In Reply to: Non family belief question posted by Greg on March 03, 2005 at 15:53:34:
Greg, I think that Joppa’s response to your post illustrates perfectly what I was trying to say in my earlier response to you, that “Christians tend to answer such questions with certainty and dogma”. He doesn’t want you to “analyse the stuff of life,” in other words don’t use your rational mind to understand Christianity. Instead, he says “to fly, you must fly”, in other words, to understand Christianity you have to become a Christian. Why he has to use an analogy instead of speaking plainly I don’t know, but what he’s really saying is that until you accept Christian dogma, you will never understand Christianity.
Analyse closer what he is saying in response to your question. He doesn’t answer it. Instead, he talks about “speaking in tongues,” Christian dogma that holds that a person filled with the “spirit” can speak in a foreign language unknown to that person, or even a language unknown to humans. He talks about a “renewed heart”, whatever that means. He talks about “healed bones,” in other words, faith healing. And how does “the joy of forgiveness” answer your question? Is it forgiveness when Jesus condemns to hell those that don’t believe in him. After all, that is really at the core of your question: how can you reconcile Christ’s claim to be the only way to God, when other religions make the same claim? His response is nothing but a sermon to try to convince you to shed reason, ignore doubts, stop questioning and just accept the Christian “truth.”