On the subject of Hell and Salvation

[The Grand Nudger]

That was the best marketing decision the christian brand ever made.  Who wants to snip the tips of their peens off..right? No need to be jewish or get into all those zany jewish rituals. That was limiting growth!

OFC, they had to get rid of the faction that thought you -did-....and somehow square that away with "jesus" comments about not changing jots and tittles....but, that was np. Few clubs to the head here and there, a largely illiterate customer base..hey presto - success!

As to the rest, murder is also a part of christian scoiety..it was foundational to it's creation..and jesus didn't write anything on my heart. I turn away from the bad all by my onesies, part of that is turning away from christianity....so I guess I get a pass on all of the things like any christian might?

[Fake Messiah]

That was the best marketing decision the christian brand ever made.

Hey, the best marketing decision is the sin: sin the imaginary disease to sell you the imaginary cure so you can go to imaginary place.

or turn against your natural sinful nature instinctively (without knowing of Christ) to become saved.

Oh great. Another Christian that thinks how humans are evil by nature.

[GrandizerII]

If you would like to look at the New testament as a whole.

I'm not going to assume that there is a universal Gospel message that is consistently preached throughout the whole NT, when it's clear the books of the Bible are not consistent with one another theologically.

I'll be more specific with my highlights to express the inclucivist view I was talking about and if you still feel it is more exclucivist, please point out how.
"Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin"
"no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law"
"Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law ... show the work of the Law written in their hearts"

Exactly. No one will be declared righteous in God's sight by the works of the law. This would include people who never got to hear the Gospel.

John 14:6 is a notoriously difficult verse for believers where Jesus says, "no one can come to the Father except through me”. A lot of exlucisivists assume this to mean "through faith in me". A lot of inclucivists claim no Faith is necessary because it is "through my saving work". To be clear on this definition I practice restrictivism (exclusivism) meaning that a positive response to general revelation is not enough to accept the gift of salvation from Christ in that one needs a conscious decision to acknowledge/accept Christ as your savior. However, Christ's sacrifice is powered by itself, and not our actions, so those unable to know or decide (mentally handicapped, babies, unreached aboriginals, etc.) do not have "the Law" and show the work written on their hearts.

How about letting "John" himself do the interpreting?

John 3:16-18
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

Now for your last statement:

So to sum up quickly because this is far longer than I wanted.
You need to hear>accept Christ as your savior, or turn against your natural sinful nature instinctively (without knowing of Christ) to become saved.

Emphasis mine. Again, problem is that according to Paul that would be impossible.

[Yonadav]

That was the best marketing decision the christian brand ever made.  Who wants to snip the tips of their peens off..right?  No need to be jewish or get into all those zany jewish rituals.  That was limiting growth!

OFC, they had to get rid of the faction that thought you -did-....and somehow square that away with "jesus" comments about not changing jots and tittles....but, that was np.  Few clubs to the head here and there, a largely illiterate customer base..hey presto - success!

As to the rest, murder is also a part of christian scoiety..it was foundational to it's creation..and jesus didn't write anything on my heart.  I turn away from the bad all by my onesies, part of that is turning away from christianity....so I guess I get a pass on all of the things like any christian might?

If that was a marketing decision, then it was a completely unnecessary one. No one has ever needed to be Jewish to worship the Israelite deity, and the non-Jewish worship of the Israelite deity never had the zany rules about circumcision and such. The Torah says that when a gentile brings an offering to the Temple, their offering was to be accepted.

[The Grand Nudger]

That was the best marketing decision the christian brand ever made.  Who wants to snip the tips of their peens off..right?  No need to be jewish or get into all those zany jewish rituals.  That was limiting growth!

OFC, they had to get rid of the faction that thought you -did-....and somehow square that away with "jesus" comments about not changing jots and tittles....but, that was np.  Few clubs to the head here and there, a largely illiterate customer base..hey presto - success!

As to the rest, murder is also a part of christian scoiety..it was foundational to it's creation..and jesus didn't write anything on my heart.  I turn away from the bad all by my onesies, part of that is turning away from christianity....so I guess I get a pass on all of the things like any christian might?

If that was a marketing decision, then it was a completely unnecessary one. No one has ever needed to be Jewish to worship the Israelite deity, and the non-Jewish worship of the Israelite deity never had the zany rules about circumcision and such. The Torah says that when a gentile brings an offering to the Temple, their offering was to be accepted.

It was an issue for the various proto-christian factions at the time.  There's alot about christian theology and disputes that expresses a profound ignorance of that tradition....that some christ is actually god itself incarnate being the gorilla in the room..lol...but that doesn't change the fact that it was a pressing matter to them, which required and got resolution. The winning message was the message which spoke to a larger share of the religious market. The tension between those communities is precisely how "paul" came to be branded as the apostle to gentiles and why he wrote "letters" to other communities to that effect. Pauline christianity ultimately emerged as the victor over it's competitors.

