God's love is an absurdity

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PePPaR said:
Why should we pray for the ‘poor souls’ in purgatory. Those are the people who have lived a Christ-like life and are in their stages of purification before entering heaven. So these souls are not ‘poor’ at all.

Instead, we should be praying for the souls in ‘hell’ so that God may save them.
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Because the prayer for the souls in purgatory can be of some benefit. The prayer for souls in hell can have no benefit as they have sealed their fate with an irreversible decision to deny God at the time of death.
 
PePPaR said:
Why should we pray for the ‘poor souls’ in purgatory. Those are the people who have lived a Christ-like life and are in their stages of purification before entering heaven. So these souls are not ‘poor’ at all.

Instead, we should be praying for the souls in ‘hell’ so that God may save them.
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Pepper!!

For the Love of God, get certain things straight in your mind! Please!

Here it is: There is the Church militant - that is you and me still here on earth living and loving and praying. There is the Church triumphant - that is the souls in heaven. And there is the Church suffering, the souls in purgatory.

The “circle” of prayer is centered on these 3 only. We, the church militant pray for the souls in purgatory - the souls in purgatory, through our intercessory prayers enter into heaven. In heaven the souls in the church triumphant are able to intercede for us the church still militant.

You are free to send your prayers where ever you want but the souls in hell are not in this circle of prayer.

The souls in purgatory are “poor souls” indeed. They are not punching a ticket or carrying a progress report with them to indicate “hey tomorrow I get out of purgatory”.

In fact, there are souls in purgatory that don’t even have living relatives on earth to pray for them.

There are souls in purgatory like priests and bishops and religous men and women who people on earth think they are in heaven and theefore don’t pray for their soul. And so they remain in purgatory.

There are souls in purgatory whose family doesn’t believe in purgatory! And so they remain there.

All of them waiting for your prayers and mine. Waiting for you and I to use our collective heads and figure out that there is more to purgatory than meets the eye or the imagination.

Stay with us pepper! Triumphant, Militant, Suffering.
 
davidv said:
Because the prayer for the souls in purgatory can be of some benefit. The prayer for souls in hell can have no benefit as they have sealed their fate with an irreversible decision to deny God at the time of death.
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Sadly, this is true. In the meantime we can make a difference for those in purgatory.

Keep in mind too that, technically, we do not exactly know the eternal fate of all of those who have perished. Someone that we assume is in hell may in fact be in purgatory-- and vice versa.

We can be negative but I don’t think it will help us. So if one were to pray for someone, it may be beneficial (and this is a good thing). We can certainly hope for this and this hope *for others *may be what gets us through the day too.
 
PePPaR said:
Why should we pray for the ‘poor souls’ in purgatory. Those are the people who have lived a Christ-like life and are in their stages of purification before entering heaven. So these souls are not ‘poor’ at all.

Instead, we should be praying for the souls in ‘hell’ so that God may save them.
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Pepper,

One fianl thing. Prayers are never wasted when you offer them up to the Lord. Whatever your intention…the Lord knows best - your prayer will serve the greater good.

Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum.
 
God condems no one to hell. People condem themselves to hell by not listing to God’s comands. 👍
 
PePPaR said:
Why should we pray for the ‘poor souls’ in purgatory. Those are the people who have lived a Christ-like life and are in their stages of purification before entering heaven. So these souls are not ‘poor’ at all.

Instead, we should be praying for the souls in ‘hell’ so that God may save them.
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Because Purgatory hurts. It is purification by fire.
 
PePPaR said:
So will a person know that they are in purgatory when they go there? Considering they will be ‘burning’ as well…
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Yes. They are joyful because they know they are in heaven and that the pain is for their own good, but pain is still pain.
 
PePPaR said:
So will a person know that they are in purgatory when they go there? Considering they will be ‘burning’ as well…
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I believe the “burning” here is not physical. Between the time of death and the “resurrection of the body” at the general judgment, we will not have a physical body to “burn”. Purgatory is a spiritual/soul purification where we are “refined” as if by a refiner’s fire.
 
PePPaR said:
And stating that ‘one must choose to go to hell’ also contradicts itself. We all sin, and it’s fair to say we all commit mortal sins as well. A mortal sin is one that can destroy and severely hurt ones relationship with God – it does not mean that one WANTS to break up his relationship with God; it is merely a rule as such in regards to what a mortal sin is. I have committed masturbation plenty of times; it doesn’t mean I want to destroy my relationship with God.
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You mean that you don’t want to go to hell. As for masturbation, if you trully loved God, you would not do it. None of us care much for him, and if we could get of way with it for all eternity, then none of us would care much to be perfect either. Whats the point of being good, if you can be just as happy being evil?
PePPaR said:
Eternal punishment and hell completely contradicts LOVE.
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I once went through this stressful faze. What made it worse was, when people asked me why i still believed in God, i had no answer; and on stop of that, i felt guilty and embarassed, as if i had wronged somebody, as if right and wrong actually reflected objective behavior, as if there was any such thing as moral law. I am not going to judge you, but i am going to leave you this question just in case nobody else has asked it.

