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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

I believe the "if you live a good life you go to heaven" is a common tenet of many Christian denominations since the Vatican Council.

At least, I recall my religion teacher (a catholic priest, we have such a class in public schools in Italy tho they vary in content and quality) telling us that some decades ago.

You do not go to heaven if you're an atheist tho, as _denying_ there is something divine puts you in the bad list, sorry.

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I mean does it really matter what the church says? The important part is what God actually thinks here and that seems to be very different depending on who you ask.

To be more precise, what matters is not so much what God/gods "think", but what they want us to do. In this case, the textual foundation for Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus is Mark 16:16: "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned." Assuming these really are the words of Jesus, they leave very little for interpretation, no matter what Vaticanum II says.

Only if your priest disallows other interpretations. Here people can disagree what constitutes faith. Many Christians believe that God is everything good, so if you share good values, it's thinkable you are effectively a decent Christian. But yeah, for Protestants faith is formality: if you only believe in these and these letters and remain a miserable sinner, you get a ticket to heaven.

These can not be the words of Jesus since the language of these words did not exist at the time (assuming a deity that doesn't express itself in yet unformed languages).

Is this better?

"ὁ πιστεύσας καὶ βαπτισθεὶς σωθήσεται, ὁ δὲ ἀπιστήσας κατακριθήσεται."

That's the closest we can get, although Jesus would have assumedly spoken these words in Aramaic, not Greek.

Source: http://bibletranslation.ws/trans/markwgrk.pdf

God would hardly allow the church to go around spreading falsehoods, would He? Surely the various Popes/Patriarchs/Grand Wizards are just a mouthpiece for the almighty and all of his confusing and inconsistent proclamations.

That's a fairly new development BTW, I believe 2005-2007. Before that, unbaptized "good" souls were collecting dust in limbo.

Definitely not on the Protestant branch of things.

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