RE: 'Drich, which of the millions of different christian denominations goes to Heaven?'
January 14, 2015 at 7:58 am
(January 14, 2015 at 12:23 am)Drich Wrote: So what's the trick? One must have the attonement offered by Christ. According to Paul to his letter to the Galations, this 'gospel' is the canonical/biblical Gospel. All other 'new gospels' are false.Paul sure did like to get the last word in, it seems. But did he specify which gospels were canon? The Bible did not exist when Paul was writing those letters, and there may have been a dozen or two "gospels" by then.
And as far as I can tell, nearly every Christian denomination believes in the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus as the basis of salvation. Even JWs, who place Jesus on secondary footing to a fully separate primary deity, believe that salvation is not possible unless one accepts Jesus (not Jehovah) as the instrument by which he is saved. The differences between JWs and other Christian denominations are many, and to some denominations blasphemous. Yet the JWs are clear that no other denomination will be saved from god's wrath, and many of the others consider JWs to be hell-bound.
There's simply no consensus on such matters, and no real way to settle it because the Bible is too easy to manipulate towards any particular point of view. Even your claim regarding the "rules of Christianity" depends on how you interpret Bible verses. Like I said elsewhere, the problems that this presents is not mine to deal with, but it also doesn't require that I select one particular interpretation and accept it as canon. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if the Bible was written by the George Lucas of its day.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould