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Chris Carstens's avatar

Many of us still work with this ancient mind altering tool, the book. It is particularly useful, because you can buy one and hand it to a friend -- or in my case, a 47 year old son -- and they can carry it away for use on their own life-rebuilding project.

Paul, when might we hopefully expect to find your magnificent series of essays on The Machine available in such a format? I plan to immediately purchase 10 copies for my friends.

Christopher Carstens

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Sethu's avatar

I was talking with someone about universal salvation, or the view that all souls will be saved in the very end. There are three arguments for it in particular that I appreciate. 1) The concept of "eternal Hell" is an oxymoron. Only God is eternal, and Hell is the utter absence of God, which means that there can be no eternal place that is Hell. 2) Our deepest human nature is the image of God; and if freedom means the capacity to perfectly realize our nature, then that means that any decision in favor of evil is an expression of unfreedom. When we are in perfect freedom, we will paradoxically have no choice but to choose Him. 3) The basic logic of love will not be at peace with some souls being condemned to Hell forever. Aquinas' view, which is that the saints in Heaven will derive pleasure from watching the torments of the wicked in Hell, is morally depraved. Much more Christian is the vow of the bodhisattvas, who refuse personal salvation until all creatures on this earth are also saved.

Many seem to believe that universal salvation is a heresy, but the formal stance of the Orthodox Church is that it is a permissible belief, with no dogma or doctrine requiring believers to feel one way or another about it.

The metaphysical implications are somewhat open. Assuming that not all people are going to become saints in this earthly life, universal salvation would seem to require either 1) ongoing purification of the soul in other realms in the next life, or 2) a type of reincarnation, so that people have further opportunity to become holy in this realm. I'm somewhat agnostic about the nuts and bolts of how it works, but I'm convinced that it does. And naturally, universal salvation should never be taken as an excuse to waste the gift of life that we have now. Whatever comes next, this life is of consequence—but it would be better to act out of the actual love of God rather than the fear of Hell.

One vision I have is that when it's time for us to depart from this realm, we will all be obliged to pass through a wall of purifying fire, and our egos are highly flammable. If we have spent our lives here drawing closer to God, then we may experience the fire as fulfilling our deepest desire; whereas if we have spent them clinging to the stuff that will burn, then the fire could seem like a sort of torture and loss of self. In other words, hellfire and holy fire might be one and the same fire, subjectively experienced by two different sorts of people.

Related to universal salvation may be Christian perennialism, or the view that the Logos who is Jesus Christ speaks through all wisdom in all cultures and places and times. It thus becomes possible to consider a distinction between "Christians of the heart" and "heathens of the heart", looking past tribal labels of what people merely profess with their tongues. In Matthew 7:21, Jesus says, "Not all who say My name will be saved"—and I think that the converse must be true as well, and that many who don't say His name will be saved, since it is the state of the heart that matters. I expect that God is more concerned with whether our hearts are aligned with His will than with whether we formally declare faith in His name. If some professing Christians are in for a rather rude shock, then why not also imagine that some self-declared Buddhists are set up for a pleasant surprise? That's how I see it, anyway.

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