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What do you think salvation is (for)? How is it achieved, what does it accomplish, why is it necessary, and for whom is it necessary? Are salvation and related concepts like judgment and repentance just empty words, addressing a fictional problematic?
I do not believe that religious doctrines are aribtrary mumbo jumbo, redeemed only when you've had some sort of religious experience opening your eyes.
I do see Christianity as applying to human lives rather than afterlives.
And this has little to do with whether or not there is a deity, whichever one it may be. I'm not talking about the entirety of Christian theology or anything like that... just doctrinal bits and pieces that I've encountered online.
Throwing context to the wind, as is customary, some Bible quotes:
"Bad people will have punishment forever. But the good people will go and have life forever."
"The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire."
"And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation."
"This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."
Good and evil - that theme is familiar enough. A morality so stark naked perfect that it can shed the fetters of conscience and cast that first judgmental stone, then all stones until no evil's left breathing... or, as the case may be, left untortured. I fail to see what is is achieved, what's made better by the infinite torment some believers deign so necessary for God's holiness to remain standing, but this is another topic.
"He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him."
"He that believeth not, shall be damned."
"And to them it was given that they should not kill those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."
Now this is more interesting. How could disbelief, non-membership, possibly be a crime, though? What's so "godly" about rewarding or punishing people for whatever they used to falsely or correctly believe about reality back when they saw but through a glass, darkly? How come we who are so infinitely inferior, so corrupt and unworthy are nonetheless imbued with this strange power of causing all-powerful, perfectly wise beings to want to punish us for our thoughts? So what if I'm wrong! Does that matter more than why I'm wrong, or even why I'd have liked to have been right?
It doesn't. It's just that, with Christianity's unsurviveable premises, faith - that is, trust - in a way out becomes necessary. "Sola fide", "sola gratia" necessitate and enable this act of self-salvation. We're declared fundamentally incapable of saving ourselves - we can't ever be good enough, we cannot earn or barter for salvation, we cannot attain enlightenment or godhood or meditate ourselves out of this vale of tears. Broken as we are, we cannot reach for God... but God reaches for us.
We only have to believe it, and accept it, repent, surrender. That's where the actual salvation takes place. That's the doing of it. It's a fundamental change of mind and heart, a relinquishment of control to a notion in your mind that you must not (for this would render it powerless) consciously steer the way you might if you tried too hard to make an imaginary and stubbornly silent friend talk back to you. Might the belief in being "graced undeservedly" be a powerful, perhaps cathartic, religious counterpart to the humble secular "being okay with oneself"? Christianity does, after all, presuppose a universe whose morals are defined and embodied by its creator and judge. Hard as even that is, believing yourself okay with yourself won't do - nor will the approval of other imperfect creatures. You'll have to believe yourself okay with God.
"Enlightenment" in Christianity, and this may be part of its appeal and an advantage it has over Buddhism (say), is thus open even to those with no self-esteem, those so tormented with guilt and self-loathing that their state of mind wouldn't allow them to work any positive magic in their own interest anyway. It's a psychological shortcut in disguise, then, demanding (besides belief) a recognition of our own helplessness in overcoming our essential human nature and a willingness to submit entirely to the will of that which would otherwise threaten us with well-deserved punishment.
After all: If "all fall short of the glory of God" - or that of their own expections, or of those of Moses or Paul and whoever wrote in their names or in God's - then failure is in every single case inevitable, and any judgement and punishment attached to these (as if by some cosmic causality) likewise inevitable.
Blame it on Adam or don't - sin really is hereditary, a byproduct of being human, an inborn disability of sorts.
Why, though, does an innate flaw predestinate us for (eternal?) fiery punishment? Do cripples deserve torture - for losing the 100 metre dash, perhaps? - unless they break down in tears to repent of their failures... in which case pressure is taken from them (they're saved, you might say)?
