(June 22, 2013 at 10:29 pm)Consilius Wrote: You are preaching against "no salvation outside the church", which many Christians believe does not exist.
We all have our basic moral values, and the Eurocentric 16th century stereotype of "immoral savages" probably does not exist, and morality is not dependent on whether or not your particular tribe has been evangelized. There were law systems in ancient societies like Egypt and Mesopotamia, and people in general would have had an idea of what was right and what was wrong, based on, I admit, stuff that was evolutionarily beneficial. To attack a band of runaway slaves or to refuse them hospitality in the middle of the desert was something that you don't need Jesus to agree is wrong.
On what happened when they died, Jesus himself preached on the difference between getting it wrong when you knew it was wrong, and getting it wrong when you SHOULD have known it was wrong by your own rationality (Luke 12:47-48). I can't speak on their behalf, but some will say that the reasonably good ones went to heaven, while the truly bad ones went to hell. Catholics say that the good ones stayed in a state of limbo until Christ died, and that the good ones who had done some bad things suffered for a finite amount of time in Purgatory before going to heaven.
It's nice to think that if I were a well-behaved savage I would have made it to heaven. Unfortunately you are all over the map here, and while I appreciate the information, I was looking forward to seeing what you felt personally about what happened to those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of forced un-believers' souls, did they dry up like a raisin in the son? Is your god responsible for anything at all?
