Welcome to Bob Peters 61's homepage.

Don't let anyone tell you that you are doomed to Hell for your works, or for the lack thereof. For through faith we are saved by grace, and not by works. Salvation is the gift of God.

The right-wing cult would have you to adhere, under threat or coercion, to a strict code of moral conduct, while the true Christian way is that we are dead to the letter of the biblical law, but are bound by love of God and our conscience to do what we know by the Spirit of God within us to be the right thing.

Once, in the month of October, I saw a photograph in my local newspaper of a right-wing church's own "spook house" of horrors with which they meant to terrorize people into their code of moral behavior for fear of eternal torture in the afterlife. The caption below the picture even boasted of an exhibit depicting a woman being cast into the fires of Hell for the fatal sin of having an abortion.

And the "religious right" condemn the Muslim faith as a religion of hatred, being based on submitting to the will of God under duress. The sad part is that they don't even see the hypocrisy of this.

Where to start debunking... For one thing, there is no sin so horrible that God will not forgive you with your repentance. And even if you do believe, as some do, that there is one unforgivable sin, that sin isn't abortion, it's blasphemy of the Holy Spirit according to that particular doctrine.

And the choice to accept Jesus as your personal savior is entirely your own to make. Nobody makes it for you, and nobody can be coerced into it. The only way it counts is if you yourself consciously decide to turn to Christ on your own.

As a child, I often felt cheated by my church because my bible was the thickest book I owned, out of pages as thin as rice paper, all covered with the smallest print. Even before I learned to read, I knew for a fact that all of that absolutely had to say something more than, "If you don't get saved, you'll go to Hell, where it's really, really horrible like such and such." Yet, that was all I ever heard preached at the Puritanic Baptist Church at the corner of Hellfire and Brimstone Streets.

And how could it possibly be considered to be in character for a loving God to condemn the people He created to an afterlife of eternal torture for not being raised in or defecting to the "correct" version of His truth?

The good news is this: Even though the medieval torturers of the Inquisition couldn't truly save anyone's soul, your own acceptance of Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and your claim of His sacrifice on the cross as payment for your sins is all it takes.