Rapist Christians Go to Heaven, Atheists Go to Hell

Pope Francis recently stirred some things up by stating that "doing good" is the most important key to getting into heaven, even going so far as to say that atheists can get into heaven as long as they do good throughout their lives. I wonder what kind of reactions will happen to this across the world, even outside Catholicism. The concept that the only way to salvation is through Jesus is pretty much the fundamental tenet of most Christian faiths and this flies in the face of that idea. However, for any group which claims to have knowledge of morality, this has been a big problem because what logically follows from the idea, that salvation is only achieved through Jesus, is that horrible Christians get rewarded with heaven while goodly Non-Christians burn in Hell... and any moral compass which claims that is "right" is a broken moral compass. 

I applaud Pope Francis' declaration because I think it resolves an inconsistency in their dogma. Now if we can just address that whole thing about condoms, especially in Africa, and maybe have the Priests stop fucking children... then we'll be making some serious progress!

In honor of the Pope's declaration, I'm reposting something from the archives, April 5th, 2012:

Rapist Christians Go to Heaven, Atheists Go to Hell

I'd like to take a moment and share with you the main problem with dogmatic thinking: 

I've been tweeting with Ben recently. He's a young Christian and I'm happy to say he is actually very progressive minded.... until religion gets involved. As far as I can tell he's a devout Christian, but he believes the Earth is billions of years old, he believes in Evolution, and I think he is willing to believe in the Big Bang (but only if he can believe that God made it happen). 

He totally accepts science as long as he can make an excuse and make room for his religious beliefs. His views of morality, unfortunately, are not being kept in check by science... and this is where he goes completely off the rails. I asked him a common question regarding religion and morality. 

If an atheist is a really good person, can they get into Heaven? If I behaved even better than every other Christian in the world, but didn't believe in Jesus, do I deserve to be tormented for eternity? Does that seem right? He kept avoiding what he felt about the rightness of it and kept repeating "that's just the way it is." So I asked for clarification... 

... and it turns out that he feels Christians who are Serial Child Rapists should go to Heaven if they ask for forgiveness but an Atheist who is loving, caring, never hurts anyone, is charitible, and helps their fellow humans... deserves to be ETERNALLY TORMENTED in Hell. 

He feels that refusing to accept Jesus is a violation of God's Law and therefore a sin. This acceptance of Jesus is merely a thought. All behaviors can be the same, the only difference is this thought. I asked him how lacking this one thought, even in the face of all of this good behavior, was a large enough sin to warrant eternal torment in Hell. His response was shocking: 

I couldn't believe it. All sin is the same? That's MADNESS. How can anyone hold such a thought in their head and still claim to be moral in any way? 

This is the problem with dogmatic thinking. It isn't based on any sort of sense or logic. You have a set of rules written by unknown authors from an ignorant culture and it leads you to believe monstrous ideas. 

I hope that Ben realizes this method of thought is insane. I hope he realizes it soon. 

Screenshots of tweets with Ben in context