The God Who Wasn't There2005

[Showing frightening paintings of the damned in Hell]

Narrator:
What is salvation? Well, it's the opposite of damnation. I learned that Hell is a real place where you really do go if you have not been forgiven by Jesus Christ. When the school says that each student will be encouraged to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, this is what encouragement means: Be forgiven - or be damned. But Jesus was a great guy! He'd forgive you for anything. Lying, murder, Internet pornography, anything. He'd even forgive you for speaking against Jesus himself. But apparently just to make things interesting, Jesus did add one extra rule to the mix. There actually is one unforgivable sin: denial of the Holy Spirit. If you do that, you are eternally damned. It says so right there in the Bible, twice. It's a doubly infallible rule. Deny the Holy Spirit and you can never, ever, go anywhere but Hell. And as luck would have it, the Holy Spirit is the easiest thing in the entire Doctrine to doubt. God is out of your reach, Jesus was two thousand years ago, but the Holy Spirit is with you, right here, right now, so you'd better really actually feel the Holy Spirit. You can't deny it in your thoughts, because Jesus is *in* your thoughts. And if your mind starts to wander to the fact that there's no more evidence for this Holy Spirit than there is for the existence of unicorns? Guess what you may have done. The greatest crime in fundamentalist Christianity is to think. And when I was a Village Christian, I was terrified that I'd accidentally done this.