There was a lot of very good discussion on the blog yesterday about the topic of hell. I had wanted to be a bigger part of the discussion, but I’m traveling through the Puget Sound by ferry.
Given my travels and my difficulty in posting today, I thought it might be good to republish a post I wrote over two years ago on the topic of hell. The post amounts to how I would answer most of the objections raised to the teaching on hell. Although it is not extremely philosophical or Thomistic, it is more what I would call pastoral.
In it I wrestle with the question of hell and some of the objections raised. . I think we can all agree that the teaching on hell is difficult, it is one of those hard sayings of the Lord. But in the end, I would argue that hell has to be. Here then the reprint of my post:
If God is Love, why is there Hell? And why is it eternal? In a word there is Hell because of respect. God has made us free and respects that freedom. Our freedom is absolutely necessary if we are to love. Now suppose a young man wanted a young lady to love him. Suppose again he found a magic potion with which to lace her drink. So she drinks and suddenly, presto., she “loves” him! Is it love? No, it’s chemicals. Love, to be love, has to be free. The yes of love is only meaningful if we were free to say no. God invites us to love him. Love has to be free. There has to be a hell. Ther has to be a real alternative, a real choice. God will not force us to love him or to come to heaven with him.
But wait a minute, doesn’t everyone want to go to heaven? Yes, but it often a heaven as they define it, not the real heaven. Many people’s understanding of heaven is a very egocentric thing where they will be happy on their terms, where what pleases merely them will be available in abundance. But the real heaven is the Kingdom of God in all its fullness. Truth be told, while everyone wants to go to a heaven as they define it, NOT everyone wants to live in the Kingdom of God in all its fullness. Consider some of the following examples:
- The Kingdom of God is about mercy and forgiveness. But not everyone wants to show mercy or forgive. Some prefer revenge. Some prefer severe justice. Some prefer to cling to their anger and nurse resentments or bigotry. Further, not everyone want to receive mercy and forgiveness. They cannot possibly fathom why anyone would need to forgive them since they are rightand the other person or nation is wrong.
- The Kingdom of God is about chastity. God is very clear with us that his Kingdom values chastity. For the unmarried this means no gential sexual contact. For the married this means complete fidelity to one another. Further, things like pornography, lewd conduct, immodesty and so forth are excluded from the Kingdom. But many today do not prefer chastity. They would rather be unchaste and immodest. They like pornography and do not want to limit their sexual conduct.
- The Kingdom of God is about Liturgy – all the descriptions of heaven emphasize liturgy. There are hymns being sung, there is the praise of God, standing, sitting, prostrating. There is incense, candles, long robes. There is a scroll or book that is opened, read and appreciated. There is the Lamb on a throne-like altar. It’s all very much like the Mass! But many are not interested in things like the Mass. They stay away from Church because it is “boring.” Perhaps they don’t like hymns and all the praise. Perhaps the scroll (the Lectionary) and its contents do not interest them. Having God at the center rather than themselves or their agenda is also unappealing.
Now my point is this: If heaven isn’t just of our own design but things like these are features of the real heaven, the real Kingdom of God, then doesn’t it seem clear that there actually are many who don’t want to go to heaven? You see everyone wants to go to heaven (the heaven of their own design), but NOT everyone wants to live in the Kingdom, which is what heaven really is. Now God will not force any one to live where they do not want to live. He will not force anyone to love Him or what he loves. We are free to choose his kingdom or not.
Perhaps a brief story will illustrate my point. I once knew a woman in one of my parishes who in many way was very devout. She went to daily Mass and prayed the rosary most days. But there was one thing about her that was very troubling, she couldn’t stand African Americans. She often told me, “I can’t stand Black People! They’re moving into this neighborhood and ruining everything! I wish they’d go away.” I remember scolding her a number of times for this sort of talk. But one day I thought I’d make it plain. I said, “You know you don’t really want to go to heaven.” She said, “Of course I do Father. God and the Blessed Mother are there. I want to go.” “No you won’t be happy there,” I said. “Why? Want are you talking about Father?” “Well you see there are Black people in heaven and you’ve said you can’t stand to be around them. So I’m afraid you wouldn’t be happy there. And God won’t make you live some place where you are not happy. So I don’t think you want to go to heaven.” I think she go the message because I noticed she started to improve.
But that’s just it, isn’t it? God will not force us to live in the Kingdom if we really don’t want or like what that kingdom is. We can’t just invent our own heaven. Heaven is a real place and has contours and realities of its own that we can’t just brush aside. Either we accept heaven as it is or we ipso facto choose to live apart from it and God. So Hell has to be. It is not a pleasant place but I suppose the saddest thing about the souls in that are there is that they wouldn’t be happy in heaven anyway. A pretty sad and tragic plight, not to be happy anywhere. But understand this too. God has not utterly rejected even the souls in Hell. Somehow he still provides for their basic needs. They continue to exist and thus God continues to sustain them with what ever is required to provide for that existence. He does not anihilate them or snuff them out. He respects their wishes to live apart from the kingdom and its values. He loves them but respects their choice.
But why is Hell eternal? Here I think we encounter a mystery about ourselves. God seems to be teaching us that there comes a day when our decisions are fixed forever. For now we always have the possibility of changing our mind so the idea of a permanent decision seems strange to us. But I think that those of us who are a bit older can testify that as we get older we get a little more set in our ways and it’s harder to change. Perhaps this is a little foretaste of a time when our decisions will be forever fixed and we will never change. The Fathers of the Church used an image of pottery to teach on this. Think of wet clay on a potters wheel. As long as the clay is moist and still on the wheel it can be shaped and reshaped. But once it is put in the kiln, in the fire, its shape is fixed forever. And so it is with us that when we appear before God who is a Holy Fire, our fundamental shape will be forever fixed, our decisions final. For now this is mysterious to us and we only sense it vaguely but since heaven and hell are eternal, it seems this forever fixed state is in our future.
So here is the best I can do on a difficult topic. But Hell has to be. It’s about God’s respect for us. It’s about our freedom and summons to love. It’s about the real heaven. It’s about what we really want in the end. The following video is Fr. Robert Barron’s take on the matter.
well done, Father.
Heaven is to be near God. Hell is to be far from him.
In order to draw near to God, one must become like him, share in His attributes and properties.
If you don’t want those, you can’t be near Him.
I think sometimes people are put off by images of flames and torture. Unfortunately, these things are physical illustrations of what it is like in the spirit world. There are no flames in the spirit, as flames are physical things.
Nonetheless, the pain of fire is a good illustration of the pain suffered in separation. the hell-bent soul is tortured because on the one hand it wants to enjoy the benefits of being near God, but on the other cannot have them because it will not make the changes necessary to receive them. The hell-bent one made this choice, not God.
I also think the pain of hell (the separation from God) is that we were DESIGNED to commune with him. But the obstinacy of the hell-bent in clinging to ungodly things prevents that communion. Thus the pain is self-inflicted.
Jesus’ story of the people invited to the wedding is very apposite. Some show up, but refuse to dress in a way appropriate to a wedding. They wanted the fun and the cake, but wouldn’t honor the bride and groom in their personal deportment … which reminds me of the old saw: you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
I suppose it could be said that there is no wedding party if there is no union between bride and groom. That union is why the music, and the dancing, and the gifts, and the banquet are shared. Wedding crashers aren’t allowed as they don’t get the cause of the celebration! They are free to entertain themselves as they wish, but not by stealing the abundance of those who are celebrating the union and its fruits. Left to their own devices, there is nothing to celebrate, and that is hell.
Bad karma or good karma and the image of pottery! Is the essence of your response different from the Buddha’s warnings?
Respectfully yours.
l don’t entirely l agree with you, because how can sins committed in time be punished out of time that is eternity. what purpose does hell save if it is not reformatory.
will you kill a child for droping and breaking a cup or better still will you kill a child for buying the wrong thing at the shop after you carefully told her what to buy?
if God is a just God as we believe He is how do will reconcile eternal puishment with His eternal love.
One thing we need to know is that we are never enterly free nor do we enterly know everything befor hand our knowledge is aways relative.
so all these factors influnce our choices and decisions and so to eternally punish some one in these circumstances will be unjust.
l rather prefer the notion of purgatory because at the end after one is purified one comes to be with God forever. And then Christ will be in all in all and all things will be in Christ.
Edwin
Edwin,
What parent would kill a child that broke a cup or buy a wrong thing at the store? Edwin, we’re talking about mortal sin here (murder, adultery, fornication, etc.) not venial sins. Take for example, the Drug Lords in Mexico who enjoy killing people and afterward, cutting people heads, hands, etc., now if these Drug Lords do not repent of their horrific crimes before they die – their eternal destiny is fix forever. Why? Because that the TEST! You see the test is to believe in the Word of God (especially about crime and punishment). If man constantly rejects the Word of God (for example, the 10 Commandments) and Natural Law (the law that’s written in your heart and mind) and never repented, then suddenly he dies and sees God, should he be allow to enter into heaven? If Hitler never repented, should he enter into heaven? You are to do the will of God while you’re on earth, If YOU CAN’T EVEN DO HIS WILL ON EARTH, HOW ARE YOU GOING TO DO HIS WILL IN HEAVEN?
Well then you might say: “Well, then He could force me to do His will in heaven, when I get there.” But you see THAT NOT TRUE LOVE COMING FROM YOU. People who chose not to have a relationship with God in this life, ain’t going to enjoy being force into a relationship with God in the next life. And God is not going to do that. Most people really want the heaven of their own design, that is true. That’s why Fantasy Island with Ricado Montalban and Tattoo was a big hit on TV. And truly, the Devil really wants you to believe in Fantasy Island. The Devil wants you to live in sins, yet promising the joy of eternal bliss if you believe in the doctrine of “once saved, always saved”. You see you are to work out you salvation in fear and trembling (Phillippians 2:12). You have to work hard at being good. It’s written in the Bible. With the Devil, he wants you to celebrate your sins and believe that heaven awaits you. You see the Devil is the big Prankster! And so are the preachers who preach “once saved, always saved.”
