What's in store for Moslems [Sunnis, Shia, and Sufi]; Sihks; Jains; Hindus; Buddhists; Jews; and animists - the vast majority of non-Christian humanity who have absolutely no inkling - not the merest conception - of Christianity or its myriad and fragmented doctrinal variations? Most of humanity has no better knowledge of Christianity than we "Westerners" have of their religions and philosophical systems. To take Islam as merely one example, how many Christians possess even the vaguest/slightest knowledge of it? How many Chritians can truthfully say that they have read even one single sutra or verse of the Qu'ran? How many Christians have held a Qu'ran in their hands? Not many, I can assure you. Conversely, the vast majority of people adhering to faiths other than Christianity have never read or owned a Bible.
What's to become of the vast majority of humanity who have never even heard the name "Jesus"?
The very notion of "salvational exclusivity," propagated by a good number of Christians - the idea that a person must "accept" Jesus in order to be saved, seems ludicrous to me. The notion that, some 2000 years ago, "God" chose, of all places, a primative cultural backwater - on the periphery of the Roman empire - to send the Redeemer, and this at a time when most people in the world were totally illiterate. The fact that, at this time, most people were unable to read is crucially important because it involves the transmission of scripture. In other words, why would God, if endowed with infinite wisdom, choose such a time period in which the reliable transmission of scrpture was virtually impossible?
Any honest person who has researched the bible has to admit that, basically, we have no idea of what this character, named "Jesus" really said and what he taught. There exists not one single original manuscript dating from the era in which Jesus supposedly lived. We only have copies of copies of copies of copies of copies at best. Most of these consist of mere fragments. And when one compares and contrasts these manuscripts with each other, one can determine that, in regard to the "New Testament," there are more differences than words. There are more differences among the surviving New Testament manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament; the differences among manuscripts outnumber the words that make up the New Testament.
Moreover, it is common knowledge that there are many, many sciptures that did not "make it into" the established cannon. Many of these flatly contradict those scriptures that were accepted as cannon.
The question is: By whose authority were some scriptures accepted while others were rejected? By whose authority, and on what grounds? Honest research reveals that it was the "political," and ultimately arbitrary, decisions of a few "church fathers."
In its essence, Christianity is very much a "textual" [as oppsed to primarily ritualistic] religion. Of course, Christianity has its rites and rituals. But, ultimately this religion claims its legitamacy based almost solely on its texts, on its scriptures. In my opinion, the problem with Christianity is that the texts or scriptures, upon which it is based are extremely problematic. To use a rather trite metaphor, it is all merely a "house of cards." The scriptural basis of Christianity is an illusion, a chimera. It is a bricolage, a patchwork, of disjointed and inherently contradictory texts. The very notion of which scriptures are "canon" [and are thus to be considered legitimate or authorized] is itself extremely problematic. That decision was made many hundreds of years ago by a very small group of men who exerted great socio-political and cultural power.
To me, it is absurd that an infinitely wise and omniscient "God" would choose such a dubious and tenuous method to transmit a text upon which the very salvation [or contrasting eternal damnation] of people depends. How presumptuous and risible the contention that certain people entertain, that they somehow know the mind of "God." In my opinion, this is the position of a madman.
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