Before I proceed, I must qualify that whatever is written here is what I perceived to be what his message was, the words and phrases used are not verbatim, at best, it is the closest to what I can recall and this is reproduced without his knowledge. Hence, he is not a party in this.
There is a secluded island, it is so remote that civilization has not reached its shore. In that island, there lived a man. He has been living there all alone since he was a baby. No explanation about how he got there and who took care of him as a baby. Let's just assume he was brought up like the myth of Romulus and Remus.
Although man is born into this world tainted with the sin of Adam and Eve, as the creation of God, we have the inherent goodness in us. It's built in, goodness is in our DNA. My thoughts : I can agree to that. I haven't met a psychotic serial killer baby or child yet. Seen them in the movies but they're normally offspring of Satan etc. It's only later in our lives when external/environment inputs that influence us to do bad things. If we decide to do bad things, that's free will in action. I'm no expert in this, I already disclaimed that I'm no learned scholar so I'll let the learned folks at Wikipedia to explain it to you. Click here.
Ok, continue on with the story about our man, so he lived a good live. He did not commit any sin. It is kinda hard for you to have bad influence when you are living on your own. He did not know what is right and wrong because he was not living in a community with common sense of right and wrong. However, all his live, he followed his natural instinct and his natural instinct was never to do harm.
After living a boring but sinless live, he died.
Where do you think he would go? Hell or Heaven. Hell, because he did not acknowledge Jesus as the saviour of mankind? It was not his fault that he never heard of Jesus or Budha or Prophet Mohamed.for that matter
So where do we put him. He has a soul, he is a human being, not an animal. Become heavenless(stateless)?
Father Richards left it at there for us to contemplate it on our own or maybe he expected us to deduce his answer already.
I like to think that God is kind, his wisdom is beyond comprehension of our feeble human minds, compassionate, loving etc. I would say the man will go to heaven. We are all made from the same dirt. Only after centuries of diets and weather changed our features.
The three major religions in the world i.e Judaism, Islam and Christianity share a common root. We are progenies of this root. Religion was coined and created by human beings. I don't think God will bother about names and catchphrase. He is God. Nothing can change that. He doesn't need to have his ego stroked by his creations, he created the universe and life for crying out loud. Do you think he needs insignificant ants like us to tell him how great he is? I imagine he would say, "Tell me something I don't know my son.".
I was born into my religion, so are most of you and I've been conditioned and indoctrinated with my religion's teachings. It's not a bad religion. If they ask me to drink blood and sacrifice virgins, I would have second thoughts but they have not. I believe my God. Will I go to hell because I'm loyal to my belief i.e. there is only one God. And can I say that anyone who is born into their religion and who believes that there is only one God, will go to hell because they don't believe in my God?
You think for yourself.
