Precisely this. /u/blueredscreen, I think it's important to grasp the fact that (high-Church) Christianity views the Scriptures not as the source but rather as the product of the Tradition of the living body of believers, namely the Church. Since the Scriptures arise out of this body of believers, to whom God has promised protection against the gates of hell, the Church that they constitute can interpret and give voice to the Bible in an authoritative way.
In other words, there is no need of the original texts because the people out of which those texts emerged—the body of believers, the Church—is itself still living and can still be consulted on matters of faith. For the purposes of correct citation, this is the methodological point that Pope Benedict XVI makes in the introduction to the first volume of his Jesus of Nazareth series.
(1) Ratzinger phrases this problem thusly in Conscience and Truth:
> But as it is, since they can go another way in good conscience, they can reach salvation
>According to this view, faith would not make salvation easier but harder. Being happy would mean not being burdened with having to believe or having to submit to the moral yoke of the faith of the Catholic church. The erroneous conscience, which makes life easier and marks a more human course, would then be a real grace, the normal way to salvation.
IIRC (the last time I read this piece was 3 years ago), Ratzinger contends that following one's conscience as best one knows how does open the possibility of salvation, but that something is lost if one's conscience is not open to fundamental truth. That is, conscience is morally binding because human beings have in them a fundamental memory of the good (which in classical philosophy is called "anamnesis") which informs conscience. On anamnesis, Ratzinger writes:
>This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the godlike constitution of our being is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is so to speak an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. He sees: "That's it! That is what my nature points to and seeks."
Jesus Christ is the truth to which our human nature is oriented. Ultimately conscience finds its fulfillment in recognizing that the source of that initial inclination towards goodness, the source of "anamnesis," is Jesus Christ himself. So even if there is a possibility of attaining salvation without consciously following and/or knowing Jesus, it is desirable that the human person should encounter Jesus directly—thus it would be a great disservice to humanity if we were to make knowledge of Christianity vanish.
I think I'm presenting Ratzinger's argument pretty crappily (again, I haven't read it in full in years), so I urge you to take a look at "Conscience and Truth" itself if you have a deeper interest in this issue.
> Yeah mention the positives. But why are you all so okay with me going to hell? Why did nobody plead to Christopher Hitchens "Stop this madness! You and your followers are going to insufferable eternities please stop!" Either you don't really care about the fate of non-believers, or you don't believe in damnation, or refer to point (1) which would be a viable option by your logic.
I'm not. I just think that mercy outweighs judgment, and that therefore it is mercy that ought to be emphasized.
> On whose authority do you claim that's the best way to spread the message?
What is it that Jesus proclaimed? What is the message? A proper reading of the gospels will reveal that the message consisted in the assertions that (1) the Kingdom of God is at hand (in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke) and that (2) Jesus himself is God (in the synoptics, but emphasized most especially in John). Ratzinger in Jesus of Nazareth contends that (1) is essentially (2): he says that the only meaningful way to understand the assertion that the Kingdom of God is at hand (given that no political program was instituted, and given that the Church is not coextensive with the "kingdom") is to interpret the "kingdom" as Jesus himself—that is, the kingdom was at hand because God himself was at hand.
Thus the message of Christianity is simply God. The Scriptures tell us that God is love—his very nature and essence is love. When human beings love each other what they are really doing is exchanging the divine nature amongst themselves. Loving other people is therefore an act of communicating God and thus the gospel message.
> I don't believe you believe in hell
I do.
> Are you afraid of the chance of going to hell?
A little, but not much. I trust in God's mercy.
> If you rejected Christ would the fear haunt you?
Yes.
> Are you only afraid because that directly relates to you?
The Church maintains that "those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation" (CCC 847). The question is therefore obviously what exactly constitutes "knowing": there are surely some archconservative holdouts who maintain that "knowing" simply refers to an awareness of the claim that the Catholic Church is necessary, whereas for the most part theologians posit that "knowing" refers to a kind of personal conviction: has one come to the point at which they recognize the necessity of the Church but then fail to enter it?
I would be afraid in my case because I am of the conviction that the Church is necessary and that the gospel is true; thus if I were to leave, the theological principle expressed in CCC 847 would not apply to me. I do not believe that most non-Christians "know" the Gospel of Christ or his Church in the same sense, and so I think that the provisions in CCC 847 apply to them.
Note: I'm sorry that my argumentation is shit tonight. I am working a late night at work and am trying to write this in between what I have to get done. Hopefully there might be something useful in here anyway.