In my experience, each flavor of Christianity handles this a little differently. IIRC the reason the Mormons are extra aggressive about hounding your door is because they consider it an obligation to spread the good word, while there are other groups who just stay out of your business entirely.

WRT the quote, there's very little talk of heaven and hell at all in Lutheran churches in my experience, just as an example. Although I have only been exposed to the Norwegian state church, which is pretty laid back about most things, so your mileage may vary with other Lutheran churches.

Indeed - as a writer I find holy texts fascinating for their endurance through viral properties. It seems important for them to speak at once with ultimate authority but also a lot of vagueness to keep the messages versatile for as many situations as possible and as unfalsifiable as possible.

They are the equivalent of a radioactive meteor that lands on an unwitting planet and spreads a plague.

That is hilarious. They gave Christianity the selfish-gene treatment. I'll be embarrassed if this is a page from the book — I haven't actually read it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

This kind of implies that this is the social engineering equivalent of worm-like malware in Cybersecurity.

That's curious.

Preach brother

Original chain email

Should have kept it in Latin...

I always believed that God would accept anyone, even if they don't believe, as long as they were good people. I can't imagine He would just turn away the kindest people because they were born on the other side of the planet. But I don't get along with fundamentalists.

Mathew 18:18 is the circuit breaker for those situations: whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven

AKA when in doubt, god defers to the Pope for some reason.

Spent some time in Alaska - the natives I had a chance to speak to referred to themselves as Eskimos. And it wasn't one of those 'we can say it, but it's derogatory coming from anyone else' words... it's just a word they use for their people. They were kind of amused at the whole controversy.

It's anecdote, and the number of them actually offended by the term Eskimo is probably higher than zero, but by and large this is white people being offended on their behalf at something that is a non-issue.

So, call em Eskimos. Or Inuit. Or Natives. From the source, they're cool with it.

great answer, thanks for that. i wonder if apostates/non-believers are included in "Gentiles who do not have the law"

or is it only the people that never heard the gospel?

except christian missionaries have been literally doing this for thousands of years