Of Heaven and Hell (Part 2)
Most of us Christians are familiar with the verse:
“No one comes to the father except through me [Jesus] …”
Think about this scenario. Picture yourself in Africa’s interior, say 1500 A.D You might be fishing on Lake Victoria, digging in Murang’a or herding goats in Loiktoktok. No colonial boundaries exist. Let alone hear of Jesus, no one has the faintest notion that other men except black exist …
Another scenario. You are born in Afghanistan – 1998 – at the height of the Taliban rule. Your parents are devout Muslims. Pray five times a day, give alms, read the Koran, etc. Do you think you’d ever get to hear of Jesus and his teachings? And if you did, would you forfeit what you grew up believing? We are a function of what our parents and communities are. That is an irrefutable fact.
In all fairness therefore, hearing or not hearing about Jesus in a way that you can accept and adhere to his teachings can be attributed to probability – that is – the probability that you are born to a Christian family. Given the population of the world and the number of professed Christians, I dare say that the said probability is less that 0.5.
I find it hard to accept that the God I pray to, all loving and caring, would operate like this. There must be a lot we do not understand
posted by jm at 11:31 AM
2 Comments:
There's a lot we do not understand about God, and personally, I'm tired of questioning if he even exists. All the same, we all need to believe in something, if only for our own sanity
they say that religion is the opium of the masses. there is a difference between religion and faith though. religion is what someone wants to identify with. faith is one's personal relationship with his God/god.
i read someone's blog http://www.kakondeskele.blogspot.com/ where he says that christianity was introduced by the british as a weapon to penetrate africa with less hostility. i kind of agree with him. he even went ahead and 'deciphered' the meaning of the BIBLE as an acronym.
everyone should just believe in one God and hope that they are on the right path. the truth cannot be found out there. not even the pope can tell the truth about religion, no pun intended. i am a christian by birth, defected to Bahai during the course of my life, read buddhist scripts and finally became a pagan, one who has no religion but believes in God. i rest my case.
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