Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
Besides Christians Does God Love Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, Communists and Pagans?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Other Religions
Christianity claims to be the only way to salvation. Jesus says:
No one can come to the Father except by me.Matthew 6:24
So not only we skeptics who have concluded that Christianity is synonymous with crookery are excluded from being saved, but so too are all of the billions of people who have been brought up in other religions which they therefore prefer. The squirming evangelists tell us that we do not know how God will judge people like this, and what is more, it is “none of our business”. Christians do not have to worry about them because He will have his own solution.
There are several non-sequiturs here. Is it an eternal truth or not that Jesus declared as plainly as can be that no one can be saved who is not a Christian? If Jesus makes such a clear statement, and it is displayed prominently in God’s Holy Word, then how can it be “none of our business?” God has made it our business. What is more, Christians throughout the ages have always considered other people’s beliefs entirely their business. There would be no need for pages like these if Christians considered it none of their business what others think.
But Christianity has always been a bully’s religion. Christians insist that you accept their view, and for long periods of history, if you refused, would judge you in advance of God, and decide that you had no right to life. Not only that, but because you were sure to spend eternity in hell fire having rejected Christianity, it was plain that God could not be concerned about your fate—having declared there was only one available route to salvation—and would even be delighted that you were happy to strike the first match. Christians were always ready to strike the first match. As for infidels, they would be converted by the missionaries, showing that everyone’s business was Christian business.
Why also would God want His true religion to be revealed to some people by a haphazard process while billions of others had no such revelation? Well, that is an easy one for the evangelists. It is because God works through chosen people in history—Abraham and Moses, David and Solomon, Ezra and Nehemiah, John and Jesus, not to mention the whole of the Jewish people.
Here is the God that can create the universe in six days, concerned that the people He made needed saving, but able to do it only through chosing people who often turn out to be unreliable. People are told not to believe false prophets but he sends people with no a priori sign that they are not false prophets. He warns humanity that He alone is the saviour, clearly implying that any mortal who makes the same claim is a liar, then turns up pretending to be a man saying he is the saviour. Did He expect to be believed, or was He testing people to see whether they had read the messages He had already sent?
Why does God, supposedly immensely powerful and vastly intelligent, have to rely on fallible mortals who could only be taken by any sensible human being as a crook or a mountebank. He will be destroying the world before restoring it for the righteous to dwell in, but cannot get across a simple message in a compelling way to people he is desperate to save. It would be a doddle for him to send a personal angel to each of us to tell us of His salvific message in no uncertain way—and the Christians tell us we all have an angel. What stopped Him? He could have told us, if He had a reason. He could have personally been a still small voice in the ears of each of us. Instead, He sets up a system that was and is used for the personal gain of a few individuals, whether His chosen ones or imposters. We have no way of knowing except just to believe. Let us do so, to be on the safe side, and we might all be believing the devil.
A friend who is a Catholic lay preacher likes to remind me that the wolves would come among the sheep, but neverthless we must honour this institution, the Church, even when the wolves are running it, as a matter of our own salvation. It is hard for some of us to understand how the sheep ever get the fold back once the wolves have gotten in it. If the Church was not run by wolves when it was incinerating innocents, then it must have been run by sheep. Pity us all when the wolves eventually do take over.
Most people are not chosen to have the immensely important matter of their salvation from eternal punishment implanted in their heads, but some are. God loves all the Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, Communists and Pagans just as much as He loves the chosen ones, so he choses them to go amd missionize to save the others. Like evolution, it seems like a wasteful and inefficient way for an all mighty God to go about things. “Ah,” says the evangelist, “It is the way God works so it must be the best.” It is certainly the best for the evangelist and all of the other religious parasites that live off the sorrows of widows, but as the best that an Almighty God can do, it is a poor show. Could it be that the ones who benefit are really the ones who set up and administer this entirely “this worldly” religion? Don’t ask!