To anyone who don’t believe in hell,
Should HITLER, Stalin and Mao without repenting of their sins enter into Heaven? We are talking about millions upon millions of people being murdered. If they were sorry for their crimes before they died than purgatory awaits them. Again, I ask you – should Hitler, Stalin and Mao enter into Heaven without repenting of their sins while they were alive on earth? YOU SEE HERE IS THE LOGIC – It would be silly for them to repent of their mortal sins after death because the TRUTH OF GOD EXISTENCE is suddenly revealed to them, so they say, “We’re sorry, but please give us heaven.” But so what – WE KNOW IT WASN’T SINCERE. If the thief notice a camera in the building, he is not going to rob and kill. But if the camera is not there, the thief will rob and kill. And that is the gist of it! YOU MUST BE GOOD AND BELIEVE IN THE WORD OF GOD without God giving an apparition of Himself to you while you are alive. That’s the Test! The test will come to an end at death.
Again, if you can’t even do God’s will on earth, how are you going to do His will in heaven?
My example l gave was trying to show the “inappropriateness” of eternal condemnation. Eternity is unimagenable and to have someone suffer endless does not make sense.
Here we need to consider that God is all powerful, all knowing and all loving, and when we take these factor into consideration hell, represents a failed God. God gave us freedom, so does this freedom surpass God’s power to save His creatures? if it does then He is not all powerful.
I don’t believe in a vengeful God, who will do an eye for eye, a God who will condem someone to eternity because you committed mortal sin, no. But that does not mean l do not believe in punishnment after life no. As l said above purgatory is more appropriate and just because, as St Paul said in 1Corinthians3,
“at the end of life we Every man’s work shall be manifest. For the day of the Lord shall declare it, because it shall be revealed in fire. And the fire shall try every man’s work, of what sort it is. 14 If any man’s work abide, which he has built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. 15 If any man’s work burn, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire”
Edwin,
I really don’t understand you man. You are quoting the bible with 1 Corinthians 3:13-15, about Purgatory (which is good), BUT RIGHT AFTER THAT VERSE, THE SUBJECT IS ABOUT HELL:
16 Know you not that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? 17 But if any man violate the temple of God, him shall God destroy. – 1 Corinthians 3:16-17
Here are numerous bible verses about hell that you reject:
“And fear not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell.”- Matthew 10:28
Also look at verses: 2Peter 2:4, Matthew 23:33, Luke 12:5 (all are about Hell)
And HELL is Eternal:
“And many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth, shall awake: some unto life everlasting, and others unto reproach, to see it always.”- Daniel 12:2
You see hell is eternal. So why do you accept a verse on purgatory, yet reject numerous verses on Hell?
Why would you do that?
Edwin- Let’s look at this in a different angle. After death there is no time. What should happen to the person that never repented while there was time for him on earth? He was given a chance on earth (this is the TEST) to repent but never did it, why because he was in love with sins not God. When he dies without repenting, he is saying that he loves sins but doesn’t love God. WHAT DO YOU WANT GOD TO DO? Should God say, “Gee, I know you don’t really love me because of your actions on earth. And you never really said that you were sorry before you died, so let’s burn up all of your sins and come and live in heaven with me for all eternity.”
THE UNREPENTED SINNERS are the ones that don’t care about being good/being perfect. And only good and perfect people go to Heaven, because God is perfect.
If we know ahead of time that there is no hell (just purgatory) no one would try to be good. No one would try to be perfect/Holy. HERE IS WISDOM: GOD DOESN’T WANT YOU TO GET TO HEAVEN BY DEFAULT! WHY? God wants to give you salvation but you must COOPERATE while you are on earth. You must be active and work hard at being good. Why? Because we are made in His image and Likeness, thus, it gives God pure joy to see that His creatures on earth can imitate His goodness and perfection before they enter into Heaven! I could also say that it gives God pure sadness when He sees that some of His creatures will not try to be good while they’re on earth. So God’s justice and mercy are perfect, YET YOU MUST NOT BE LAZY AND MUST BE ACTIVE AND COOPERATE WITH HIS MERCY!
Edwin – I don’t know what else to say, we all decide our destiny (heaven or hell) while we’re on earth and death is just a passage. When we meet God face to face and receive our judgements we would have completed our journey (and there is no extended journey). From the support of Sacred Scriptures regarding Hell, this is how God set up His system. – Peace – THE END
I ask the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the holy mother of God, Mary, all the angels and saints, the faithful departed, and you my brothers and sisters to pray for me that I might make a sincere examination of conscience and to fully take part in the sacrement of Pennance, to fully take part in the sacrifice of the Mass, and to fully pray for all my brothers and sisters.
Done.
Hope your travels are smooth and pleasant. Appreciate the follow up post as well. Should be another interesting day of comments.
“In a word there is Hell because of respect. God has made us free and respects that freedom.”
This would be fine, I think, except for one sticking point: unlike your analogy, in which the man assumedly would let the girl walk away without any consequence, the teachings on Hell are that there are positive punishments in store for those who refuse to love and obey God. I think your solution would work, Msgr., if you were willing to reject all the teachings on Hell which state that there are any pains or discomforts in Hell at all and that the sole consequence were simply that the person would not have to bother about God anymore. I suspect you are not willing to do this, since it would open you to charges of heresy, and so your analogy leaves out the part where the man, instead of using a magic potion to force the girl to love him, merely sticks her in an iron maiden for not loving him.
Indeed, with the iron maiden in the background, we have the same problem as when we have the magic potion: she may be loving him for no other reason than she doesn’t want to be stuck in the iron maiden! In fact, Catholics have a word for this: imperfect contrition.
“Many people’s understanding of heaven is a very egocentric thing where they will be happy on their terms, where what pleases merely them will be available in abundance.”
Walter Kaufmann would argue that heaven and Christianity are explicitly and irreducibly egocentric, since all actions must be referred to the eternal consequence I myself will receive from my actions. Let’s hypothetically imagine that you could do something that would damn your soul for eternity but actually would save someone else’s. What would you do?
His argument is that it is actually less selfish to be a complete nihilist, because any sacrificial action you do is NOT referenced to the eternal reward but solely to the other-directed good that action obtains. Just something to think about,.
“Now God will not force any one to live where they do not want to live.”
I understand this point. The question is: what is the alternative He allows them to choose? If it is a traditional Hell of His creation (which I understand is the actual doctrine of the Church, pastoral explanations aside) then the problem arises: how is this a truly free choice?
In other words, this little article merely rehashes what has already been said without answering the following questions:
Are there real, positive punishments in Hell, as has been the teaching of the Church?
If this is so, doesn’t God’s creation of these punishments undermine the explanation Msgr. Pope is giving, since now we would have a situation in which God offers man a choice between love and torment – a choice we would immediately recognize as abusive and evil in any other circumstance?
My understanding of the punishments of hell, is that they result necessarily from the rejection of God. These sufferings come upon us, because we were made to know God. If we willingly reject what God offers, we are free to do so, but unhappiness and suffering necessarily result, for we are not fulfilling the purpose for which we were actually made . I do not try to over analyze these things, because God is speaking to us of a mystery. While I respect the great intellectual tradition of the church, and have enjoyed the dialogue that you have had with many others, I do not share in the wish to analyze such things in the extreme. I am a man of faith, and am willing to accept that God reveals that there is a hell, and that this does not, of itself, conflict with the teaching that God is love. I also accept on faith, that at some point our decisions become final, that is eternal and therefore, heaven and hell are also eternal. As an agnostic, I can only meet you so far. Many of the things we are discussing proceed from faith, and faith rests on revealed truths that, while not irrational, do stretch beyond what human experience knows or can fully understand. Even the created world, and the world of science, contains many paradoxes, many things that need to be kept in balance which seem to contradict each other but ultimately point to one reality. It is the result of being very small beings in a large and complex world. Some paradoxes overtime resolve, new ones emerge, others simply remain. Paradox is the condition of life.
I just watched Dogville by that Lars von Ture guy. It’s mixed in its portrayal of the truth, and not without a lot of snark but *spoiler*
The movie is, I think, the history of the Church in the world. Throughout her whole time in Dogville – Grace – who I believe represents the Church, wishes only mercy and compassion on the wretched people of Dogville. It is not until the very end, when Grace’s Father arrives, that the true nature of the wretched people of Dogville is revealed. Grace finally recognizes this, and submits that they ought to be destroyed. They are then all put to fire and sword.
My thoughts on Hell lean towards universalism via purgation, in the fullness of time, but this may simply be because I cannot fully see the wretchedness of the reprobate (and I pray that despite my heavy load of sin – I am not numbered among them!), we wish only on them mercy and compassion. When everything is finally revealed, God’s justice will be made plain.
Thank you so much for these hard teachings Father, they lead me back to the Lord when I fell deep into darkness, and I’m sure they have done so for so many others. Thank you for fighting the good fight.
I think the reason that universalism is unlikely is that a person has to be willing to go through purgation in order to be cleansed from sin. I think there comes a point where a person becomes so in love with sin that they aren’t willing to become separated from it under any circumstances, and are certainly not willing to suffer in order to be free of something they want. At least in hell they may be suffering but the suffering isn’t separating them from the evils they want to be with and prefer to the presence of God. Just my thoughts on the subject.
I would say that the answer to that is that unlike a finite being who is a man who would give a woman happiness who marries him, God is the supreme center of existence and the cause of all of the harmony that exists. Hell is simply the disharmony that is outside of God’s ordering love that someone has chosen who has rejected Him. The torments of hell are thus not what God positively inflicts. With the man promising marriage, the man is not the sole source of happiness in existence, so the woman has other options for happiness. But it is not the same with God who is first cause of all. There is no alternative happiness to God – what is outside of Him is torment by logical necessity.
And about heaven being selfish, the ideas of reward and punishment have an indispensable role in pushing us in the right direction (they provide a psychological foundation), but to enter heaven, we must have the theological virtue of charity, which is a love of God and neighbor for their own sakes, which God grants as a gift if we are willing to accept it. In advancing spiritually, we may start with being motivated by fear, then move to hope of reward, then at the highest level God advances us to loving Him for His own sake because He is the Supreme Good.
Well spoken Agnostic. Here we are discusing a real issue not passing fad.
Travel mercies, Msgr. & thanks. It does all proceed from Faith, even as simple as, “God, if You are there…”
I am glad that Father Barron took the trouble to say that we are not obliged to believe that anyone is in hell.
Yes, but if that were the case I wonder why Jesus spoke the way did, indicating that hell was more than theoretical and that “many” take the path that leads there. It is clear that the Church does not mention any one particular person being there, but I am not sure I would safely say we are free to disregard the teaching as refering to a theoretical null set.
Since I am not obliged to believe that anyone is in Hell I will hope and pray that no one is.
Father Barron took the trouble to say more in his video “Fr. Barron comments on Is Hell Crowded or Empty?” where he says we “may reasonably hope that all people will be saved.”
