Don’t believe in Jesus? Then you can look forward to the fiery gates of hell once you die.
At least, that’s what I was made to believe by two members of an on-campus Christian group called “Grace on Campus” who said that the only way to avoid going to hell was by believing in Christ.
Apparently, this discomforting piece of information was supposed to convince me to accept Jesus as my savior.
The students imploringly told me that there’s really no hope for a pleasant afterlife if I don’t convert to Christianity, no matter how selflessly I try to live my life. Jesus, they said, is the only solution to the problem of sin.
“He’s like a free gift,” they said. Why wouldn’t I take it?
I can’t think of a worse way to convince someone about the merits of religion than by damning them to hell in the first encounter. Anyone with an inkling of intelligence isn’t going to be scared into converting to Christianity (or any other religion). The threat of torture is about as effective as torture itself, and changing another person’s beliefs is hard enough without it being insulting.
Maybe they were just naive, but it’s difficult not to become completely turned off toward religion when your peers exhibit such misguided and narrow-minded behavior.
If religious groups are serious about recruiting and hope to be effective at all, they should be as welcoming as possible to other people instead of isolating them.
They ought to invite students to events that make them feel good about themselves, like through community service.
All I got at the end of the conversation were some woeful looks and a flier inviting me to come to a meeting. Had the pair been slightly less condemning, I might have actually gone. They had certainly piqued my interest, but by the end I was too alienated by what they said, which, in addition to their message about Heaven and hell, included their firm faith in the notion that the world was created in seven days and that a great deal of the Bible should be taken literally.
These two did nothing more than defeat their own purpose, distort the point of having faith and give Christians a bad rap. Isaac Tucker, a first-year geography student and Christian, said that the message of Christianity is about unconditional love and that it offers a way to go to Heaven.
“We don’t know that we’re going to hell. No one knows. I, for one, am not willing to damn everyone else to hellfire,” Tucker said. “I only know a way to go to Heaven. I don’t know a way to go to hell.”
Tucker also said he doesn’t see a problem with evolution, and he doesn’t take every word of the Bible literally.
“I don’t believe science rules out acts of God or vice versa. I think God created science along with everything else,” Tucker said.
Having faith, then, is not totally unreasonable, especially if it brings comfort to those who need it. The idea of a happy afterlife might, after all, motivate people to live richer and fuller lives since they have something agreeable to look forward to. And if you view Christianity ““ or another faith ““ as the way to achieve that, then so be it.
Faith becomes a problem when it goes against its own message of love and acceptance ““ a message common to all faiths ““ and lumps together the majority of the world into one big damned group.
Even though I disagree with the belief that the Grace on Campus Church’s Web site states, which is that “salvation is wholly of God by grace on the basis of the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, the merit of His shed blood, and not on the basis of human merit or works,” and I don’t believe that the Bible was meant to be taken literally, I can appreciate what it ““ along with any other religious text ““ has to offer.
Anyone can appreciate a story about overcoming struggle and using various figures in the Bible as role models for exhibiting good behavior. If religion is about love, then why use a religious text to spread hate? Why discredit the countless people who have lived selflessly and died as nonbelievers?
Telling me I’m going to hell doesn’t make me happy and is utterly counterproductive since it suggests that I can be as immoral as I want since as a nonbeliever the outcome will be the same.
Religious organizations need to realize that using fear to recruit new members only inspires annoyance and anger. Until then, I guess I ““ along with a whole host of other people ““ will be seeing the devil soon.
If you’re about to burn up about this, e-mail Nijhawan at anijhawan@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.