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Originally Posted by shaw-n
Then christianity should probably rid itself of archaic and misleading concepts such as :
-you live only once and if you become a christian you will go to heaven when you die;
-you need Jesus as your personal Lord and savior if you don't want to be tortured in hell forever;
-you need to believe that God was born of a virgin and became a man just as us;
-sins are only made right via a blood sacrifice;
-that there is any people who are somehow more special than any others before God;
to name the most harmful lies.
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You raised a very good issue. How should Christianity evolve in light of what we know about the evolution of humanity and man's gradual acquisition of religion?
Well, firstly, listen to what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that we gut our religions and start over. So, I'm not suggesting that Orthodox Jews, Reform Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., ought to meet at a conference with Christians and every other religion to decide what the next human religion should be. The reason is that we ought to believe in godly inspiration within our respective religious tradition, so this is a matter for each religious tradition to address. However, certainly eucemenism should play a very significant role in allowing each tradition to evolve freely within the context of how other religions evolve. This I believe was one of the inspired godly reasons for evangelizing the Gospel, and as many people now realize, this worked in helping to create a religion that bridged Jewish and Pagan beliefs to some degree. Fundamentalists always look upon this as a bad thing, but this is a good thing as long as it happened within the context of the religion's natural development.
In the case of each issue that you raised, I don't think we ought to set any hard and fast rules for a tradition on what they should and shouldn't surrender from their tradition. For example, I don't think we ought to say to Orthodox Jews that the God of the universe being concerned about our haircuts is absurd. The reason is that this haircut might play a very important role in their tradition, and whether the God of the billions and billions of galaxies is concerned about how an advanced primate cuts their hair or not, the tradition itself might need that particular odd tradition in order to develop naturally within its own framework.
This doesn't mean the rest of us should accept the view that haircuts are important to God, but if that becomes a real stumbling block for the continuation of Orthodox Judaism, most likely the religion itself will evolve to avoid its own demise.
I myself would like to see much of that laundry list that you provided changed within Christianity. I belong to a religious tradition within Christianity which is already well on its way toward re-framing many of the items on this list (the United Church of Christ). So, if that's the trend for all of Christendom, then I think that's a very positive trend.