And since I will be judged as I judge I will reasonably hope that all people will be saved, for my sake as well as others.
Well, I hope so too, but the point isn’t what you or I hope, but what is in fact the reality. That said, I wonder what you or Balthasar or others would answer as to why it would seem that God allowed multitudes of his angels to fall but that somehow we humans are not so allowed to do this. Are we more believed of God than they?
I don’t recall anywhere above writing that we are not allowed to fall, only that we “may reasonably hope that all people will be saved.” Since we don’t know if any one is in Hell why should I and/or how could I claim that many are there? In fact the reality is that we don’t know who and how many are in Hell. So why must people assume many are in Hell when we can hope and pray there are few or any?
It would seem to me that the Fatima Prayer strongly implies the reasonable hope:
O my Jesus, forgive us our sins.
Save us from the fires of Hell;
Lead all souls into Heaven,
Especially those in most need of Thy mercy.
Amen.
“All souls” and “especially those most in need…” would include all those on the highway to Hell and would be in most need of His mercy. Why would the Church allow us this prayer if we weren’t permitted this reasonable hope?
It would seem that the occupancy of Hell could be either as Aquinas or Balthasar claim and which we choose says less about the reality and more about us the choosers.
I’ve thought a bit about that Father. There are a couple possible things to say:
It could be that the fallen angels received the greater condemnation because they had already seen God. For the vast 99.99%+ of us on this earth, we are blessed to have “believed without seeing”. God may be more understanding of the plight of a humanity who must see “through a glass; dimly”. Our Faith is all the more beautiful for this, and this probably, I would venture to guess, has something to do with the reason for the way that things are.
The second is far more controversial, but it has been speculated by many of the Church Father’s (not just Origen), that, in the fullness of time, even the fallen angels may obtain pardon. I’m skeptical of this personally, but it doesn’t appear to have been condemned by any council – though it has been taken up.
The closest is the last condemnation of some of the writings of Origen (more likely his students): “If anyone shall say that the life of the spirits (νοῶν) shall be like to the life which was in the beginning while as yet the spirits had not come down or fallen, so that the end and the beginning shall be alike, and that the end shall be the true measure of the beginning: let him be anathema.” If we notice the wording, it doesn’t say that it is impossible that the fallen angels may one day obtain blessedness (if they could possibly desire it) – but ‘so that the end and the beginning shall be alike’ – that’s a very specific notion that writes off the events that have taken place. It’s probably condemning the kind of “great conflagration” thinking that was popular as a result of Stoic teachings.
So it may be possible that we may even dare to hope for the latter, but I think it’s the former that would offer the best explanation for why the angels who hate us – and God – received the greater condemnation.
Hell is eternal because it would be unjust for God to either annihilate what He has created or let the wicked go unpunished while the righteous are rewarded, since God is Love and Love is Justice and Mercy.
who said God created hell?
Jesus.
cf Matthew 25:41
“If we willingly reject what God offers, we are free to do so, but unhappiness and suffering necessarily result, for we are not fulfilling the purpose for which we were actually made .”
Again, this depends on whether the “unhappiness and suffering” are merely not having to worry about God any more (which may or may not be subjectively experienced as suffering – indeed, one would have to admit that a being who does not and never believed in God, or who rejected HIm, would not find such an existence any subjectively more unpleasant than he did during life) or whether the state has additional punishments. That is the difference between the free rejection and the coerced or punished rejection, and it is at the heart of my question.
“I do not try to over analyze these things, because God is speaking to us of a mystery.”
This seems to me to basically be saying that you are willing to believe it regardless of whether it actually makes sense, and that part of how you accomplish this is to ignore the implications of your beliefs that don’t make sense. Of course, you are free to do this; indeed, anybody could literally justify any belief they wish by using the exact words you are using. We all have a courtroom; the difference is the quality of evidence we allow in it.
“While I respect the great intellectual tradition of the church, and have enjoyed the dialogue that you have had with many others, I do not share in the wish to analyze such things in the extreme. ”
I do not see how it is extreme to consider the univocal teachings of your own Church until just the last century or so. It seems that you have painted yourself into a corner, so to speak, and now do not want to think too hard about how you have gotten there. Again, you are free to do this, but as someone interested in your faith I would appreciate a little help seeing through these matters.
“As an agnostic, I can only meet you so far.”
This is like saying, “I cannot help you believe unless you believe.”
“Even the created world, and the world of science, contains many paradoxes, many things that need to be kept in balance which seem to contradict each other but ultimately point to one reality.”
The big difference is that you can observe scientific principles and test them. There is actual evidence. Additionally, any apparent paradoxes are ultimately explicable: that is, they are not merely put into a corner of “mystery” and allowed to stew unexplored; they are probed until they are resolved. Some of the biggest paradoxes in science right now are part of quantum theory, but you’ll not meet a scientist who sits down and says, “aha, quantum mechanics, let’s leave it a mystery and that is that.”
In any case, I appreciate the attempt you did make to explain the situation and I understand and even somewhat sympathize with your unwillingness or inability to address the actual difficulty I have with accepting your beliefs. From my experience, it seems to be a very common experience for people of faith when their beliefs are questioned. It of course does not mean that what you believe is necessarily untrue – I have no real grounds to say such a thing. It just means that I can see no reason or justification for believing it, indeed, no more than any other religion whose believers cannot express justification for their beliefs other than the fact that they believe it (i.e., by the “evidence” of faith). Thank you, though.
Quod scripsi, scripsi. I have enjoyed reading your back and forth with others and briefly with me. But it also seems that little progress is to be had with you. What you say about belief is not wholly untrue. Some degree of faith is necessary to appreciate the more complex teachings. St Anselm famously quipped, credo ut intelligam (I believe that I might understand). The kind of truths that we are dealing with here are revealed truths and do not pertain merely to natural law or to the physical sciences. Without faith in the reveled documents and the one who reveals, little progress can be had in a discussion of this sort. You may wish to continue your discussions with others here, i appreciate the respectful tone, but as for me, while recognizing the difficulty of the teaching in terms of reconciling it to love, And recognizing as well that there is a paradox, I must say I see open doors to persue with you. For me the paradox involved is not hard to overcome, but I am a man of faith and that does make all the difference for me.
l am also a man of faith Msgr and l believe in the Father of Jesus Christ who forgave the prodigal son. God of unconditional love.
Well, Edwin, as your many other comments show! If I understand you correctly, I do not think you do not really have a full balance regarding scripture. The heart of orthodoxy is to hold things in balance and tension. There are paradoxes and seeming contradictions in scripture and it is not wrong to ponder them. Yes God is merciful and yes there is a hell. Orthodoxy says both, heresy chooses one and disgards the other. You quote scriptures in your various responses here that support your view, but disregard other passages wherein Jesus and the Epistles do in fact clearly teach there is a hell and that there is such a thing as eternal separation from God. The challenge for you is to discover how to hold both truths in tension and balance. Yes Gods love is unconditional and there is no contradiction in saying that God still loves the souls in Hell who have rejected him and his Kingdom, he still provides for them and holds them in existence, but he permits their free choice to live apart from him, while still loving them.
Hi Interested,
I hope you don’t mind if I take a stab at the question of “positive” punishments in Hell. As I understand it, from Father Barron and others, evil does not exist in and of itself. The idea is that evil is the corruption or degradation of some existing good, it adds nothing only detracts, erodes or distorts what does exist. So when you reject God you reject all His graces, this means a total loss of the ability to know or feel even the smallest joy because joy is a grace – hence suffering in Hell is not a positive but the removal of a capacity/faculty. If God also removed your existence and allowed oblivion I think you’d have less of an objection as you likely believe that already (just a guess). However for reasons which are mysterious and accepted on faith (I appreciate how unsatisfying that it as a answer) existence is preserved in the absence of any grace. You could argue that the presence of other sinners is a positive torment, but again it’s simply the shared result of the loss of graces.
“The big difference is that you can observe scientific principles and test them. There is actual evidence. Additionally, any apparent paradoxes are ultimately explicable: that is, they are not merely put into a corner of “mystery” and allowed to stew unexplored; they are probed until they are resolved. Some of the biggest paradoxes in science right now are part of quantum theory, but you’ll not meet a scientist who sits down and says, “aha, quantum mechanics, let’s leave it a mystery and that is that.”
We have very different understandings of science. “any apparent paradoxes are ultimately explicable” is an incredibly broad statement. In the Middle Ages the apparent paradox of disease was explained by an imbalance of the humors and now by germs and bacteria. Please look to much of the work by James Burke sush as “the Day the Universe Changed”. the history of scientific discovery is a history littered with announcements that all there is has been discovered just before we find something else.
Catholicism is unfortunately messy. There are a lot of humans with their weakenesses involved. Often they are inspired by the Holy Spirit and sometimes unfortunately they are confused. You hold a test up for Christianity that is designed to be impossible. If we can explain to you a complete system with no flaw no apparent contradiction then you will still copy a section of what we right and point out the limitations of our thoughts. I became Catholic because it explained the most of the facts that I saw in my search in the simplest manner. As you have pointed out often over the past days, there are many contrdictions and even some out right problems. The entireness of Catholicism is not static but there are some basic points that we do hold to be true for ever. We try and hold to these in spite of what the world does. I find Relativism abhorret because then nothing is true. There is no good or bad. This is not rational to me therefore I have come to believe in God as an absolute Truth. Is that messy and hard to defend in a good intellectual debate? Yeppers. But to me Catholicsm is the only system that “fits the data”.
That should give you several things to copy, paste and find fault with.
“That should give you several things to copy, paste and find fault with.”
Hey, this is how I make sure I don’t miss anything and how I make sure I am addressing what someone actually says.
“the history of scientific discovery is a history littered with announcements that all there is has been discovered just before we find something else. ”
I’m not sure I know of any era in which scientists believed they knew everything there was to know. But, of course, you are right that many times scientific theories that were once believed are shown to be inadequate. However, these were not arbitrary decisions. The discarding of a theory must be justified by observation and evidence; that is, it has to be shown that the explanations of the phenomena are inadequate. One of the ways this happens is through paradoxes: a paradox is a good sign that a current explanation may be inadequate. For example, Schrodinger’s Cat is a quantum paradox that is designed to show what still needs to be adequately explained. No one uses the Schrodinger’s Cat paradox, however, as a sign that everything is hunky dory with what we believe – we just need to accept mystery and be happy with it. This was my main point in contrasting the scientific approach to paradox to the “mysterious” approach that Msgr. seemed to be advocating.
