What does it mean to be saved?

In the biblical sense, it means to be saved for salvation and that big heavenly reward Christians believe in.

@NerdyKeith So heaven can be a supercomputer?

Nothing. It’s like one of those letters from Publishers Clearing House.

It’s like being put in a large ZipLoc bag and abandoned in the freezer of heaven.

I supposed that’s better than being chopped up and divided among several ZipLoc bags and then frozen.

When you’re a teenager furiously masturbating & you hear your mother about to walk in on you, but she’s distracted by a jehovas witness knocking on the front door…saved

According to which flavor of Christians? And, better to ask them.

The Biblical literalist bunch tend to mean something like, you need to believe that God sent his son to Earth as Jesus, and that he died for your sins and got resurrected, and you accept that you need to do that and more or less (depending on sect) try to not sin or at least confess if you do. Then you get judged and sentenced to either heaven, the 700 Club, purgatory and/or hell. If you get heaven or (in the horrid TV sects, 700 Club) then you’ve been “saved” from hell. Not sure how saved applies to just sitting in Purgatory and then eventually being let into Heaven.

However, in the actual spiritual sense, before the crude literalist version… that is, as Jesus, it seems to me, actually meant it, himself, being saved means you got in touch with your inner connected benevolent true self, so you’re not spirit isn’t suffering in torment. That torment (or the purgatory version) is real and is experienced by pretty much everyone on earth, before their body dies, but again, it’s a metaphor. Purgatory is a metaphor for being spiritually lost, not in the literal sense (“have you found Jeeeesus?”) but in the real sense of feeling disconnected from yourself and your place in the universe, or dissociated, or just not even realizing that’s what’s happened, which describes most teens and adults especially in modern cultures. Hell also exists in real human experience and might be considered related to depression, guilt, anxiety, tormenting guilt and worse dissociated states, even some that seem happy on the surface, but it’s the soul we’re talking about – the inner spirit inside that is full of genius and excitement and truth and love, and may have vanished deep inside some ego persona shell that lives out an existence that’s inauthentic to who the person really is.

For example, Tammy Fae Baker looked like someone in hell to me, even before she had cancer, and not just because of Jim Baker. Though I think some people do get diseases when they’re dying inside. http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-there-s-times-when-i-just-have-to-quit-thinking-and-the-only-way-i-can-quit-thinking-is-by-tammy-faye-bakker-323946.jpg

In that context, it seems to me, what it means to be saved is a metaphor for living life as your authentic self.

@RedDeerGuy1 Maybe our entire existence is the product of a supercomputer? Now there’s some food for thought hehe

I think it simply means to accept Jesus as the Son of God and one’s only Saviour. This sounds simple. But for many this may require a suspension of belief, going into a major state of denial and unprecedented (for them) compartmentalization of consciousness. Depending on their level of education, they must voluntarily delude themselves. This could incur a lifetime of cognitive dissonance. I’m convinced living a life filled with cognitive dissonance causes many physical and mental illnesses.

@NerdyKeith

In line with that concept, I’ve had this crazy “what-if” idea I’ve been rolling around for a while now.

Void of the conscious spark of life and its fleshy sensory mechanisms, can an inanimate object be said to have experience? I think in the sense of pure data-transfer, it does. Pretend I’m going to smash a glass with a hammer. You could get the best computer programs, and the best mathematicians together to try to calculate just how that glass will shatter, but they still won’t be completely right. Yet, that glass “knows,” in a sense, just where and how it’s going to break. It proves its knowledge of the matter in demonstration. All of matter works this way. If that, then this. If this, then that. It could almost be equated to binary, in a rudimentary fashion. But I digress…
So lets go back before what we know as the big bang. Nothing but fine matter all about. How long that period of time lasted, who knows… Let’s just call it an eternity for fun. And let’s say that somewhere in a moment of that eternity a strange form of consciousness developed between the data transfer of matter. And how profound a consciousness it would be. It would know everything, and not simply because it could see into the future or something of that nature, but by the perfectly accurate deduction along it’s language of data transfer. If these two atoms touch, then this, this, that, those, and all these things happen, on into infinity. So this consciousness knows everything, and knows it is everything. All the questions it could ask have been answered, except one. “What is this place?” That is the one question it could never answer, because the place in which it resides necessarily existed before it. There was already a place for its existence to come into being, or it never would have been possible. And as it runs back along the timeline of matter, even to before its own emergence, eventually it hits a wall. The ether in which it resides pre-dates the matter it contains; the matter which subsequently contains this consciousness.

So to find the answer to the only question left, it blows itself apart into an infinite number of pieces, to experience being every hydrogen atom, and star, and every person, individually, and as a whole, and as itself looking in on all these things in the hopes that somewhere, in the vast matrix of all that data, is the answer to what this is.

And maybe that’s the reason good things happen to bad people and innocent children get sick and die… Because it’s a possibility. And if it’s a possibility, it has to be experienced to be truly understood. Likewise, maybe that’s the reason these grand questions are so pervasive throughout the entirety of our race. Because subconsciously, it’s why we’re here. It’s what we’re all ultimately looking for, and not merely as ourselves. Maybe essentially, we’re all just part of this grand program that’s running to collect every possible experience and bring it back for infinite correlation.

Anyway… Just a crazy what-if. But it’s fun to imagine.

There are several gods and we are being saved like bank deposits by our particular god in order to successfully battle against the other gods.