@mrmhead Said
As I've always joked -
If I find myself standing before God at the pearly gates, my comment would be "Holy s***! You are real!!"
- Not too different from a recent joke posted here about the atheist praying to God for help as he's being eaten by the Loch Ness monster.
That doesn't mean I dismiss the teachings and morals of Christianity. I find many of them rather compatible with Humanity and civilization.
Which is also why I was OK with my son going to PSR (Saturday morning Catholic religion classes) When he started questioning things, we had honest conversations, and he never made first communion.
But he was baptized (another act of
conformation on my part) so at least he wouldn't burn in hell if he died before being able to learn and make decisions.
Current theological jargon is that "God" is the
ground of being rather than
a being. Difficult to imagine standing before that in which we
live and move and have our being! We do stand before other persons, and we don't have to imagine that.
When I still retained some sort of "salvific" interest in the Christian Faith I was becoming more interested and informing myself of Universalism, the teaching that
all will eventually be "saved". It's a growing belief among many Christians and there are even reputable books by those who have investigated the documents of the early church and the early Church Fathers that it was in fact the teaching of the nascent Church during the first few centuries. Few on any forum were interested. Ardent Christians of a particular stripe prefer judgement, condemnation, the eternal separation of "sheep" and "goats", presuming themselves to be a sheep of course. Certainly preferred it to grace and mercy.
I drifted "east" and have no regrets.