“Catholicism is unfortunately messy.”
I would be fine with this, if Catholicism didn’t make grand claims about itself. Science is messy, too; its history involves a lot of changes, a lot of reversals, a lot of mistakes that had to be corrected (and mistakes that still are to be corrected). But scientists own up to this fact: this is how science works. But with Catholcism, you have this strong resistance to the notion that the Church could have made a mistake, that a past teaching was wrong – in short, although Catholicism admits that its people are messy, it denies that its beliefs are. This, too, is another reason I cannot accept Catholicism: if it admitted that the beliefs are just the best we can know about God right now, subject to potential correction and revision, then I probably would be in Mass every week again. This is not what it teaches: it teaches its own inerrancy and infallibility despite how patently messy its teachings really are. It then becomes a self-justifying act of faith to continue to believe (perhaps even revel in) the paradoxes.
“I find Relativism abhorret because then nothing is true.”
I also disagree with relativism, if by relativism you mean the Protagorean variant: man is the measure of all things – that reality is what we make of it. Reality is whatever it is. I do think that truth is relative vis a vis our ability to know: that is to say, the fact that we are anatomically, physiologically, and socially contextualized minds means that our experience of reality is going to be an irreducibly subjective experience of that objective reality, but I believe that this is the necessary foundation that allows us to know truth, not a hindrance to our quest.
“if it admitted that the beliefs are just the best we can know about God right now, subject to potential correction and revision”
My struggle with your statements is the extremes. There are teachings that the Church holds to be correct without change. There are teachings that the Church has changed. I clearly recall Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI making apologies for the failings of the Church. Back to messiness. If the bar you set for Catholicism is no internal inconsistencies and everyone says the same thing then you can hang up the comments now and move on your work here is done. If you parse anything down I think it becomes ugly. One must try to see both the whole and the parts in my mind. I love my dog. He is an amazing creature in his totality. I suppose that if he were hit by a car and badly injured that he might no longer look amazing but become ugly. Same dog. I see your arguments here has dissecting the dog (sorry T-bone). I am pretty far down the line from the Pope but the Church is messy. Thank God we have the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to try and keep us on the path.
“if by relativism you mean the Protagorean variant”
My engineering education has not prepared me for a debate at this level of philosophical thought so you will have to excuse me. I believe that there must be some ultimate purpose for our existence and some ultimate truth. I believe that this purpose and truth are beyond my full understanding but I cannot accept that we are meer chemical accidents. There is clearly a bent this direction in scientific thought now and I am concerned that this has become an untested assumption. As I construct my understanding of our existence on this foundation of a belief in an ultimate purpose, the Catholic Church in the totality of my understanding so far presents the best “fit to the data”. Ask my wife, I am an engineer. There is variation in everything. The world is non-linear and has friction or messiness. But the Church holds firm the some key teachings to be true. I don’t like or even agree personally with everything the Church teaches but given my own messiness I choose to investigate the idea that I might be the wrong one. There are several teachings of the Church that I must confess I have come to embrace as I have studied these and found my own thoughts lacking.
Come on back to Mass. I will buy lunch afterwards if you are in this area. I converted about 15 years ago. I know everyday I made the right choice but it is not always easy.
armchair theologians need to realize there comes a time to stop talking about heaven and hell and decide which you want to got to. God calls us to one place we put ourselves in the other.
and to the agnostic i offer this : have you never seen a friend succumb to a hell of their own making, no matter what you or others may do to help them. Torments we heap upon ourselves follow us into eternity, an individual is very good at persecuting themselves.
“Have you never seen a friend succumb to a hell of their own making, no matter what you or others may do to help them.”
Not in an ultimate sense, though I have seen people make bad and self-destructive decisions despite my or others’ attempts to dissuade them. Of course, if I have the power to prevent them from experiencing those consequences, I would be immoral to fail to do so.
For example, my children. Part of being a parent is actually doing what I can to prevent my children from experiencing irreversible effects from their decisions, even if they know better. If my child runs towards the street despite knowing it is a dangerous place to run about, I do not sit back yelling for him to return and noting that he will get what’s coming to him if he does not. I stop him. It is not a matter of destroying his will to do so: he still chose to not obey me. I simply prevent him from experiencing irrevocable consequences, because as his father who loves him his well-being, life, and comfort are far more important than whether he obeys or loves me.
Similarly, there is no internal contradiction to a God who allows us to choose or reject Him but does not subject us to any particular consequences (and, in fact, uses His power to mitigate those consequences).
Dear Mr. Agnostic:
It is amusing that you suggest Msgr Pope would be concerned about charges of Heresy! Perhaps you did not get the memo, while Msgr Pope is very othordox, even if he wasn’t orthodox at all, there would be no inquisition. That was in the good old days! These days in the Catholic Church a priest or anyone else for that matter, can virtually say anything or deny any truth of the faith pretty much with impunity! We have the Leadership Conference of Women Regious praying to Mother Earth or some such nonsense for the last quarter century! Some folks Like Hans Urs Von Balthassar ( A Catholic theologian made a Cardinal shortly before his death, ) in essence denied the practical existence of hell, by claiming it was a “possibility” but that we should “hope” no one was actually there. No one called him a heretic! Nor od I , although I kind of think his opinion was problematic, since I find the thought of dying and bunking for all eternity between Osama bin Laden and Hitler, well….. lets say….. unattractive….. to say the least, and I am not nuts about the possibility of oblivion either. Which of these two alternative possibilities to the traditional heaven/ hell picture strikes your fancy ? Anyway it would be nice if the Bishops or someone was acutally calling the heretics out, but alas thats not the case. I think you must be living in an alternative universe of some kind!
But all kidding aside I do have a more serious point.
I think you are bogged down in the imagery used to describe hell, not to put too fine a point on Msgr Pope’s response, in which he alludes to the same idea, I would still ask you to consider the following:
Eternal separation from God is worse suffering than the Iron Maiden etc.. because even the Iron maiden and such are temporary, and more importantly physical suffering while very graphic, is much less severe than physical suffering. People willingly suffer the former to avoid the later. Think of the Buddhist Monks who lit themselves on fire to protest their horror over the Viet Nam War. The Church and Christ himself used such imagery perhaps to underscore the reality that hell is the ultimate catastrophe. We have a hard time imagining eternal separation from God as a really bad thing, because we have no mental construct what such a separation would look and feel like. If Christ lnew that eternal separation from God, the source of all meaning, coherent thought etc was catastrophe, he might choose terrible physical images we could understand in order to emphasize the gravity of the situation. It is unfortunate that modern images focus on flame, the biblical image is more darkness and icy cold, which is Dante’s image as well. This to my mind captures more the reality. It is not that God is conjuring up some eternal combustion engine, it is more that we via the unattenuated force of our will, push God from us and are left with what you have without God, which is not much. Imagine if you were alienated eternally from the very source of your ability to have a coherent thought, but still somehow existed. I think the suffering would be great indeed. It does not do it justice to compare it to the man dismissing a girlfriend! One human being is not the source of another human beings existence. It would be more like the infinite frustration one would feel if the soul was separated from its power to have a thought, or a relationship, or form an image but still somehow continued to exist. An vision of hell by Theresa of Avila captures this a bit, and compares it to being trapped in an tiny whole enclosed in the dark. Claustraphobia ramped up to some infinite degree.
On a personal level I have some sympathy for Pascal’s gamble. I am not interested in doing the experiment that you evidently are interested in. The one that says “I can live my life as an atheist or an agnostic and test the theory seeing what happens when I die”. I see very little gain in that approach. After all if there is no God, then we are all headed for nothingness and I do not see much gain as life as an agnostic. It is certainly not something that obviously produces much happiness. The thought of my wife, and children eventually ceasing to exist is just as unpleasent to me as the “iron maiden” Such an absurd world is worthless. Having to undergo the mild inconviences that church imposes on my tendencies to lust, greed, gluttony, anger and sloth so as to have a chance at eternal life seems like a no brainer trade! If it is not true, well it should be! On the other hand if there is a God I can not imagine the Marquis de Sade and Ghandi sharing the same eternal fate, that is self evidently absurd. IT seems we are left with some sort of eternal punishment /eternal reward after death, which is the believe of most people at most times in human history. I do not consider myself smarter than most people at most times in history, in spite of thinking myself a reasonably well educated guy. As such It seems to me that faith is the most reasonable option to make sense of the world. Does it make sense of everything and tie it up in a nice little bow? No, it sure doesn’t ! Not any more than the standard model of Physics explains everything about the physical world, but the explanation does fit many of the facts we do know and is a more frutiful basis for moving forward than the alternatives
“while Msgr Pope is very othordox”
I am sure he is, which is exactly why he has difficulties addressing my question. If he was not committed to orthodoxy he could have already admitted that all that talk about literal fires and pains and torments in Hell was all a bunch of medieval rubbish that obscured the real, purely “spiritual” understanding of Hell. He cannot take this route to escape the problem, however, precisely because of his commitment to orthodoxy, leaving him only with the route of attempting to minimize the problems of the physical pain and torment side of Hell vis a vis a “pastoral” treatment of the subject.
“I think you are bogged down in the imagery used to describe hell”
Inasmuch as the imagery has been repeatedly affirmed as literally applicable and not merely an analogy, yes, I guess I am.
“Imagine if you were alienated eternally from the very source of your ability to have a coherent thought, but still somehow existed.”
Luckily for me then, I would be unable to think about my condition and situation, rendering the alienation rather moot.
“On a personal level I have some sympathy for Pascal’s gamble.”
Guess what? Pascal’s wager can be used to justify any religion with eternal consequences. You could Pascal’s wager yourself into Islam if you wanted to. I’m not so much interested with gambling as with the truth of things.
Now, Marcus Aurelius’ observation that we should live our lives well regardless of whether there are gods or not, that rings quite true.
“The thought of my wife, and children eventually ceasing to exist is just as unpleasent to me as the “iron maiden””
And here we get to the real Hell of Hell. You love your wife, no? Now imagine, unpleasant as it is, that she goes to Hell and you to Heaven. Some Heaven, eh? And your children?
I am reminded of the real sickening side of Hell, as portrayed by St. Thomas Aquinas:
“…the saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked, by considering therein the order of Divine justice and their own deliverance, which will fill them with joy. And thus the Divine justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed: while the punishment of the damned will cause it indirectly.”
