beads wrote:non-christian wrote:The belief that only one religion, less than 2000 years old, is the only path to heaven, nirvana, valhalla, whatever, seems rather narrow to me when you consider the fact that man has been around for many thousand's of years previous to christianity.
So you really don't know all that much about Christianity, huh?
The core teaching of Christianity as far as it pertains to how to get to heaven has always been faith in God. This is what the OT is all about. That faith was to be practiced by the Jews in the form of the sacrificial system, but the Jews ended up focusing more on the sacrifices themselves rather than on what the sacrifices symbolized and pointed to - Jesus Christ. Once God was made manifest in the flesh in the person of Jesus, the law and sacrifices were no longer necessary - as the Bible says, Jesus was sacrificed once for all. Now all that is necessary is faith in Jesus, who is God. So you see, the way to heaven according to Christianity has been the same ever since the beginning of time - Faith in God.