I am searching, I am not alone

I started my last entry with the intention of writing about the places I find truth other than the Bible. Then I got lost on a tangent (as is my wont) about Biblical truth itself and I ended up with a completely different entry from the one I intended to write. Let's see if I manage to stay on my intended topic this time.

I have never been able to bring myself to believe that salvation is only for people who believe in a certain thing. In middle school, I was very good at finding loopholes, much the annoyance of those who wanted to teach me moral facts. I believe in a just God and I simply could not wrap my head around the concept that a person who had never heard of Jesus would be sent to Hell for this. When I got a little older, I realized how much of a person's religious knowledge comes from her/his upbringing, culture, and life experience. I know a lot of people think that standing on a street corner shouting slogans and handing out tracts is a good way to "win souls for Jesus", but the truth is that no one is going to convert because of such an encounter unless s/he has been contemplating Christianity for some time already. Condemning a person for choosing to remain with the religion s/he was raised in and had followed all her/his life seemed about as harsh as condemning her/him for having never heard of Christianity.

So I'm not into winning converts. If someone came to me and wanted to know about Christianity, I'd share what I know. But I believe we are judged by God for who we are and how we live rather than what we believe, and so I'm not really gung-ho about preaching Christianity to every person I meet. In CS Lewis' The Last Battle, Aslan (the Jesus figure, although it took me years to see the Christian allegory in the books, thick-headed child that I was) welcomes a man named Emeth into his kingdom. Emeth protests that he did not follow Aslan but rather the god Tash, to which Aslan replies, "all the service thou hast done to Tash, I accept as service done to me...no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him." When I read this, I was struck by the realization of its parallels to my beliefs. A good person is a good person regardless of whether s/he is good in order to obey Jesus Christ, attain Nirvana, or simply to be a good person. And I cannot believe that a kind, just, and loving God would send his children to Hell simply because they go to the wrong worship services.

In high school, I started to think about religion as a social construct, a man-made entity. I know a lot of people who, equating religion with spirituality, reject God along with Church as human devices. My conclusion was that every religion evolved as humankind's effort to understand and relate to God. I still don't believe that any one religion has the whole picture down. At the time, I thought this was a marvelously original way of looking at religion (as teenagers are wont to do), but I've since learned that far wiser people than myself have come to the same conclusion. It doesn't mean all religions are the same. I think there are profound differences between the paths walked by a Jew and a Hindu, a Muslim and a Buddhist, a Christian and a Zoroastrian. But perhaps those paths are closer together than we think. Perhaps they do end at the same place. Regardless, this belief makes it even less desirable to me to drag people onto my path. I'm not arrogant enough to think my path will work for everyone, although, as I've said, if someone expressed an interest in walking my path for a time, I'd be happy to share.

When I read the Bible, passages about withholding judgment from other people always leap out at me. Jesus tells us that we will be judged in the same way we judge others (Mt 7, Lk 6:37, Jn 8:15, the Lord's Prayer). Most of his teaching focus on how we should best love God and our neighbors, not on how we should make our neighbors stop acting in ways we find wrong. In John 8:1-11 (depending on the version you look at, which is neither here nor there), Jesus gives his famous "casting stones" pronouncement, telling a group of Pharisees that whichever of them has no sin may throw the first stone at a woman they have caught in adultery (no mention of the man, who was presumably also an adulterer, but this is again neither here nor there). So who am I to declare someone in need of salvation? It's enough for me to try and live my own life in a Godly way; how can I take it upon myself to tell others how to do so?

I'm all for "preaching by example"--living a Godly life and letting that speak for my religion. Perhaps this makes me a coward. Perhaps I am breaking Jesus' command to "preach to all nations". Perhaps I ought to be more vocal about my faith. But as I fail to see the effectiveness of in-your-face proselytizing, I don't understand why I should do it. The trick for me is to balance my desire to be accepting of other people's faiths with the work of being open about my own. I tend too often to be too laid-back, to the point of not discussing my faith at all. I have no real framework for discussing my faith without feeling preachy and I have not had much experience with inter-faith discussion that focuses on understanding rather than conversion. So it looks like my work is to learn how to be open and share my faith without the goal being to make the other participants in my conversation feel preached-to.

And once again, I deviated from my intended post by about the second sentence of the first paragraph. If I didn't think tangents were an excellent way of finding unexpected truth, I might be frustrated with my inability to stay on topic. I'll try again next time.