Hell full of Ancients

[Petrosjko]

Which is a load of shit if you subscribe to Original Sin as the Catholic Church does. We are all born with the Sin of Adam and Eve on our souls. Gotta love that forgiving god.

Internal consistancy of the storyline is not their strong point. The rules and interpetations are just exactly what one would expect from a heavily modified code handed down from ancient times.

[Rye]

Ok now. Let's put aside that the quote was written a hundred years after Jesus' death, that the gosepls are not even contemporary writings and that you have to accept on faith that guy was god in the first place. Let's accept all that as positively true.

Does that mean that all the ancients - Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, Aztecs, Incans, Norsemen, etc...all these people including the numberless generations of apemen and human ancestors all went straight to hell? That the Buddha went to hell, that Vestel Virgins, Incan children, Native American infants, Greek Doctors, Roman senators and philantropists, phiolosophers, scientists, writers, builders, the poor, the rich, the meek, the humble, the pious. They ALL went straight to hell. But come 33AD, we suddenly started going to heaven?

And if you were a Jew- God's chosen people who he slaughtered infants and brought down walls for- you were REALLY screwed because unless you switched beliefs to some smelly Nazarene preaching to the masses then your chosen status was revoked and you're now going to hell.

Well, as with all things biblical, it really depends what you pay attention to and what you try to harmonise.

For example, I could point out that there are some prophecies Jesus has yet to fulfil that have pertinence here:

The whole world knows about God, and Jesus, and they'll all search him out: Isaiah 11:9 "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea." 10 "And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious."

Isaiah 40:5 "And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see [it] together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken [it]."

and Zephaniah 3:9 "For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve him with one consent."

So when Jesus returns, to be a proper messiah (ignoring the requirement to return, which was never mentioned in the messianic prophecies AFAIK) he'll unify everyone and make them all like YHVH/him, as per John 3:16 this means everyone will be saved.

God will also stop all death; Isa 25:7 And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations. 25:8 He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth: for the LORD hath spoken [it].

but, he'll resurrect ancestry, and this is the important part. Isa 26:19 Thy dead [men] shall live, [together with] my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew [is as] the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.

So given that: Jesus will fulfil all prophecy. He will resurrect all the dead. And more to the point all will believe in God/Jesus and follow them, be they Jew, Gentile or whatever, and they will die no more. You should know what believing in Jesus will do according to John 3:16 and this doesn't disagree.

Of course, this could mean they're in hell now, but according to ecclesiastes, they don't even know it.Ecclesiastes 9:10 "there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave [sheol], whither thou goest, " and that "the dead know not any thing" (vs. 5, 10).

So in short, yeah, in some bits, it's nasty, in others, it says other things. What can you do? Seems there's an inbuilt loophole in the system though, where everyone gets eternal life, though this is contradictory to revelation...this is the trouble when you get different mythologies from different eras and try to harmonise them.

[xcr]

Origional sin is not biblical. It has its origin with St. Augustine. This is not to say it is not suggested by the bibal (also note that I am assuming the truth of secondary sorces here- I have not read the entire bible by any means.)

[Frank Hipper]

Does that mean that all the ancients - Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, Aztecs, Incans, Norsemen, etc...all these people including the numberless generations of apemen and human ancestors all went straight to hell? That the Buddha went to hell, that Vestel Virgins, Incan children, Native American infants, Greek Doctors, Roman senators and philantropists, phiolosophers, scientists, writers, builders, the poor, the rich, the meek, the humble, the pious. They ALL went straight to hell. But come 33AD, we suddenly started going to heaven?

If you're accepting the existance of hell, why would you preclude the existance of all them non-western types' version of the afterlife?
One fairy-tale satisfies as much as any other...

[Shadow WarChief]

So ... Noah and Moses ..... in Hell, by this theory?

Boy did *those* guys get a raw deal!

Actually, Dante said that those figures were in the same place as the other enlightened pagans until 33AD when ol' JC gave them specifically a get of jail free card.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The simple fact is that Catholicism has a heavier basis in the works of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas than the Bible; many Catholics don't know much about the bible, but that's totally irrelevant to their beliefs because the majority of their beliefs are the work of those philosophers more than actual direct scripture. For that matter, a lot of beliefs held by Protestants are also the world of those two philosophers, and again has little to do with the Bible. Over two thousand years, countless hundreds of brilliant men spent much of that time, and their lives, working to force Christianity to conform to the concepts of Greek philosophy. The end result in something almost certainly unrecognizable not only to early Christians, but also from a direct reading of the Bible.