To consider this a marketing decision, whatever else it may have been, and however poorly or well informed it's precepts were, is a statement that arises from contemporary theories of religion, not on the specifics of judaic traditions or the accuracy of any sect or schism with respect to them.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

That was the best marketing decision the christian brand ever made.

Hey, the best marketing decision is the sin: sin the imaginary disease to sell you the imaginary cure so you can go to imaginary place.

Too right.  It's always struck me that asking a god who invented sin to forgive you for committing a sin is sort of like thanking the bloke who sells you a bandage just after he stabs you.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, the difference here is that sin was a very broadly believed in concept, not at all limited to christianity.  In that sense, sin was universal, whereas adherence to judaic tradition was seen as too costly.  Insisting upon the irrelevancy of those traditions removed a barrier to assumption and recruitment while giving the institution broad leeway to decide upon it's own.

The effect of proto-christendom unhitching itself from judaism is so profound that it's nearly impossible to overstate. It was the singlemost consequential decision that the institution of christianity ever made. Before this was decided, they were as unsuccesful as judaism, after..they possessed the means to become a global phenomena (and you can see this disparity present, still).

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-just to continue with the thought above and get it out of my head..not only did the christians not invent sin..they weren't selling a cure for sin.  Sin itself was incurable. They were selling a cure for immanent death. You are all going to die..everyone is going to die. It will happen any minute now. Get on the train before it's too late.

This message was -pounding- in the ears of those experiencing the antonine plagues (and their sporadic precursors), specifically..when roman soldiers were bringing both proto-christian ideology and pathogens (lol, the distinction is academic as far as I'm concerned) back from wars in the near east.

[Yonadav]

If that was a marketing decision, then it was a completely unnecessary one. No one has ever needed to be Jewish to worship the Israelite deity, and the non-Jewish worship of the Israelite deity never had the zany rules about circumcision and such. The Torah says that when a gentile brings an offering to the Temple, their offering was to be accepted.

It was an issue for the various proto-christian factions at the time.  There's alot about christian theology and disputes that expresses a profound ignorance of that tradition..but that doesn't change the fact that it was a pressing matter to them, which required and got resolution.  The winning message was the message which spoke to a larger share of the religious market.  The tension between those communities is precisely how "paul" came to be branded as the apostle to gentiles.

I can't imagine why it was a pressing matter to them. I've ministered to Noachides a little bit, myself. But unless you build up a really strong core group of Noachides who won't tolerate anyone bringing xianity into the fold, they are very susceptible to xian missionaries who infiltrate the fold and try to turn the Noachides back to xianity. It's really just an authority issue. The xian missionaries want the Noachides to have beliefs that no Jew will touch with a ten foot pole, so that the xians will have authority over the non Jews. To me, xianity just seems to be about separating gentiles from Jews, because certain xian concepts seem to serve no purpose whatsoever, except to make xianity toxic to Jewish theology.

To help put that into perspective, let me point out that Jews and Muslims can worship side by side just fine. But the second that an xian shows up with their man-god, the Jews and Muslims have to go pray somewhere else. They really seem to have come up with a completely toxic idea just to drive others off.

[The Grand Nudger]

I can;t imagine why christians think alot of the things they do...and yet..they do. The christian god notion simply isn't toxic in the way that matters to growth, quite the opposite. Sort of like how putting crack in your cigarretes would probably help you to sell a bunch more..even if it eventually killed the smokers and destroyed the people around them. My comments, again, don;t have much to do with the decency, value, or validity of christian concepts (and even less so their relationship to their fellow abrahamics)..only those sociological effects which constrain or promote growth in movements of any kind.

The decision to seperate christianity from judaism was massively useful...particularly in the case of romans who didn;t much care for jews...and the same effect would repeat itself with the romanization of christian ideology. The metaphoric (and purportedly literal) washing of the hands. They found their market, they tailored their message to that market..and the rest is history.

Jesus and the rest of the characters of the new testament are as much Mr. Clean as they are anything else.

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-still continuing, because why not, right?  What else is history, is the specific means and avenues by which proto-christianity mobilized it's evangelical effort.  Independantly attested to by hostile and in-tradition authors..and most gloriously, in a purported debate between them recorded by later christian authors in which the christian proponent flat out accepts the accusation of the roman opposition.  That christians were bribing the under-served and ignorant lower classes with food.  

The combination of their message of enhanced inclusiveness and dire warnings of things to come along with the roman failure to adequately address either the poverty or disease particularly endemic to impoverished areas produced the christianity that we know today while devastating the traditional authority structures (the nobility were not spared) and their very claim to authority.  

No one seemed to be able to stop the looming end, but at least the christians were giving away little cakes!

[Godscreated]

Given that you are preaching this knowledge of salvation when you come before God without accepting Christ you will have no excuse, could be God will pull up this very post to condemn you.

GC

You obviously never saw this video

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And I never will, i understand what the scriptures say, something you lack very much.

GC