Leaving aside the potentially sarcastic-flame-inducing question of whether or not MiB is a good Christian (which I'm hardly qualified to judge these days, anyway), I am curious about one thing:
The Man In Black wrote:
The bible's all allegorical, thats where so many people get it wrong, I mean Jesus spoke in parables, the 10 commandments appear to be mostly guidelines ("Thou shalt not kill," its almost universally accepted that there are still circumstances killing is okay with God, if 1 of the commandments is merely a guideline it logically follows, since it isn't specified, the others are as well, correct?)
But what about the first commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"? I can see where "Thou shalt not kill" is just a general rule of thumb which can be circumvented in extreme circumstances, but no. 1 seems pretty straightforward. It's hard to think of an emergency situation which would require belief in a different god. I've seen it interpreted as meaning that if you grow up somewhere where you have no access to the word of God, you're exempt, but if you're familiar with Christianity and still reject it, you go to Hell. Which still seems a bit sucky, frankly...
Quote:
Er...no. Aside from closed-minded people, a lot of ministers and priests take this view, I mean the real problem this solves is, God is all-forgiving and all-merciful, but if he really wants to give us all a chance to go to heaven, why is Christianity the One True Religion? It means that a whole lot of people went to hell who not only lived good lives but had *no opportunity* to convert to said "right" religion (ie the Chinese just after Christianity got started.) So, either God is not really all forgiving and all merciful, and he lives to pick random peoples to bless and take up to heaven (kinda inconsistent with the ideal of the Christian God) or there is some other way to get to heaven than by being Christian.
You'll have to excuse me, the church we normally attend is Southern Baptist, so your non-fundamentalism frightens and confuses me... You seem to place more emphasis on living one's life by Christian principles rather than the actual mythology. Which begs the question, doesn't that make you more of an altruistic deist with an interest in ancient Hebrew literature than a “Christian”, per se? (Whoops, I said I wouldn't get into that. Ah, well...)