Being Saved

TEH FIRST TIME somebody asked me whether I had been "saved", I recall being somewhat confused. Saved from what? I was tempted to ask. As a third grader, I felt very secure, unthreatened, even when the president of the United States was murdered right before Thanksgiving vacation. Only later did I realize that the question about being saved referred to the acceptance of Jesus as my Lord and Savior as a requirement for avoidance of eternal damnation in hell. The thought occurrred to me that being threatened with eternal torment in hell unless I embraced a specific religion was a sort of blackmail. The thought still occurs to me. Equally tempting is the thought that since Jesus rose from the dead three days after being tortured to death, what he sacrificed for me (us) was not so much his life, as his weekend. What cruel, barbaric, sadistic God, I have always wondered, would be so cruel and barbaric as to stage a purely theatrical gruesome murder with only symbolic importance to prevent people from eternal suffering, when it would have only been necessary for an omnipotent God to simply forgive all sinners, and to refrain from creating hell. Archibald MacLeish summarized the situation quite nicely with his comment, roughly paraphrased here, that: "If God is God then God is not good, and if God is good God is not God". I have never, nor do I now, feel any need to be saved from anything. The universe is apaprently a place in which I am allowed to exist in my current form briefly, and to make the best I can with my short existence, until physical death sends me on to my next adventure, which I can at best currenly only describe as "non-existence", but which may in fact be considerably different from non existence. Belief in hell seems to me to be a form of mental illness. The question of whether a literal hell exists is of course independent of the Bible, or anyother book. The Bible is vague, using terms like "gehenna" and "sheol" which can be interpreted as "the place of death". It is often assertd, not without reason, that there is no reference in the Bible to any "hell" of the sort whih people commonly believe in today, but that various translations and interpretations of the scripture have given millions of people the opportunity to invent their own concept of a hellish after life, which they proceed to do. And, of course, our modern interpretations of what the Bible says about hell tend to become uniform depending upon the particular religious denomination which invents them. The thought which occurs to me most often is that since there is so much misery and suffering already in the world, could we not refrain from inventing more with our imaginations?