God is Love. If this is true, then how is it possible that anything less then perfect, can spend an eternity in God?

You see, the problem with your arguement is, you pressume that you are mearly going against Gods opinion about things; as if to say that Love and God are two seperate entities.

If God is Love by his very nature of being, then it is impossible that you can live in sin and expect to go to heaven. Gods love is eternal, and it is your destiny to make a choice about how you will spend the rest of your eternity. The choices you make in this life, reflect how you will eternally experience God, since God is eternal and so the finite choices we make, will have eternal conceqeunces. For some, he will be an eternal enemy, and for others he will be eternal joy. Although we can experience some happiness in this life, if you choose not to live in God, you cannot expect to experience love in the eternal life. God cannot interfere with your choices in this life, because that is not the nature of love. But God will determine, by his very nature of being, how you will experience eternity. God is right to create us, even if he knows some of us will go to hell, since we ought not to choose evil. If you love the greater good, then what hell can befall you? Love can tolerate life, and that has been promised to all of us whether we choose heaven or not, but love cannot tollerate evil. Those who have attached then selves to evil, will suffer eternally; since evil is not the root of happiness. Love is the root of all joy.
 
The only reason God tolerates finite evils, is because of the potential eternal good that can come from it. Otherwise we would not exist at all.

Man ought to be eternally good, like God. To desire that man ought to have the eternal will to chop and change as he willed, would be a contradiction to Gods will, which is eternal heaven. Eternal heaven is a good thing, thats why it exists, and once your there, you will never sin again; but the down fall to that, is that there is eternal hell as well. People who are in hell, do not want God, otherwise they would not be there. God does not send people to hell against their will, or underservingly. Heaven is God. Hell is with out God. We have no right to exist, nor do we have any right to the kingdom of heaven. What greater sin is there, then to spit in the face of your creator.

I think your seriously underestimating the severity of sin.
 
“There is no mercy in condemning someone to hell” Peppar

Romans 9:18
Therefore He hath mercy on whom He will;
and whom He will, He hardeneth

Romans 9:13
As it is written:
Jacob I have loved,
but Esau I have hated
 
PePPaR said:
Honestly, the more I think about it, the angrier I get. I somehow feel called to deepen my understanding of my faith. But some things annoy the blits out of me.

Constantly, God is proclaimed as omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent – and ALL LOVING. God is continually pronounced as all loving and merciful. It’s one of the fundamental core beliefs in Catholicism. I WANT to believe this. But realistically, somebody who damns people to hell is not ALL loving if you ask me…

If a mother has a child. She will love that child forever despite what that child does. Even if her child rapes, murders, steals, bombs cities and whatnot; the mother will continue to LOVE that child forever. Yes, she may be distraught, forever saddened, and angry with her child’s actions – but her love will never cease, and she will always welcome her child into her love. Furthermore, she would not want ANYTHING BAD to happen to her child regardless of the things he has done. WHY? BECAUSE SHE LOVES HIM FOREVER AND HER LOVE WILL NEVER CEASE. This is what love is!

And when I hear such things as, “Thou shalt be condemned in hell and burn forever”, or “Thou shall be engulfed in eternal flames for eternity” – I seriously get angry.
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Some thoughts from Rabbi Abraham Heshel: The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is apathy. Wrath is God’s wounded love.

I found it interesting that you wrote “I get seriously angry”. I can tell from your anger that you care. Because you care about the condemned people, you get seriously angry.

But if you get seriously angry at the thought of God inflicting suffering on others, and that shows how much your care, why would not God, if he cared, also get seriously angry if we cause sufferings on others.

Wouldn’t God condemning Adolf Hitler and the other Nazis because He is serously angry with the way they treated the Jews? Wouldn’t God condemning the child rapist be because He is serously angry with him ruining a child’s innocence?

If God allowed us all into heaven, then he would be allowing into heaven every serial killer and every person who has abused and hurt others. That would show that He is apathetic towards the plight of their victims. But God is not like that. He gets seriously angry at the injustices in the world, and He will avenge the oppressed throughout the world.

Maybe that is why God is pictured as our Father and not our Mother. A mother sees her child oftentimes as doing no wrong. We use the phrase “mothering him” to refer to coddling someone. A father is more likely to see the faults in his children. A father is more likely to use tough love. A father is more likely to kick out his son out if he is on drugs. A father may be tougher than the mother, but that does not mean he loves his children any less.
 
