither is it fair and certainly, there is no justice for all. There is little I can do to change that on a general level. Thus I accepted my impotency, my insignificance and my mortality. I took control of my own life and stopped hoping/expecting an omnipotent God could tell me what to do.

In short I found tranquility: at least on this score. I have no problem with others finding it in religion either, even if I secretly think they avoiding facing up to the realities of existence. I'm sure that they are praying as hard for my enlightenment as I am hoping for theirs.

lemoniee - how odd that it is quite ok for you to know God is there, but not ok for an Aetheist to know God isn't there...is it also ok for a Jew to know there is a God, but that Jesus was NOT His son?

Catinahatthingummy - good post. I think you just summed up why i am not a Catholic any more much better than i could!

so lemoniee - do you pray for non-Christians, even if they ask you not to?

Great post catitinhata, by the way.

lemoniee - sorry, I see you did sort of answer the question about praying for/being prayed for in your post.

Great post catinahat

lemoniee - you kinda ruined your own argument there with the "luckily I KNOW I'm not deluded" line

And as for what we teach our children? All babies are born atheist i.e. without a god - it is parents who thrust their beliefs on a child without giving the child a choice.

I will not force my dd to share my beliefs. Instead I will encourage her to learn as much as possible about how the world works and to make up her own mind about these issues when she is old enough to decide for herself.

'I've not noticed that my friends of faith have noticeably happier children than mine'

Having religious faith isn't designed to make you 'happy'.

Quite the opposite IME abraid!