If this Doctor of the Church is to be believed, not only will the fact that your wife and children are eternally separated from you in pain and suffering not bother you, it will actually contribute to your joy in heaven.
There is a glimpse in the scriptures, when the man that used to dine sumptuously asked Abraham if he would send Lazarus to dip his fingers in water so the flames that die not would quench a little of his thirst. Remember he was in tourment for choosing to disobey….The great divide or Chasm
Hell is that place which ensures that the poor, the chaste, the charitable, the meek, the faithful, never have to suffer the depredations of the rich, the immoral, the powerful, the arrogant and the ungodly ever again.
Ever.
There’s a wedding and you’re invited but make no mistake about the wedding garment.
Hell is forever.
May God shed His mercy abroad in our hearts!
Like heaven hell is a mystery. True we have many writings on the punishments of hell and most involve fire. Of late there have been a few who opt for ice and freezing, and another group who speak of the loss of God. Now all are about a loss of God because heaven is the presence of God the Beatific Visionl. The fire curiously has a relationship to God as the all consuming, purifying fire. “Who can endure the everlasting flames. The one with pure heart…” SO the fire of hell is very likely the same fire which is warm and inviting to those who can endure it. This leads to a further point. It is those who refuse to be purified; those who insist on enjoying their sins who cannot endure the fire of purification and the fire of Divine Love. People put themselves into this state and place of suffering and they revel in the misery. Msgr. makes an error I believe in his remarks about sexuality in heaven. There is no sex in heaven. We are not given in marriage in heaven. All that ends at death. There is no sex in hell either. That is all physical and the body we have in heaven is not physical but spiritual. I urege you to view Fr. Baron’s video on this post. It is very good, and I think it explains things about as well as we can at this point in heistory.
This should be there is a hell and the choice is ours. Hell begins in this life! The joy of hell begin with never considering being sorry.
Where is your scripture to back up these statements?
1 Corinthians 5:21
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Phl 2:9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,
Phl 2:10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
Phl 2:11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
You just quoted Phl 2:10 …”under the earth, I think this is sheol (hell) and not purgatory
Hell is eternal or Jesus isn’t. Because nothing but the possibility of eternal separation would exact such an unfathomable idea of God assuming human nature and dying on a Cross.
The door to heaven is unlocked, but you still have to knock to enter.
completely off-topic:
So, I’ve read that the Democrat Party plans to make same-sex marriage part of their platform. Oh, my.
Dear Mr Agnostic:
Its probably pointless to engage you point by point, so I won’t. There is an interesting book by Father Thomas Dubay called Faith and Certitude, and in it he makes the case that at some level atheism versus theism is ultimately a choice. I think this is correct. The evidence for theism is not the kind of thing that is like a deductive mathematical proof ( although the mathematician Kurt Godel formulated St. Anslem’s ontological proof as an exercise in modal logic) , but more often it is like the evidence a spouse loves you and would make a good marriage partner. There are logical reasons for it, but ultimately it is a decision one way or another for the relationship. Like all analogies this is imperfect, because I have emotional feelings for my spouse and not really emotions directed at God per se, but to an extent there was a decision to make a commitment based on reason but not reasons that were mathematically compelled. I could have decided differently in either case without being considered insane and my life would be different.
On some of your facts your are wrong, for example the Church teaches that the language of hell is imagery, Msgr Pope has said this and so has in fact the late Pope John Paul II among others. Its simply sounds foolish to assert that anyone would fear being heretical if they admit this. ( Do you really believe otherwise?) The issues about Aquinas and the souls in heaven not being disturbed by seeing the souls in hell suffer has a bit more substance. Still I think you misunderstand the nature of what it takes to get into hell. If one was Hitler’s father and was not also damned ( because we have some moral responsibility for what we teach our children..) It is easy for me to see that one might not be saddened by Hitler’s damnation. It is possible if one saw the evil that leads to hell in all its horror as God sees it, sees ever child orphaned, hears the cries of those who perished in the concentration camps, etc then maybe ones parental feelings for The originator of such evil would diminish. As for my wife and kids, I have no worries about their salvation, my kids are reasonably decent, ( They are teenagers, so the bar is set pretty low after all… ) and my wife must put up with me , as such, if she offers up the suffering I think her sins are well remitted.
Still In a response to a blog post It is difficult and tedious to respond point by point. I can, but I am not really sure your interest is in being persuaded. I think on some level you miss the point, For example I am not saying you can not live some socially respectable atheistic life along Marcus Aurelius lines. I am saying it is a rather unhappy one for most people to live like that. After all most of the intellectually serious atheists were hardly joyful creatures. ( Let’s think about Sarte, and his works like “Nausea” , or Camus’s statement that “the only real philosophical question was suicide” or Neitzsche , ( thinking about Neitzsche at all kind of makes the point right.?) I don’t think any of these guys is someone that I would want to go to the ball park, catch a game and have a beer with… no thanks… not a fun group.) That’s sort of my point with Pascal’s gamble, I think on a fundamental level atheism = despair. Even you.. Do you ever even laugh at a joke? Perhaps you do, but you would never guess from your posts.
In any case if you are really thinking about this in an open minded way, folks like Msgr Pope are there to help,( not me I dont have the patience.. Mea Culpa…) and I would recommend you read Dubay’s book, If your just looking to pick a fight on the web.. yawn, been there done that, not worth the time…
Peace…
“Its probably pointless to engage you point by point, so I won’t.”
Very few discussions are profitable without real engagement of what the other person says. Do not mistake the fact that I do not share your beliefs with the mistaken notion that I am not sincere.
“and in it he makes the case that at some level atheism versus theism is ultimately a choice. I think this is correct.”
It depends on what he and you mean by it. If he simply means that reasonably informed people must make a decision on what to believe, then sure, but this is nothing but a truism. If he means that choosing what we believe is ultimately arbitrary and merely a matter of choice, I must part ways with him and you. What matters is seeking the truth, not choosing sides.
“but more often it is like the evidence a spouse loves you and would make a good marriage partner.”
A common analogy, except that in this case we are searching for evidence that the spouse even exists, much less whether they love us. It is a bit like a bachelor is going about his business when suddenly a stranger pops in to tell him that his wife loves him.
“There are logical reasons for it,”
Such as?
“but ultimately it is a decision one way or another for the relationship.”
Unless you go about choosing your beliefs in a remarkably different way than I do, you should realize that things are not really like this at all in any other area of life. For example, if you are trying to find out if your spouse loves you, such events as your spouse saying “I love you” and acting in ways consonant with love are pretty good evidences justifying the believe “she loves me.” If she tells you she hates you and tries to kill you, no amount of wishful thinking or “choosing” can justify that same belief. If you don’t even know whether she exists, the matter becomes different altogether.
“On some of your facts your are wrong, for example the Church teaches that the language of hell is imagery, ”
Really? Maybe you should investigate the Council of Florence, the Summa Theologiae, and other documents.
“As for my wife and kids, I have no worries about their salvation, my kids are reasonably decent, ”
My wife has a little theory that everyone is a universalist when it comes to the people immediately in our lives. As for Hitler’s father, I cannot pretend to know how he felt. I do know that eternity is an awful thing to spend in torture, even if you are Hitler. I do not mean to diminish the horrible things that Hitler did. But eternity is…eternity, and you know the saying “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy?” I think Hell makes that saying ring true.
“but I am not really sure your interest is in being persuaded. ”
Here, again, is where the difference between the way you think and the way I think becomes clear. You act as if believing is a matter of choice. As if I can close my eyes, and really just wish that God didn’t exist (or did exist) and damned be logic, reason, and evidence – or worse, that I can build myself a house of evidence to support whatever I chose to believe. As if I walk around with a predetermined set of beliefs that I don’t intend to change. I don’t work that way. If what you say is convincing and substantive, I will believe it. If it is justified, I will believe it. If it is not, I won’t. I used to be fully Catholic. Then I realized that a lot of what I believed just didn’t make sense, and I found out that when I questioned the beliefs people started acting like children do when someone stops playing along with a game of pretend. There was a lot of sadness, a lot of people saying “I’ll pray for you,” a bit of condescension, a even an amount of bitterness that I (who used to teach an RCIA class of all things) would suddenly stop believing. What they didn’t realize is that I had come to the sudden knowledge that I had been pretending. I had said something over and over again – “Credo in unum Deum” – that I had tricked myself into believing it without any rationale or justification. I may as well have been saying “I believe in Allah” or “I believe in Bigfoot,” because those claims had the same level of justification as my own: pure faith. So, I stopped pretending. Now, if I am to believe, I want to choose to believe something because it is true, not believe something is true because I choose to believe it.
“After all most of the intellectually serious atheists were hardly joyful creatures.”
The great irony is that many of the most intellectually serious Christians were hardly joyful creatures – whatever “joyful” might mean. We have saints who put away their families, saints who spent their lives cloistered in a monastery, saints like Thomas More who rejoiced in putting people like Tyndale to death, so forth and so on. It may just be that being an intellectual giant can be a tremendous burden no matter what you believe. Then there are men like Walter Kaufmann.
“I don’t think any of these guys is someone that I would want to go to the ball park, catch a game and have a beer with… no thanks… not a fun group.”
Actually, I think it would be a blast to have Augustine and Nietzsche in the same room with me (assuming we could all speak a common language, which we can’t).
There are many crying in the wilderness.
:-/ ?
Interested Agnostic,
Your “iron maiden” analogy is not apt, since no analogy involving human beings punishing their fellow humans will properly capture the connection between God (an infinite Being) and His creature (a finite being). In the case of the man who loves the woman, the man is not the absolute end of the woman’s existence, in whom her true happiness resides, and so inflicting infinite or eternal punishments on her would of course be absurd. But God is the Being for Whom men were created and in Whom alone they can find happiness, and therefore to be eternally separated from Him by their own fault will ipso facto entail torturing suffering. Put differently, it is astonishing that God would NEED to command His creatures to love Him, since He is infinitely worthy of love regardless of whether He commands it or not. But given human penchant for acting foolishly and irrationally, it was fitting that He gave this command, and that He threatened punishments for those who did not comply with it. In reality no one should need to be commanded to do what is good and right. As Aristotle said, laws, punishments, and prohibitions are for the majority of human beings, who do what is good not from love of virtue but from fear of punishment. If such people were rightly ordered towards their end, they would do the good without any law or threat of punishment, but purely from love of virtue. But most people need some form of coercion to tend towards what they should tend toward anyway.
