FOURTEEN FLAGS?! [clicks] Oh, all but three four are comment flags. Okay, that's alright. :P

@curiousdannii I know I'm coming a few days late to this conversation, but you may be interested in judaism.stackexchange.com/q/31831.

@LeeWoofenden (Same caveat as my previous chat post.) Judaism has three statuses for people (well, for the purposes of this conversation) (1) A Jew is someone born to a Jew or who has undergone formal conversion, whether he currently believes in Judaism (God) or not. (2) A non-Jew is anyone else. (2a) Some non-Jews believe in Judaism (God) and what Judaism says God wants of them and try to do so. (2b) Most don't. [cont'd]

[cont'd] While Judaism doesn't urge (indeed, discourages) conversion to Judaism (#1), it does want non-Jews to be #2a. In fact, there are a small number of Jews who are actively proselytizing #2b people toward #2a status.

Personally, I think "Judaism" as a religion logically includes #1 and #2a, even if "Jew" as a status is #1 only. But I don't use the word "Judaism" that way (except with heavy commentary like here), because no one will understand me.

@msh210 Thanks for your thoughts, which are paralleled in my own (Swedenborgian Christian) belief system. And that is not something that started recently, when it became fashionable to be inclusive; rather, it goes all the way back to our beginnings in the 18th century.

Swedenborg distinguished between the specific "church," which are people who hold to essential Christian teachings such as a belief in the divinity of Jesus, and the universal "church," which includes all people throughout the world who have a belief in God and strive to live a good life as their God or religion instructs and inspires them to do. All of these, Swedenborg said, would find their eternal home in heaven.

And he said that in the mid to late 1700s, when few to no other Christians were saying such things, but nearly all—and certainly all of the large, recognized denominations of Christians right across the Christian spectrum—believed and insisted that only Christians, and usually only Christians of their own variety, could be saved and go to heaven.

@msh210 About Judaism specifically, many liberal Swedenborgians today are embarrassed by some of the harsh things Swedenborg said about Jews, even though they were actually rather mild by the (Christian) standards of the day. However, we take comfort in the fact that unlike the rank and file Christians of his day, he assigned good, observant Jews a place in heaven, not in hell, when they pass from this life to the next (as we believe).

@LeeWoofenden And apparently the Vatican has recently issued a similar statement.

@msh210 It's nice to hear that two and a half centuries later, the Catholic Church is finally catching up to Swedenborg. ;-)

@LeeWoofenden What about those who don't have a belief in God?

@Mr.Bultitude Good question. I take it up in this article: "Do Atheists Go to Heaven?" It goes somewhat beyond what Swedenborg said explicitly. But I believe it is a logical extension of the general principles he laid down, based on the Biblical principles explored in the article.

@LeeWoofenden Thanks. Did Swedenborg posit a hard distinction between the head and heart?

@Mr.Bultitude That is a complex question, though the simple, one-word answer is: No.

@Mr.Bultitude Swedenborg said that in God, "head and heart," or love and wisdom, are fully one and fully balanced, or "married," to use his term. And, he said, they go out fully one and balanced, and are "married" in everything that they do. But when they reach created things, and especially humans, they become distinguished, divided, and unbalanced in those created "subjects," or recipients, of God's love and wisdom.

@Mr.Bultitude In fact, Swedenborg wrote a whole book about this—the most philosophical and cosmological work of his theological period—titled [Divine Love and Wisdom](Divine Love and Wisdom, by Emanuel Swedenborg).

He stated that an entity is fully real only when the love and wisdom, or good and truth, or, on the negative side, evil and falsity, are united and equally balanced. And in the non-human created universe, they generally are, though there is a continual progression in which one gets briefly ahead of the other, then the reverse, and so on, sort of like walking where the right and left alternately lead.

In human beings, the situation is more complex. Uniquely in the created universe, we are able to consciously and intentionally, through our own choices and actions pursuant to them, go outside of the natural (and spiritual) order into which we were originally created.

The story of how we first did this is told in the second half of Genesis 2, and especially in Genesis 3. Our departure from the harmony and spiritually "married" state of our original creation began to break the "heavenly marriage" of love and wisdom, or will and intellect, or heart and head, that was our original state.

The human head and heart have been necessarily out of phase in us ever since, in order to make it possible for us to be spiritually reborn through repentance, reformation, and rebirth.

This quasi-division of head and heart is told metaphorically, or "correspondentially," to use Swedenborg's term, in the story of the Flood, and more specifically of Noah's ark. I cover it in this article: "Noah's Ark: A Sea Change in the Human Mind."

@LeeWoofenden (Oops. Messed up that link, and too late to fix. Here it is again: Divine Love and Wisdom.)

@Mr.Bultitude Ever since then, the human head and heart have been distinguished from each other in that we can want one thing and think another, or think one thing and want another. This is necessary for our spiritual rebirth and salvation because it's the only way that our heart, which "tends toward evils of every kind" (to use Swedenborg's wording) would not be reformable.

The fact that we are able to learn God's truth and God's commandments, and force ourselves to abide by them even though we desire to break them, is what makes us salvable. And our entire lifetime here on earth is a process of doing just that, if we are on a path toward heaven rather than a path toward hell.

Ultimately, our head and heart will become fully reunited. For some, this takes place here on earth, after a full life on the path of spiritual rebirth. For others, it happens only after death. At that time, according to Swedenborg, everything that does not truly accord with the "ruling love" around which we have organized our life is stripped away, and we become fully, head, heart, and hands, congruent with the true nature of our will and the reigning desires of our heart.

If our "ruling love" is love for God and/or the neighbor, we will find our place in heaven. If it is love of self, power, possessions, pleasure, and so on that drives us at our core, then we will find our place in hell. And we will no longer be able to think, or say, anything that does not fully accord with the true desires of our heart.

So our final state will be one in which our head and heart are fully united, even if we must spend much of our lifetime here on earth having our head and heart frequently at odds with each other.

@Mr.Bultitude That's the complex answer to your question!

And to placate, if not satisfy, all you "grace alone" folks out there, yes, this is all done by the power of God, who for us is Jesus Christ, working in and through us. By ourselves, without God's power, we could do none of this. "I am the vine, you are the branches . . . Without me, you can do nothing" (John 15:5).