Perhaps the first seedling of skepticism germinated in my
brain long, long before I became a skeptical inquirer of Christianity. It
happened back when I was still a fundamentalist.
The church of which I was a member insisted that everyone
in the world who believed differently from us, or ever had, were going to burn
in hell forever. This would include people who were members of other Christian
churches. Even at the time, I simply could not believe this. I personally knew
lots of people who were not in our church but whom a God of Love would simply
not be able to send to hell, unless he was an evil God.
That was it. It took decades for the realization to
emerge in my mind that the whole doctrinal infrastructure of who is going to
heaven and who is going to hell was invented by humans. As I write these words,
the climactic theme from Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is booming in my
mind—at the climax of which, everyone is amazed to discover that the
Resurrection is for everyone and not just for the doctrinally orthodox.
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