Your objection about St. Thomas’s point can also be easily answered. If your wife dies in the state of mortal sin, and if you die in the state of grace, then you will experience the beatific vision of God’s very essence. This vision is so filled with the sum of all happiness that no merely finite consideration (such as the well-deserved punishment of someone you loved on Earth) will be able to dull the intensity of the joy. The reason for being unhappy, ultimately, is because you don’t get something that you want. But in Heaven the blessed always get what they want: what God wants. The wills of the blessed are entirely united with the divine will, so that they do not wish anything which He does not wish. Now He wished to exercise justice on someone who, despite many opportunities, chose to spurn His mercy and die unrepentant of having grievously offended Him. Such a person deserves Hell, and therefore the blessed, seeing the fittingness and justice of the punishment, and the infinite goodness, truth, wisdom, mercy, and justice of the One who inflicts it, will have no reason to complain or be unhappy. Your objection seems to stem from a purely earthly, naturalistic consideration of how our emotions work. But the blessed will not think, reason, and feel as earthly agnostics think, reason, and feel, and therefore you should not expect that what causes you pain will cause pain to them. Nor, if you are humble, should you be adverse to the possibility that their intellectual and emotive tendencies are actually the right ones and yours the wrong ones.
God bless.
“Your “iron maiden” analogy is not apt, since no analogy involving human beings punishing their fellow humans will properly capture the connection between God (an infinite Being) and His creature (a finite being).”
If God’s goodness has no relationship to human goodness, then when you say “God is good” you are saying something meaningless, because all you know is human goodness. This is the point Thomas Aquinas makes in the Summa: the words we use for the divine are drawn from creatures and point analogically to the divine reality. So, you see, there must be a connection between what makes a good human father and what we mean when God the Father is good, or you render the goodness of God meaningless.
“so inflicting infinite or eternal punishments on her would of course be absurd.”
It would be infinitely more absurd for the good God who is the intended end of her existence to provide extraneous punishments for His creatures. As my students used to say when I taught middle school English “that’s petty.” Petty indeed! It has all the false grandeur of a man tormenting a bug.
” This vision is so filled with the sum of all happiness that no merely finite consideration (such as the well-deserved punishment of someone you loved on Earth) will be able to dull the intensity of the joy.”
How refreshing. I will forget all about how much I loved her, the tender moments with her, the gaze of her eyes in mine. Will I really become such a witless worm – to push her out of my mind? I’m sure I could fall for such a temptation: perfect happiness if I just forget about that wife of mine in eternal torment. But it disturbs me to no end.
“Now He wished to exercise justice on someone who, despite many opportunities, chose to spurn His mercy and die unrepentant of having grievously offended Him. Such a person deserves Hell, and therefore the blessed, seeing the fittingness and justice of the punishment, and the infinite goodness, truth, wisdom, mercy, and justice of the One who inflicts it, will have no reason to complain or be unhappy. Your objection seems to stem from a purely earthly, naturalistic consideration of how our emotions work. But the blessed will not think, reason, and feel as earthly agnostics think, reason, and feel, and therefore you should not expect that what causes you pain will cause pain to them.”
Are you familiar with the Borg from Star Trek? I swear, you make the beatific vision sound like getting assimilated. If this is what heaven is – the complete destruction of my individuality, including my memories and love for my wife, my desire to never leave her, the desire to always be able to look into that specific creature’s eyes – then heaven is really Hell. Strange religion, to teach you to love others, even your enemy, to love each thing for what it is, then tell you that, in the end, you might just be forced to celebrate when the things you loved are lost to eternal torment.
First, an aside about scientific viewpoints of faith and pseudo scientific viewpoints of faith. Perhaps somewhat (and briefly) justified in that a belief in hell is based on faith.
Interested Agnostic comments on quantum mechanics and inspires me to (is moved to move me to?) bring something together. Some spokespeople for science declare against religion because it is “unscientific” and goes against what was, and is, known about science. However, the discovery of; and progressive work of quantum mechanics, physics, whatever went against what was, and is, known against science so; true scientific people proceeded to move on from their existing THEORIES to rediscover. Earlier this year I found great excitement upon reading a report on a degree of reconciliation between classic physics and a seeming contradiction in wave/particle duality when a sliding scale was discovered wherein even the largest of particles has some particulate aspect. What if the discovery of the whole quantum thing had been rejected because it disagreed with what was “known” at the time? The beginnings of a terminal illness besetting science? Is the so called scientific rejection of faith (which ignores a lot of hard data) a new terminal illness on the true search of knowledge?
Oops, I did say “briefly” so on to main topic.
Some fathers are overly protective and, thereby, heavily stifle the child’s learning experiences. Others protect from severe and “experiencing irreversible effects from their decisions, even if they know better” (thanks again to Interested Agnostic) but allow the child to feel the consequences of their action when practical, including comfortable and achievement oriented consequences.
Wouldn’t it make sense that a Perfect Father would allow many learning experiences of consequences of our actions to benefit us? Wouldn’t Salvation, to save those who would otherwise be lost, as He suffered with us through Himself who is His Son; in a way we may that we may never be able to understand; also make sense? Sort of accompanying us on our tougher journeys and sharing some of the hardship?
However, some earthly fathers have had to make a decision to finally give up on a hopeless ne’er do well offspring for the good of the whole, the good of the rest. What a tough and painful decision that must be. How painful for the father who experiences the continuing suffering of the disowned.
A point which I never recall seeing brought up; does God suffer pangs of something so divinely and indescribably painful in the mere thought of finally giving up on any of His earthly children and condemning them to eternity in hell? Even if it is done for the good of the rest?
Interested Agnostic,
Yes, I am aware of St. Thomas’s teaching on analogical predication of divine attributes. This is not relevant to the case at hand because there is certainly an obvious sense in which an earthly father is totally disanalogous to the Heavenly Father: no earthly father is the absolute end of his son’s existence. Therefore the analogy won’t work.
Your objection regarding your wife is an emotional difficulty, not a theological difficulty. This is a crude analogy, but it will have to do for the moment: suppose you have a million dollars in your right pocket and a penny in your left. Your left pocket springs a hole and you lose the penny, but the right remains intact and you retain the million. When you get home you notice that you have lost the penny (with an initial sense of panic as you reach into the left pocket) but then sigh with relief as you see that you still have the million. Do you pine away and mourn, weep and lament for the lost penny, or do you experience pleasure that you are still a millionaire and have no sorrow at all about the lost 1 cent-piece? That is, if you have two goods which conflict with each other, one of which is infinite and all-satisfying and the other of which is finite and conflicts with the infinite Good, do you sorrow for losing the finite good and keeping the infinite Good? The answer is self-evidently obvious.
The pain of loss in Hell is not an “extraneous” punishment; as St. Thomas says, it is proportioned to the two errors inherent in any sin which in justice must both be punished. One part of the sin consists in turning away from God (punished by the pain of loss) and the other consists in turning towards creatures (punished by the pain of sense, e.g., Hellfire).
Heaven does not destroy individuality; this is another fallacy. Thomistic metaphysics points out that whatever a creature has of being and entity comes to it from the Self-Subsisting Being; whatever it has of defect, failing, and falling short in being comes to it from itself (“I am He Who is; you are she who is not,” God said to St. Catherine of Siena). Whatever you lose in Heaven is your imperfection, your sin, your falling short of what you should be, i.e., things which present obstacles to your union with God. Catholicism is not a strange religion: to love someone means to will what is good for them. If someone dies in the state of enmity with God, then what is good for that person is to receive the just recompense of their evil, and that is indeed what they receive. You seem more “interested” in ridiculing what you don’t understand rather than making an effort to grasp it.
Ironically, your criticisms validate Msgr. Pope’s point. Msgr. Pope said, if I recall, that the damned would feel more torture in Heaven than in Hell. They don’t want to go to Heaven; the “values” celebrated there are not their values. Put differently, IA, there is a conflict between what you see as reasonable and what God sees as reasonable. I have tried to explain it to you, but you may well continue to reject and belittle it. At the end of the day, if there is a conflict between your ideas and the ideas of an all-knowing, all-powerful, infinitely wise, and infinitely good Being, who wins? You?
“This is not relevant to the case at hand because there is certainly an obvious sense in which an earthly father is totally disanalogous to the Heavenly Father: no earthly father is the absolute end of his son’s existence. Therefore the analogy won’t work.”
If this were the case, calling God “Father” is meaningless and Christians should stop doing it. Of course, Christians, especially St. Thomas, do not believe this is the case: the Father is fittingly named because of its analogy to earthly fathers.
“Do you pine away and mourn, weep and lament for the lost penny?”
““Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’” Loves makes us do things like this. Moreover, Christianity taught us a love that does things like this. Except, of course, for the odd part where it tells us to forget all about those people we loved and leave the coin under the bed, out concern for it drowned out by a pile of gold.
“That is, if you have two goods which conflict with each other, one of which is infinite and all-satisfying and the other of which is finite and conflicts with the infinite Good, do you sorrow for losing the finite good and keeping the infinite Good? ”
Now you have reduced heaven to a bribe. If something is wrong – like not caring that someone else is being tormented – then it doesn’t become right if one is rewarded infinitely for doing it. If God must bribe His creatures to forget about the pains of the ones they love, then there is something monstrous about Him.
“The pain of loss in Hell is not an “extraneous” punishment”
I am not debating the pain of loss, but the pain of the senses. Additionally, one may reasonably wonder why someone who doesn’t want to bother with God would be pained by not having to bother with God. I suppose from the point of view of the blessed, the “pain” may be evident, but it is in no wise clear why the damned themselves would necessarily consider the situation painful.
“Heaven does not destroy individuality; this is another fallacy.”
No; just our ability to think as individuals, feel as individuals, desire as individuals, and so forth. The things that made me me, like my love for my wife, our experiences together, the smile my children bring to my face, the concerns I have borne for their sake, the knowledge I have of my family, the rituals of thought and action that this domestic life has seared into my being: these are all part of me. If heaven involves me losing all this, or discarding these memories and knowledge (or drowning them in the River Lethe, like Dante does), in exchange for a bribe, no individual distinctiveness, no thoughts that are my own and not everyone else’s, no moments or memories that belong to me and make me who I am…what is left of the individual me?
“Whatever you lose in Heaven is your imperfection, your sin, your falling short of what you should be, i.e., things which present obstacles to your union with God.”
