Sunday, July 13, 2008

Through Christ Alone? A Skeptic's Response...

This is a response to a recent blogpost entitled, Through Christ Alone.

The Bible is very clear that the only way to Heaven is through Jesus Christ alone (see John 14:6). Interestingly, according to a recent survey of the U.S. religious landscape, 70% of people who claim affiliation to a particular religious faith reject this idea. In fact, 57% of Evangelical Christians think that many religions can lead to eternal life.

This is both encouraging and depressing at the same time. It is actually of little surprise that such religious pluralism is so prevalent in American society when one considers that, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life,

“…44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.”

As Christopher Hitchens so aptly questions,

“Do these people have no idea how much used to hang on the differences between Wesley, Luther, Miller, Smith, Augustine, and Aquinas? How choice of religion was once a life-and-death matter, in this world and the next?”

Thank God that these choices are no longer life-and-death matters! Yet, it is even that much more frustrating that so many believers still cling to their beliefs in spite of, or in ignorance to, the contradictions between their self-identified religious faiths and their own foggy notion of what is necessary to achieve eternal salvation.

While the majority of Americans have apparently rejected biblical literalism, at least with respect to the beliefs one must subscribe to in order to avoid spending one’s afterlife in a lake of eternal fire, a significant minority has not. A good friend of mine, Matt Capps, takes literally the necessity of accepting Jesus as one’s lord and savior as a requisite belief to enter Heaven (described here).

To accept this belief is to espouse the following ultimatum: Worship Jesus or burn in Hell forever.

To be frank, I find this doctrine morally detestable to the highest degree.

A skeptic’s creed is simply this: extraordinary claims must be met with extraordinary evidence. So long as the evidence and reason for a particular belief are in proportion to the claims being made then a skeptic will accept it as provisionally true; that is until further evidence / reason refutes said claim. Basically, a skeptic is one who fully and consciously embraces the scientific method.

Before one considers the moral proposition that Jesus is the only path to Heaven one must consider whether there really is even a Heaven in the first place. Does a personal God exist? Even so, is there sufficient reason or evidence to suggest that our spirits live on after our bodies pass away? The answers to these questions must be known with the highest level of confidence prior to contemplating the original question.

I’ll end here with a quote from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:

"If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.... The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind."

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