Christianity (Jesus, at any rate) does perform an overdue step away from culture-specific rules and strict legalism toward love as the true goal of all these laws, toward forgiveness and charity. At the same time, it also points out that "till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law" - that it's not so much the rules that are wrong, that they're only human, or based on misapplied standards, as our innate inability to obey them. Casting the first stone would be wrong because of the sins of the caster, not because the stone itself would be misdirected! Why? Why not go all the way and stress not merely the virtue of forgiveness, but its ultimate deservedness to boot?
This psychological stick-and-carrot approach, this tightening of the screw becomes more comprehensible, perhaps, if you consider it a solution to a problem not just inherent in human nature but specific to the lethal theocracy of Jesus' times. Within ye olde retributive justice paradigm, an ideology in which justice is served by inflicting pain on the guilty, how could a perfectly just God let any sin go unpunished? Think this to its mathematical conclusion, and anyone other than God himself deserves any punishment imaginable. No sinful human could possibly wield the authority to forgive that for which we will in the end be held accountable by the very personification of perfection - we'll have to believe it's this personification itself, God, who's forgiven us - we'll have to be ready to submit to God's will, for outside it nothing good may be found.
Thus can faith in Christ's sacrifice and divinity accomplish what comprehension of the psychological and philosophical mechanism at work in it would actively prevent: the placating of an existing hell of having to fear ...hell. It can't make us perfect - but it can help us believe we can safely enter Perfection's personified presence after we've died.
"It's okay," this belief seems to be saying, "you're still filth - but now that you've humbled yourself before and surrendered to the Personification_of_Perfection, you no longer have to dread standing before to it - being judged by it, as it were. You no longer have to hide from the blinding light of the holy, the good, the just in a vain attempt to cover up the secret stains on your imperfect soul. You can now take delight in goodness instead of seeking only the safely virtue-devaluing thrills of unwholesome movies and music and sex and failing pathetically to fulfill non-assigned gender roles! Give it all up, and heaven won't burn you!"
It is true, then, that we must believe to go to heaven! Outside such a state of grace, we must fear "going to hell" into a state of absolute awareness of our wrongs - if not through death, then through a breakdown of denial as we lose control in some other fashion. In the foreshadow of this hell, life itself becomes spiritually bare as we lock things within us in, out and up, fearing their exposure, fearing goodness as acknowledging it would be acknowledging that we ourselves are a taint, a flaw in that purity.
At some point it may then seem easier to just pull everything else down with us into the dirt - where everyone's equal, and equally dirty. That is the devil's approach, perhaps: to degrade virtue until it needn't be lived up to any longer.
One way or another, this problematic must be dealt with to find peace. I don't think extremes are healthy here... perhaps for those who feel they can indeed find a spiritual home in a sufficiently authoritative religion, or whose self-love enables them to roll their own - to the self-incriminating, self-doubting, alienated outsiders among us, however, such schemes might amount to self-sabotage. Religions all seem to endlessly exaggerate their dogmatically decorated psychological fundamentals as though the human condition determined the nature of the universe rather than vice versa. I would prefer not to buy into a world-view that in most cases seems to come with overly much confidence in the justice of hurting people 4 graet justice as though their suffering alone made anything better. And I would prefer not to purchase a whole new set of sins to feel guilty about - which would inevitably follow if I were to adopt the Bible, for example.
We screw-ups will just have to suffer from guilt, then, and dread going to hell for as long as there is any doubt left in us that there might, perhaps, be something to it - that there might actually be a judgement waiting for us, punishing that combination of inborn sinfulness and rebellious obstinacy that the fundies like to see in the non-Christian's general lack of agreement.
Christianity works, for you or against you, until you've left it completely - unless it's true, of course, then leaving it won't exactly help... then you better hope you'll find out what's really going on in the universe, and make your peace with it - perhaps, if God really defines right & wong, come to an understanding that acceptance of it is by definition the best possible choice you could make.
How one is supposed to find that out, though, and find out whether that'd mean the words contained in any holy book are any more authoritative than what you yourself would "divine" in your explorations, has so far eluded me. I can only seem to try to understand why people would believe what they believem - and all too often it appears to me that they'd believe it whether or not it is true.