The more you describe, the more I am reminded of the Borg. What do the Borg do? Have you ever watched Star Trek? They go about the galaxy assimilating people and giving them perfection. Emotions are irrelevant. Memories are irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is the placement of the individual’s voice within a unified collective: one voice. Whatever the Borg Queen thinks, you think; there is no thought or desire that is not perfectly in union of hers. Indeed, the Borg often ponder the (from their perspective) perverse resistance that others put up rather than accept this gift of perfection.
“Catholicism is not a strange religion: to love someone means to will what is good for them. If someone dies in the state of enmity with God, then what is good for that person is to receive the just recompense of their evil, and that is indeed what they receive.”
No, well-wishing is willing what is good for someone. Love is more: it binds our thoughts to others. It is knowing them and wishing to know more. It is compassion. We do not love like an impassive God because we are not impassive creatures. Odd God, to give us compassion for the suffering, then rip it away from us as the price of perfection. Another film that your description of heaven reminds me of is Equilibrium; the state of apathy.
” You seem more “interested” in ridiculing what you don’t understand rather than making an effort to grasp it.”
I understand what you are saying. I just believe that it is horrible, and if God is like that then He is a monster; why should I serve a monster for pay?
“At the end of the day, if there is a conflict between your ideas and the ideas of an all-knowing, all-powerful, infinitely wise, and infinitely good Being, who wins? You?”
Now we get down to the real heart of the matter: the reduction of God to absolute power. Raw power. He’s powerful and I am not. Well, if that is true, it’s true; what does it have to do with whether God is good? Especially if he resorts to this sort of bullying: that He is bigger than His little creatures? I believe in the notion: come, let us reason together. If there is a God and He is anything like a good father, then this would be His M.O. My child has many crazy and mistaken ideas that I know are crazy and mistaken. What am I to do, as a father? Punish her? No. I am to sit down with her as often as it is needed, and discuss with her. Not simply tell her the way things are, but to help her discover those things on her own. That, too, is part of loving someone: accepting that they are different things and respecting the path that they take, even if it doesn’t match the path you had planned for them. If God is truly wise, He knows this as well; plenty of mythologies have a jealous, grubby-handed God who cannot lay hold of enough parts of His creature’s lives. What a truly transcendent God would He be, if He was beyond grubby-handed pettiness.
There is nothing unjust about God positively punishing the wicked. Here on earth, we groan under the fact that far too many people do not get what they deserve, that hidden forces that cause so much pain and suffereing go unpunished, etc. When someone like Hitler dies by his own hand in a bunker after all that he has caused, we know in our hearts that there is some debt…yes, debt…that has been left unpaid. Hell, with its positive punishments, is the rectification of the wrong committed against the innocent.
Now, God has graciously extended mercy…graciously, meaning unnecessarily…to all who will accept His free gift, paid by the Blood of Christ on the Cross. But if you do not accept it, then the original accounting you deserve is, out of respect to you as a free agent responsible for your actions, given to you.
Now true, perhaps you are not as bad as Hitler, but each one of us has fallen short of what we owe ourselves, each other, and particular God, the blatant disrespect and disregard we as a human race show the Source of our existence is wretched.
To me, there is nothing more rich, white, and American than to think Hell is not fair, should not exist, and not becoming of a Good and Gracious God. Anywhere else or at any other time in the world’s history, if you posit a God that does not have something like Hell, where Justice is exacted and all things made right, you would be laughed out of school. The fact that this God of ours shows Mercy is the suprising thing, not Hell.
Hell is a great comfort, that this life is not run in vain, that our actions do matter, that God respects us enough to treat our lives like they matter, and in addition to all that, offes us a mercy we do not deserve.
Okie,
I could not have said it any better!
Z
Mr Agnostic:
I am curious as to your ultimate point. Is it that there is no God? If so Why do you care if Msgr Pope’s readers believe in one ? I do not believe in Vishnu but I do not troll Hindu blogs looking for a fight either. From a reverse perspective Christians may wish to convince you there is a God because they think it benefits you, like maybe makes the salvation of your soul more probable, or perhaps gives you a more fufilling life. From your point of view lets stipulate ok… you win there is no God… fine… Than what difference does it make what anyone thinks, since in a very short time span everyone reading this blog will be gone ? Not so long ago Christopher Hitchens was extolling the virtues of atheism, no he is a foot note to human history. So whats your purpose? After all If the brillant writers like Hitchens ( not to mention people like Voltaire and Sarte) are worm food and from your perspective the human race is just as benighted as ever, most of them believing in God in some fashion. Don’t you feel like you are on somewhat of a fools errand, trying to convince all these folks there is no God? Or are you looking for the one argument that convinces you? If its the former than you are living in an alternative universe.
One does not come to believe in God based on a single argument, its more like how you decide most important things, one looks many different facts, and concludes that Christianity is compelling, again like getting married. Any one fact can be denied ( my wife can say she loves me because I have an impressive job and make a very good living… she can be nice to me because she is bascially kindly.. etc ) but at some point to deny each and every fact interpreting it in a negative way says more about me than her. So too it is the sum total of what Christianity is through millenia that make it compelling, its miracles, its teachings, its introduction of compassion into a world that had little, etc.. One can argue one point but not the whole tsunami. In any case this is why its rather boring to respond point by point. Sure maybe one argument can be shown to be weak, but faith is not based on a deductive argument, it is based on ones whole experience of life and acceptance of it as meaningful or absurd. That it is not to say it is not based in reason, but rather it is based more on inductive reasoning. Interestingly in some ways modern Physics is like that. In that way it is like getting married, One takes the sum total of the experience of the other person and is moved to enter into a permanent relationship with them or not.
But maybe you are really not looking for a convincing argument at all, having made up your mind ( to that extent than we are talking about a choice, not being just open to a conclusion) In that case whats your point? Ok there is no God… so what? You see if there is no God, who cares nothing than means anything. Its only if there is a God that any question can have an answer that ultimately makes a difference
Some reasonings against Hell. BTW, as to defing terms before discussion, I take “hell” teaching to mean an eternal torment, physical and/or mental, of dead sinners in the afterlife. IOW “hellfire” of some kind.
1) Vocabulary: “hell” is an English word with about a 1000-year history in the written language; not known in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic. In the old English versions it is used by translators for any of the following words: Gehenna, sheol or Sheol, Ha(i)des. Therefore such statements as ‘Jesus talked about Hell more than any other topic’ are meaningless as such. There is no “Hell”. (In the King James Version the word “hell” is rendered from sheʼohl′ 31 times and from hai′des 10 times. In the Douay Version sheʼohl′ is rendered “hell” 64 times, “pit” once, and “death” once.) So our discussion should be ‘What does God do with dead sinners?’
2) Legal precedent: In the so-called civilized, advanced nations of the world there are constitutional or statutory restrictions on what is usually called double jeopardy. The [Christian] Bible says “The wages of sin is death”; a phrase so well-known it is proverbial in the vernacular. Thus a person who has died HAS BEEN punished completely for his sins; any further torture would be illegal. “For the wages of sin is death; For he that is dead is justified from sin.” (Romans 6, Douay; KJV says, “For he that is dead is freed from sin”; others say “freed” or “acquitted”, which is the modern version of “justified”.)
Is this appropriate in a theological discussion, one asks? I say “Yes”, because of the existence of such laws. It means, as we all know, that such persecutions of a secular criminal occur and are widely recognized as unjust; torture itself occurs and is widely recognized as INhuman punishment. If this is so- if humans can rightly judge each other as having thus punished unjustly, how much more so would such actions be unworthy of a God worthy of our worship? IOW hellfire believers have in a sense ‘made God in man’s image’. (Gen 1:26)
3) God himself, in several little-known verses in Jeremiah, distances himself from such mens’ actions and thoughts: Ex. from 7:31 “… and [apostate Jews] have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Ennom, to burn [alive, as most scholars take it] their sons, and their daughters in the fire: which I commanded not, nor thought on in my heart.”
4) When Jesus ‘talked about Hell’, most often he said “Gehenna” in the original Greek. (See e.g. the newadvent Bible at Mt 23:15,33, where the Greek is γεέννης; [or ge’enna; I hope that reproduces here] and the Latin is gehennæ. What we know- as fact- about Gehenna is this: It was the valley S of Jerusalem that was used as a trash disposal site by the inhabitants of Jesus’ day and long before. The ‘eternal fire’ associated with it came from the sulphur continually cast down by civil servants to ensure the burning of more difficult items. (Jacobean English for sulphur is brimstone.) Those who have ‘sampled’ both will agree that the harsh odor of sulphur dioxide is not nearly as objectionable as that of rotting flesh. In line with (2), DEAD criminals would be ‘cast into Gehenna’ for disposal, not for more punishment. That was Jesus’ meaning, in which Paul concurred years later. (Romans 6)
5) Torturing a dead person (or a proverbial dead horse!) is useless, by Bible teaching. “For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know nothing more, neither have they a reward any more: for the memory of them is forgotten” and “Whatsoever your hand is able to do, do it earnestly: for neither work, nor reason, nor wisdom, nor knowledge shall be in hell, whither you are hastening” and “Behold all souls are mine: as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sins, the same shall die.” and “These things he said; and after that he said to them: Lazarus our friend sleeps: but I go that I may awake him out of sleep. His disciples therefore said: Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well. But Jesus spoke of his death: and they thought that he spoke of the repose of sleep. Then therefore Jesus said to them plainly: Lazarus is dead.” (Ec 9:5,10; Eze 18:4, which also disposes of the “immortal soul” beloved of mainstream Christendom); John 11:11-14)
If these things are established- and please do the research before you reply- then a question that might be aslked is, ‘Then what is the purpose of hellfire, since it’s so popular among the churches?’ A long post; thank y’all for your patience.
No time to discuss it all here, but your response is largely typical of the modern(ist) approach and features some of the least helpful notions of the Historical Critical methed, IOW it wholly disregards two millenia of Church and Christian teach and neglects to apply the rule of faith to text. Textual criticism, as you have appealed to here, is but one tool, and you cannot dismiss as “meaningless” or “useless” by simple (and I would also say simplistic) appeal to linguistic argument.
Well spoken Doug. what you said is more scholarly and credible. It is more important to understand the Bible in context. The language initial used and the culture the Bible took place is very important to understand meaning of words and situation.
Doug,
You applied the modernist reasonings against hell, but from the writings of the Church Fathers all have concluded that it is a place of eternal punishment. So are you saying that Jesus mislead the Fathers and the Catholic Church into falsehood? All the collective wisdoms from the Church are wrong? Shouldn’t the Holy Spirit be with the Bride of Christ and give Her wisdom even until the end of time? Shouldn’t God be straight forward with His teaching on Hell?
