I rode around on my mower for an hour tonight with a question in my head, one I’ve been pndering for years now. I am not attempting to bait and switch. I want an honest answer. I am leaning toward Wil C. Fry, who was well-educated as a Christian, to give me a clear-headed answer on this…
A Christian premise seems to be that the only correct path to eternal life is through Jesus.
John 14:6 seems unambiguous: “Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'”
So my question is: is every Jew who died storming the beaches for the allies on D-Day in hell now?
“Those inside Christianity have answered this in various ways over the centuries…”
I noticed, repeatedly, while reading the Bible a couple of years ago, that “answered this question in various ways over the centuries” is always the answer. Every single time something absurd popped up in the Bible, or a contradiction, or something entirely untrue, I would Google it and find that Christians noticed it too, something hundreds of years ago, and spent lifetimes trying to explain away the ridiculousness.
Some apologist websites were forthright in their view that “the Bible MUST be true; therefore all interpretation is based on that.” So when it contradicts itself, they have to tie themselves up in knots to explain it away, when the obvious and easy answer is “it’s probably not true.”
Someone asked me recently why I chose Normandy as an example. Simple: few things in the American conservative psyche are held in higher regard than military heroism and sacrifice. If your dogma claims to send the best, strongest, most deserving among us to eternal punishment on what really amounts to a technicality (not being raised in or taught by the “right” religion), it might be time to reexamine that dogma.