Dear PePPaR,

we go to hell and deserve eternal torment because of what we are SAYING by our actions.

Admittedly, on the surface, it is absurd to think a creature deserves eternal torment because God said don’t take the fruit and you took it, so you fry forever.

It is in what one is SAYING by the act of mortal sin that merits eternal torment.

I will share the following quote from my website to explain this, from my article,

Darth Vader, Lust, and Hell
There are different approaches that people can take to Hell. On the right, we have hard-hearted individuals who have no problem with it because their attitude is, bad people are just plain bad and should just go to Hell. They shouldn’t be given a chance to be forgiven. They see being “born again” as a cop out. If you’ve been bad, you can’t just say I’m gonna turn around. It’s too late, what you’ve done is done, and you’re going to Hell whether you like it or not.

On the other hand, severely left-minded individuals will usually object to Hell altogether. They will say that everybody should eventually get to heaven and that a loving God would never send anyone to Hell.

So on the right, we have hard-headed individuals with hard hearts, and on the left we have soft-hearted individuals with soft heads. Authentic Catholicism is neither on the right or the left but in the center. It has the hard head of the right and the soft heart of the left.

The problem with the right position is that there is no room for mercy. But alas, without the Christian solution, we might just conclude it couldn’t be any other way. This is because what the right-positioned person is right about is that serious sin can never be atoned for by the one who has committed it, except by everlasting punishment. The person has an infinite debt. Take the following example.

Some time ago, I was reading an article about teenage girls who had lost their virginity and were regretting it. One of the girls told her story. She was at a party and was alone in one of the upstairs bedrooms, depressed that she was still a virgin. Well, in comes Paul, a guy she knows from school. He proceeds to get on top of her and have sex with her. The girl explains that she was so tired and depressed of being a virgin that she decided to just allow him to proceed. As the event unfolded, she began to hurt physically very bad from it and tried to tell him to stop, but he didn’t seem to care. He just continued, ignoring her. Once he had finished, he just got up and left.

Later, she learned that she was just one of several pit stops. Paul had been going from girl to girl that night, looking to shed the virginity of as many girls as he could. He was just out to “prove his manhood” and get some pleasure.

Now most people in this apostate culture in which we live think that it makes sense to go to Hell for things like killing or stealing, but they find it ridiculous to say that you could go to Hell for sexual sins. The reality of the situation is that this Paul had, most likely, incurred an infinite debt that night because he evidently regarded these priceless creatures as mere ends to prove his power and use for gratification. God creates every human person for the potential of everlasting love, to exist for all eternity in a state of total love, being loved by God and the saints and loving them back forever without end, and it is for this reason that every human person’s worth is immeasurable. And so if you decide to regard any such creature merely as some finite means to some selfish end, you commit an infinite insult and thereby acquire an infinite debt.

And so the person on the right correctly understands that the person guilty of serious sin has no way of paying the debt except by suffering without end. Therefore, even if God said, I’ll forgive you, who will pay the infinite debt? If the person must, then he has to go to Hell anyway, and the mercy is impractical.
However, the good news of the Gospel is that God’s love does not know any bounds, and hence His desire to have mercy knows no bounds. And the unbelievable news of the Gospel is that God has found a way to forgive serious sin and still balance the scales with justice: He pays the debt Himself! How? By becoming a man and suffering for us as a man. He creates a human body and soul and fully unites His Divine Essence with it, so that the tortures, both physical and psychological, done to Him on the cross are actually being done to Him, the infinite God, and hence have infinite worth. And so since Christ’s death on the cross has infinite merit, it atones for any number of serious sins (because infinity plus any number of infinities is still just infinity), and of course, it also atones for any number of minor sins (sins that only merit temporal punishment).
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PePPaR said:
Anyone who loves another person WOULD never even consider damming someone into hell for eternity. It’s just not right. And this is what seriously pisses me of about my faith and I’m trying to find a deeper meaning in all this, but I can’t.
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You can’t because you don’t understand the concept of “growing up”.

The “afterlife” is not “this life” with nicer furniture and weather.

In eternity a being with free will may not make choices which contradict other choices of theirs. All choices are eternal commitments.

The angels who fell are eternally commited to their decision to disobey, and can’t “take it back”. They “grew up” by having to accept that their commitments ARE real and eternal commitments. In fact, they were created “grown up” because they were NEVER capable of changing their minds.

Men are allowed to change their minds, to only TEMPORARILY commit to their choices, because that is our earthly priviledge, given only to us and to no other creature of true free will.

We are to learn to be “grown ups” by the time we die. That is our job here.