How could it be this complex? Since God is the ultimate Author of Sacred Scriptures, shouldn’t He make His writing clear? Shouldn’t He reveal His simple truth to a little child, so the child can understand? Shouldn’t “stop” mean “stop”? And shouldn’t “go” mean “go”? The Scripture verse from Daniel12:2 makes it so plain and clear that Hell is eternal, how could you read anything more in to it? Again check out Daniel 12:2, I ask you: How Could You Read Anything More In To This?:
“And many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth, shall awake: some unto life everlasting, and others unto reproach, to see it always.” – Daniel 12:2
Here are Christ’s words on Hell:
“And fear not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell.”- Matthew 10:28.
We are talking here about simple, basic, clear teaching on Hell given by Christ – TO ALL GENERATIONS.
If you want to read more into this with “Mental Gynastic” than I really can’t stop you. However, you would be doing a grave disservice to others. The Holy Spirit is not the God of Confusion!
Doug & Edwin,
You are both on dangerous ground. Read Daniel 12:2 & Matthew 10:28, you do not have a come back for those verses.
Interested Agnostic,
1. Analogous does not mean univocal. Your objection would be like saying that because God does not physically reproduce His children, therefore He cannot really be called a father (which would obviously be absurd). There are many analogies between God the Father and human fathers. Human fathers provide for their families; so does God. Human fathers punish their children and discipline them to bring them to the right way; so does God. But there are and must be disanalogies; human fathers did not create their children’s souls from nothingness, nor are they their children’s ultimate raison d’etre, and therefore in that sense they cannot be compared with God. You have confused analogy with univocity.
2. You said: “If something is wrong – like not caring that someone else is being tormented – then it doesn’t become right if one is rewarded infinitely for doing it. If God must bribe His creatures to forget about the pains of the ones they love, then there is something monstrous about Him.”
Reply: It is not wrong to acquiesce to the punishment of someone who is getting what he or she deserves (actually no one gets the punishment they truly deserve; God’s mercy is present even in Hell, since the damned are punished with infinite duration but not infinite intensity, the latter of which they could in justice be punished with due to their offenses). Your comments about “bribes” are a caricature of my argument. You’re not understanding the argument: if one of your loved ones dies at enmity with God, having refused all His offers of mercy and having chosen deliberately, consciously, and with full consent of the will to remain separated from Him, knowing His will but choosing to refuse it, then that person deserves every torment he or she gets in Hell. There is nothing immoral about someone in Heaven seeing this person in Hell, recognizing clearly that this person gravely offended God, knew what was coming to him if he didn’t knock it off, and thumbed his nose at his Creator anyway (and then was damned), and then recognizing that an all-knowing, all-just, all-merciful God would not have condemned the person if he or she had not deserved it, and thus that the person deserves no compassion or pity. We expend pity on those who deserve it, not on those who willfully threw away literally every chance they got while intently pursuing their own destruction. Nothing about your reply answers my explanation, but once more substitutes outraged emotion for reason (“How dare you torment my loved ones, then bribe me to forget about their pains!” seems to be the gist of your reply, which is, to repeat, a caricature of what I said).
3. I wrote “pain of loss” when I meant “pain of sense” in the original, so thank you for the correction. You said: “Additionally, one may reasonably wonder why someone who doesn’t want to bother with God would be pained by not having to bother with God.”
Because human nature is such that no one can be eternally separated from the End of his existence, by his own fault, without suffering horrendous torments as a result. St. Thomas says that everything seeks its end or reason and finds no ultimate fulfillment until he achieves it. Now the end of every finite rational being is to exercise his two highest faculties–intelligence and free will–on the best possible objects of those faculties (truth and goodness). Not just any truth and goodness, though, but infinite Truth and unlimited Goodness, i.e., God. The reason why the damned are tormented is because the one and only thing which would have given them (and any human being) the rest and repose of happiness is the precise thing which they forfeited by their own fault. And it is precisely their fault that they did not want God; in eternal suffering they do not want to be with God, Whom they hate, and yet they will never be happy without Him. They know that God can make them happy, they know that they should want God, but they don’t. Once more, you would be right to object that their decision is irrational: who willingly forfeits the one thing he knows will make him happy? Answer: the reprobate do. That’s why they are reprobate. Your argument is not with me or with the Church, but with the damned and how they could be so stupid.
4. Regarding individuality, your love for your family, etc. is conditioned by present circumstances which will not endure if your family families die at enmity with God and if you die in His friendship. If you die in friendship with God then you want what He wants. But your family in this case does not want God; they would be hating Him and you would be loving Him. Suppose that you have a best friend who one day starts hating your family, who you dearly love. If he persists in hating and abusing your family, will he still be your best friend? Well then, if you really love God, and if your family dies hating Him, will you still have the same bond with your family? It is hard for you to answer this question, since as an agnostic you do not admit God’s existence, but you should be able to see the internal consistency of this reply. As for individuality in Heaven, you still have your soul, your merits, your graces, your personal history and the particular mercies which God gave you and not others. But it stands to reason that everyone now enjoying the beatific Vision likewise has many things in common; all are united with God, all love Him, all share a community of life. There’s nothing destructive of individuality about that. I won’t comment on the Star Trek references, as I don’t see how they are relevant here.
5. Your further objection about love and compassion is once more an objection from hurt feelings rather than from reason. The ability to have emotions is a limitation of our material nature, which can be acted upon by chemical forces (anger, joy, depression, etc.). God’s impassivity is not an imperfection but a perfection. Further, if your emotions are in conflict with your reason, then it is your emotions which must yield and not vice versa. Thus your reason tells you that God is infinitely just, that a loved one died in a state of enmity with Him, that if a conflict arises between an infinite perfectly Being and a finite creature, the finite creature cannot possibly be on the right side (not because of “raw power,” but because an all-knowing Being, by definition, is all-knowing, while a finite being can and does make mistakes), and that this creature because of his own deliberate faults deserves the punishment he gets. But your emotions tell you that you don’t want this to happen, you don’t want to see someone suffering, and you don’t care about what makes sense; you just want your sentiments satisfied. With due respect, this “emotion trumps reason” attitude does not exactly strengthen your earlier claim to being an arbiter of Catholicism’s internal consistency.
As for God giving us compassion, God gives us compassion to be exercised in accordance with reason. You should not pity the damned as though something unjust was afflicting them; what they get is what they deserve and chose by their own free fault. If you pity a villainous reprobate, your pity is misplaced and irrational, no matter what your personal affection for that reprobate may have been during this life. Think about that a few times before replying with another response filled with outraged emotion.
6. Your final remarks about monsters echo what I said before: if your ideas do not match God’s ideas, then it is for you to figure out where you’re going wrong, because it’s certainly not God Who is the one going wrong. If you don’t like the way God has established things, is it for the all-knowing Being to alter His all-knowing designs to satisfy your limited and finitely-known ideas, or for your limited and finite knowledge to yield to omniscience?
Your claim about “raw power” is also completely false; Catholics reject the voluntarist Islamist notion of God. God always acts reasonably; it was the Logos Who took human flesh. The point is that intellectual humility requires you to admit that you might be making a really enormous mistake in the way that you are examining this situation. By your own admission you are an agnostic; you admit that you “don’t know.” If by your own admission you are in a state of doubt and uncertainty about theological realities, where do you come off accusing God of being a monster if He doesn’t act in ways that you personally find emotionally satisfying or easily understandable? Does that make any sense at all, even from your own theological framework? I don’t think it does at all. God is always right, not because He dominates you with power, but because an all-knowing by definition could never make a mistake or get something false. A divine Being can’t “mess up,” but human beings certainly can. It’s a question of the inherent limits of a finite nature vs. the infinitude of an infinite nature, not a question of “raw power.”
I’ve given you many reasonable answers to your objections. I don’t see very much in the way of reasonable response coming from you, only strange Star Trek references and emotional outrage about irrational instances of compassion (compassionating someone who deliberately chose his own eternal destiny and wills to remain separated from God; remember that an earlier post said that if the damned repented, they would be forgiven straightaway. Why don’t they obtain pardon? Because they never repent.).
As for God reasoning with His children and explaining things to them: Interested Agnostic, that’s exactly one of the points of revelation and the Catholic Church! God revealed truths and established a Church to protect those truths so that confused people wouldn’t have to puzzle these things out themselves and get lots of it wrong (i.e., by abandoning the truth for agnosticism). Perhaps God is explaining things to you right now by inspiring you to consider some of the Catholic explanations, think them through carefully, putting aside any trigger-happy emotional replies you might have ready, and consider whether you might not have been badly mistaken in your evaluation of things.
God bless you.
Debate can be a means to present two, or more, sets of opinions so that valuable input can be found from many sources or opinions. However, when it becomes a matter of either/or with debating skills (rather than truth) being used to prove that the opposing view is totally flawed then the participants can find themselves drawn into something more akin to an athletic event.
The prize which the debaters strive for could begin as a greater, and truer, understanding but end up as something like Olympic gold that reflects the individuals abilities of conflict as the moderator is manipulated from a guide toward the aforementioned understanding and toward that of a referee.
Athletic contests, the athletes involved and a fair referee have their place but; Ecclesiates 9:11 “I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.”
If I may be so bold to add that the truth is not always to the greatest debater, and if it’s not valid I take the chance.
Not saying that this is becoming the sort of athletic like contest I mention, just that I fear that it may here and may have been before.
Interesting numbers on this quote. Could it have to do with a love of conflict for its own sake, instead of the purpose of the conflict. God’s infinite plan spans the millenia but, I certainly don’t have all the answers and; as Monsignor Pope has previously pointed out; one bible quote does not necessarily make a complete dissertation.
Oh yes, as I clicked on submit, a line from Dickens’ Christmas Carol came to me. If I have it right; “God bless us everyone”
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Imagine what would happen if the authorities found out that cult leaders and the parents in that cult were telling their children that if the children did not obey the rules of the cult, they would be tossed into a boiling pot of liquid fire.
The leaders of the cult and the parents would most likely be put in jail.
So if conservative Christian clergy and parents threaten their little children with claims that an invisible ghost god is going to burn them alive if they do not obey the church’s rules, should these clergy and parents be subjected to the same punishment as the leaders and parents of the cult?
Should the teaching of Hellfire and damnation to children be a crime?