Re: Tolerance (was: THE WORLD OF THE JINN)

Sent originally from the wrong email address. Here it is again...

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On 16 Oct 2003 at 21:57, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
> > On Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 06:49 , Andreas Johansson wrote:
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > > Ah, that's unexpectedly charitable, isn't it?
> >
> > Sad that someone finds it unexpected.
>
> Well, (traditional) Christianity wouldn´t expect Muslims getting to heaven. I
> was being ironic about the less charitable views common among those of my own
> faith.
Well, as I understand it, each stage of (at least the one main branch of) the Judeo-
Christian mythos is inclusive of the previous stages, but believes that the essential
message of God's word has been misinterpreted or forgotten by the previous
stages.

Thus, in the hierarchy

Jews --> Christians --> Muslims --> Sikhs

At any point on the line, the people at that point believe that themselves and the
people to the left of them are allowed into heaven, and that people to the right of
them are heretics.

Of course, when you get into the various sub-categories of each faith, and the other
branches, things start to get a bit harder to explain in simpler terms. For example,
the Jehovas Witnesses believe there is only room in heaven for 144,000 people.
This leads me to wonder facetiously whether it's wise for them to encourage greater
numbers of people into their faith to compete for those few spaces, but that's
another question entirely.




Paul

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