[Vision2020] More than one path to salvation

[Ralph Nielsen]

Andreas,

I'm well aware of the history of Judaism. I was referring to the old  
Hebrew religion of the Torah. Elijah is not in the Torah. Enoch is  
but was presumably taken up alive to heaven like Elijah much later.  
They were the only two who went to heaven in the Hebrew Bible. But  
they were taken up physically to a physical heaven while they were  
still alive. The Torah consists of the first five books of the Bible.

In orthodox Christianity Jesus was also taken up alive into a  
physical heaven. In the later official Christian creeds they still  
say, to this day, "And we believe in the resurrection of the body  
[not a soul] and the life everlasting." This sounds pretty physical  
to me. Remember that in those days nearly everybody believed the  
earth was flat and heaven was above the earth. This doesn't work with  
our knowledge of a spherical earth going around a very hot sun in a  
solar system.

Ralph



More than one path to salvation

Andreas Schou ophite at gmail.com
Tue Jun 24 10:50:43 PDT 2008


Ralph --

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Torah isn't too big on the concept of Heaven,
except in the cases Ezekiel and Enoch.

But everytime you bring this up, you ignore Judaism as it's been
practiced for the past 2000 years. The concept of Heaven has been an
explicit part of Judaism since at least the Babylonian captivity. It's
certainly present in the Talmud. And every time you bring it up, it's
to draw a negative contrast with Christianity.

You make exactly the same mistake with Buddhism, and for exactly the
same reason: you confuse the actual practice of a religion with the
standpoint of its authoritative texts, specifically to draw a negative
contrast with Christianity.

You're right that the Buddha of the Pali Sutras was more concerned
with the temporal suffering of humans than the fate (or even the
existence) an indivisible, immortal soul. But you elide the actual
practice of the religion. In this case, the "pure form" of Theravada
Buddhism is seldom practiced outside a monastic context: in its main
geographic area in Southeast Asia, it is almost invariably overlaid on
ancestor-worshipping or spirit-venerating hedge religions. This
necessarily requires an afterlife, or at least a "spirit world."

-- ACS