Salvation by faith and works : intellectually ridiculous?

Its not self influenced salvation that is lunacy, its the concept.Lets assume you are right, that it indeed is lunacy to imagine salvation by what you do, lets imagine the alternative.Only faith saves. We know for a fact that noone is born believing in Jesus Christ and his ressurection. The faith must come later in life. For some it comes early, but for others late.Now dead can seize you at any time, so logically it can come before you come to believe, or after.It follows that some people who were indeed close to believing having died, and others dying just after reaching belief. So a matter of vere short time must seperate some people who spend eternity in a loving gods light, and some who a tortured for an eternity by sadistic god.Given the number of people, the last person to earn his way to hell, died just a microsecond before achieving faith, and the last person in heaven died a microsecond after.This is clearly lunacy!We have now showed that both earning your way into heaven, and entering by grace alone is lunacy, thus the concept of salvation itself is clearly lunacy! This message has been edited by AdminPD, 04-20-2006 12:06 PM

Ah but if it is predestined then it doesn't matter if it by grace or by deeds, then God just makes it so he calls you before you die, in the case of grace, or make you do the right amount of good deeds if its a matter of earning your way into heaven.So the one having, 0.1 second less lustfull thoughts did so because he was predestined to do so.So if it is indeed predestined, then it doesn't matter if you say its by grace or by deeds.Then faith and good deeds are equally non important, they are just the marks of put on people who won the lottery. Stamp your saved, stamp your doomed. Faith is not important in itself, just an arbitrary marker.(Actually this saves your god from looking like the most vain entity imaginable, torturing innocents just because they do not worship him, but then, it makes him the most psychopathic entity imaginable, torturing innocents just because he likes it so)In your scenario, nothing we do have any relevance to where we end up, there is no free will, there is no accountability. Life on earth is meaningless, as God could from the start have put the saved in heaven, and started getting his true satisfaction by torturing innocents.Still lunacy by any definition.This message has been edited by kongstad, 21-Apr-2006 08:48 AM