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Is Faith Based Salvation Irresponsible? |
According to the rules of faith-based salvation, you are saved by faith and not by works. Faith-based salvation contemplates virtually unlimited forgiveness for any sins. It is what you believe in that counts, not what you do with your life.
Now - I do understand that this isn't a blank check to murder steal and pillage because Jesus will forgive anything. In fact, I'll write up a definition that perhaps Christians will quote on how faith-based salvation works. Being saved is sort of like an insurance policy. It covers you if you sin, even if it's a big sin. Just like your insurance policy covers you if you crash your car and kill someone, even if it's your fault. But, like auto insurance, you can't deliberately crash your car knowing that you'll be covered, and if you abuse the coverage they will revoke your insurance. So - I do admit that although salvation is by faith and not by works, you do have to do a little something to show you are really on board with the faith thing.
Having said that however, faith by definition is the belief in things that can not be proven, because once it is proven then it's science and no longer faith.
What is of concern here is that there are two worlds. "This World" is the world of science and reality and it is materialistic and physical, full of sex and evolution and black holes, and quantum singularities, logic, reason, space-time, atoms, and gravity. This world is inherently evil and ruled by Satan. This is the world of the Church of Reality.
The real claim behind faith-based salvation is that you are saved only by giving up reality.
Then there's this "other world" which is like a parallel universe with a completely different set of rules. This world is the world where God lives. It is the spiritual world that one can experience only through faith that allows the mind to communicate with this other world. In this other world there is no science. It is the world of miracles where anything and everything is possible. It is the world of "the spirit" that created this physical world as some sort of "test" to see if your soul will find it's way back to the "other world". Those who hear the calling will be rewarding with eternal life in paradise and all others will be tortured forever in Hell.
What this implies is that there is a reality outside of reality which is in itself a contradiction in terms. It implies that, in this alternate reality, if I can call it such, concepts like proof and facts don't exist. It is outside of science which is of "this world". In fact, how can you even call such a parallel world "real" when such a term is outside the framework of this "other world"?
The spiritual world is completely different from one person to the next. It has properties that are more consistent with imagination than reality.
So - here's the problem. Billions of people believe in this other world. If their beliefs about this other world were consistent, that is, if everyone who believed in the other world all believed the same thing, then that would be interesting. But the reality is that there is nothing at all consistent about people's experience of the "other world". As it turns out, everyone's other world is completely different than everyone else's other world. So there isn't "another world", there are billions of other worlds. There are as many other world's as one can imagine. Which raises the question, is there another world, or is it just our own individual imaginations?
I believe that it is irresponsible to invent an imaginary world with an imaginary set of rules and try to pass it off as something that is more important than reality itself. I think that it is a sin to call reality evil and say that reality is somehow "Satan's World" and that the world of imagination is somehow superior to real reality as it really is.
I find it interesting that believers who claim to support moral certainty and criticize non-believers on the basis of "personal reality", are in fact doing the same thing themselves. Believers seem to believe that they can do whatever their imagination makes them think, that God is telling them to do and that makes it right. I suppose it would be OK if there really was a God who was really telling them what to do. But, if there was a real God telling people what to do, then the message from this single source would be consistent. We know that the God of the Christians and the God of the Muslims is not the same God. What is really happening here is that people are expressing their self-centered personal realities and trying to justify it by claiming that an outside divine power is speaking through them when the reality is - they are at best just fooling themselves. We realists contend that impersonating a deity is dishonest and irresponsible.
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