- Joined
- Aug 27, 2005
- Messages
- 43,602
- Reaction score
- 26,256
- Location
- Houston, TX
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Conservative
DURHAM, N.C. (AP) -- When Chad Holtz lost his old belief in hell, he also lost his job.
The pastor of a rural United Methodist church in North Carolina wrote a note on his Facebook page supporting a new book by Rob Bell, a prominent young evangelical pastor and critic of the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal torment for billions of damned souls.
Two days later, Holtz was told complaints from church members prompted his dismissal from Marrow's Chapel in Henderson.
Does Gandhi go to hell? I don't really know. That's for another thread, but let's get right down to the nitty gritty. How about Protestants and Catholics? I was brought up Baptist, and my wife was brought up Catholic. When we were ready to get married, her priest refused to perform the ceremony, and told me to my face that I was about to drag her to hell. My Baptist preacher took a different tack. He smiled at her, instead of condemning. However, he took me aside, out of earshot of Carol, and said he couldn't do the ceremony because she was Catholic, and told me that she was going to hell if she didn't give up being Catholic. She and I got married in a Christian reformed church, after telling both the Baptist preacher and Catholic priest to take a hike.
So who goes to hell? I'm not really sure, but that Baptist preacher and Catholic priest sure seem to have a leg up on many people. But they are men of God, right? And God's word is infallible, right? So which one of them is the blasphemer? I would say that both of them are. The Bible says that a man takes a wife, and that's that. And I don't care if my wife was from some Pacific Island, and grew up wearing a bone in her nose. Sometimes I think that the cannibal in his or her own society has the capacity to be more moral than the churchgoer in ours. How many people have died because Protestants and Catholics started wars over religion? Show me a place in the Bible that says this is OK. All I see is something called the 6th Commandment. But that didn't stop Torquemada from torturing hundreds of thousands of people to death, and performing the first Holocaust of the Jews in Europe, did it? Didn't stop the 30 years war either, which began in 1617. And aside from Catholic vs. Protestant, what about Protestant vs. Protestant? It didn't stop the Civil War, or lynchings of African-Americans by the KKK, or the belief, arrived at by torturing the meaning of the Bible, that African-Americans where somehow racially inferior to white people. I could go on, but you get my drift.
So, who is going to heaven, and who is going to hell? I can't tell you who is going to hell, but if history is any indication, I would assert that my mythical Pacific Island cannibal has a better chance of getting into heaven than some people who dare to call themselves Christians.
Discussion?
Article is here.
Last edited: