(https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/07/11/florida-beachgoers-form-human-chain/467152001/)
". . . Florida beachgoers banded together Saturday to save a family from drowning. Roberta Ursrey and her family were at Panama City Beach when she noticed her sons were too far from shore, The Panama City News Herald reported. The boys were screaming, so Ursrey and her relatives swam to them, but became trapped in a rip current. . .Thankfully beachgoers noticed the family struggling and banded together to form an 80-person human chain, AP reported. . . Starting with the children, the rescuers towed the swimmers along the human chain and pulled them to shore, the newspaper reported. . . “I am so grateful,” Ursrey told The Panama City News Herald. “These people were God’s angels that were in the right place at the right time. I owe my life and my family’s life to them. Without them, we wouldn’t be here.”. . ."
(from http://myfox8.com/2013/05/25/heaven-for-atheists-pope-sparks-debate/)
". . . Atheist leaders welcomed Pope Francis’ comments that God has redeemed atheists, saying that the new pontiff’s historic outreach is helping to topple longstanding barriers. “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone,” the pope told worshipers at morning Mass on Wednesday. “‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!” Francis continued: “We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.” Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, said that although he has been skeptical of Francis’ outreach to the nonreligious, he welcomed Wednesday’s comments. . ."
(from http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/511016-i-find-something-repulsive-about-the-idea-of-vicarious-redemption) [Christopher Hitchens, world-reknown atheist who preferred to NOT be called an atheist]
“I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.”
(from http://content.unity.org/homepageArchive/features/ponderFuture.html on John Shelby Spong's writing)
". . .The trouble with traditional Christianity, he said, is that it is built on two assumptions that are inadequate and dying. First, salvation must come from a God outside us—a theistic God, in Spong's term. Second, human beings are fallen, broken, sinful and in need of redemption. In other words, Christianity is based on a God with the power to save and humans who need to be saved. People are cast as “quivering children before a punishing, divine parent figure.” Human depravity is necessary before we can see the grace of God, who “saved a wretch like me,” Spong said, quoting the old hymn. No one has been helped by being told how wretched they are. . . “”
