Realizing the basic unfairness of the doctrines of hell and salvation. This doubt, my friend said, largely came from the underlying beliefs of his culture. He had a Chinese friend who did not believe in God, but who said that, if he existed, God certainly would have a right to judge people as he saw fit. He then realized that his doubt about hell was based on a very white, Western, democratic, individualistic mind-set that most other people in the world did not share. “To insist that the universe be run like a Western democracy was actually a very ethnocentric point of view,” he told me.
