Born to Catholic parents, I was raised Catholic from birth - attended catholic schools from grade school through grad school. I wasn’t exposed to many other religions throughout my life. When your religion and faith are instilled in you from a child, I often wonder if one has truly 'chosen" one’s particular religion/faith. If I had been born to Jewish parents I would probably be practicing Judaism. If I were born to Islamic parents, I would probably be a practicing Muslim. I am coming to believe that we are all praying to and believing in ONE God, regardless of the religion we are practicing. I have been struggling with the idea that Christianity can seem to be exclusionary. When Jesus said, “no one comes to the Father, EXCEPT through Me…”, what does that mean for all the others who so faithfully practice the religions they were born into and raised with? I struggle with the word “EXCEPT” in the passage above. Why would Jesus, and we as Catholics, have “exceptions” to who can know God? If you had been born non-Catholic, do you believe you would at some point have learned about Catholicism and converted to it? Do you believe people have an obligation to learn about world religions to find the “true” religion?
I’m going to draw on personal experience to partly answer your question. I’m Catholic now, used to be Protestant, and atheist before that. As a kid, I had some Presbyterian Sunday School, but dropped out in the early years of high school, and became atheist.
Now I’ve often said on this forum, to the point of being a bore about it, my father appeared in my room the night he died. He started with an apology for a lifetime of deliberate cruelty, we argued and talked, and at the end he gave this almighty scream and then just disappeared.
I think he’s in Hell personally. There are others who disagree, but they didn’t witness the terrifying scream. Incidentally as a rough rule of thumb, if you have an ordinary dream you’ll probably have forgotten it within a few hours, if you remember it at all. But if you have a “spiritual dream” or “vision”, you’ll remember it. It’s one of the differences.
And i still remember this event 35 years later, including much of what we said.
However at one stage I was complaining about how he’s wrecked what might be called my vocational choice, in two ways - he’d completely destroyed my confidence, which meant that I didn’t take opportunities that I should have done. He also admitted (confessed) “I’ve damaged your mind.”
But when I complained about the lack of career openings as a result of his actions, he replied, “It’s (career / social status / public recognition) not even important!”. Since I think he was being judged, and he could see things from a new spiritual perspective, then I assume our “careers” and social standing don’t count for much in the divine economy. After all it was Christ who said, “Blessed are the poor…”. He most definitely did NOT say “Blessed are the rich, and the manipulators, and the self important”
Incidentally my old pastor was to say some years later, when I was talking to him about the same thing, he commented, “When I was about your age, I was a bit like you - I wanted my place in the sun.” He went on to add, “it’s not that important, really”.
Anyway, when my apparition of a father made the comment about these things not being very important, I blurted out with some frustration, “Then what is important?”
He replied “How you treat other people!” It’s a pity he didn’t learn that truth earlier himself in dealing with his own family. He was, in his own admission on the night, “an absolute mongrel” to us.
So I think that regardless of what other people might believe, as conditioned by their culture, their upbringing, their native religion, their level of education or the lack of it, their social statues or poverty, or anything else, one of the prime considerations is going to be “how they treated other people!”.
Or if you like, whether we visited Christ when He was poor, sick, in prison, persecuted, hungry, cold, naked …
or whether we didn’t. And that will just as important as a formal Christian faith, something many people are not in a condition to easily achieve.
Every single one of us - Christian, Jew, Moslem, atheist, Hindu, Buddhist - will face that particular test.
And my father failed.
)
That is why all religions - to some extent - are, and should be, exclusionary.