Once we leave the place where persons with an earthly nature are allowed to “change their minds”, they are no longer allowed to change their minds, as they are to have “grown up” by then.

God’s mercy makes allowances for the those not culpable for their sins, which is why mortal sins are ONLY those done with full intent to sin.

Those in hell are still loved by God, and are incapable of loving God for eternity because they’ve “grown up” and chosen not love God for eternity.

The “deeper meaning” in the reality of eternal hell is that it is wiser to grow up (accept the reality that culpable decisions are truly ETERNALLY to be honored) and choose heaven (God) instead of choosing hell (not God).

We can deny that we need to grow up, but God knows when we’ve grown up such that we do in fact KNOW that we are choosing from eternally consequential alternatives.

What you are “angry” about is that you consider men incapable of truly “growing up”, because you don’t want to be held responsible for having to do so yourself.

That is perfectly normal of you. You simply need to learn the meaning of the terms “growing up” and “commitment”, and why they are important.
 
Hasn’t it always been a Catholic custom that anyone can offer up, indulgences for others?

A mother loves her child and will continue to love her child till the end of time, everytime that child does something wrong it hurts the mother to see her child doing the wrong things, but she will continue to love her child.

Just as our Lord took up our sins on the cross and bought us our salvation, we too bare the sins of those we love and offer them up to the Lord, just as Jesus did… This intimate sacrifice of ones self for another can save souls… Christ is who showed us the way… Now we live our lives following it.

Each one of us who is born again in Christ, must strive to act like Christ in order to save our loved ones… but also save those who are hard to love.

If you live a blessed healthy life and can take on sufferings for someone else do it. Ask God to make it happen and it will, not because God wants you to suffer, but because God wants you to Love.
 
PePPaR said:
A child will be punished, but not FOREVER. And I agree, if we are to enter a heaven we sure do need purification, but I wouldn’t really call it punishment.

I really like the last couple of posts though. But once again, it’s really your beliefs. However, I still believe even if one CHOOSES not enter in the life of the Lord after death on earth - they still do not deserve eternal hell. Instead, one should be able to choose whether to live with God or to die once more, but this time forever, completely seperated from God YES, but you would be exterminated from existence and not in ‘hell’.
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Unfortunately for you, you do not get to make the rules. You are the creation not the creator. He set the rules down for us. And I think it works just fine without your or anybody else’s ‘improvements’. I hope and pray you’ll make peace with God over this. He does love you.
I am curious though (and this is purely hypothetical, I would not expect an answer).

If you know this about God, what are you really resistant to? This is an excuse to avoid a much deeper issue.
What is He requiring of you that you are refusing to do, or give up and not do? There is always something when we begin to make excuses for not turning to God. And the whole ‘how can a loving God send someone to hell’ is one of the oldest excuses in the world.
Is it just that you think His rules are too hard to live by? Your proud and therefore think you are deserving of better treatment regardless of what you do?

As for the mother-child analogy: If my teenager goes of to college and gets started doing drugs (which I strictly have forbidden in my home) you can bet your sweet bippy I still love him/her, I’ll be in mass daily praying for his/her deliverance from such, asking every saint that will listen to intercede, etc…BUT he/she will NOT be welcome in my home until they clean up and want to change what they have been doing. And then I will expend every cell of my being to help them do just that. That’s the facts. They have a free will to exercise and make choices and deal with the repercussions of their actions. I think God is much that way in his parenting.
 
I’m going to continue with the OP’s analogy of a mother with a morally bankrupt child.
Let’s say the mother lives in a house around which are literally infinite wastelands. She says to her child, “Please give up your ways and come live with me, I want you to be with me but I cannot coexist with your ways.” The child replies, “No, I reject you and spit on the idea of you.” So, logically, where does the child dwell if not in the house? The wastelands, which are full of suffering. A basic definition of Hell is simply where God is absent. God gave us free will, and if we exercise this free will to say, “No, God, I reject you outright” he still respects our free will, and removes us from His presence when we die, which is Hell. You might say, “but that’s cruel to let the person choose to go there.” Well, God is not going to override our free will.
 
Sam_777 said:
Hi “PePPaR”,

1till their earthy body be consumed, then their soul will be taken to heaven.
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Wish it were so, but your partly right. God keeps his promise of
providing eternal existence for all. For the rejected, a means must be established for those to remain substantial form in hell even after the onslaught of disemboweling and natural destruction which is the amusement of his favored parolees. After a body is brought to a state of utter destruction by these creatures, the promise is kept up indefinitely, so that once again these creatures are presented with a fresh new body complete with sensual stimulus and an awareness by him of the preceding torment he had just gone through in the last state.

Meanwhile the soul remains as a mere whisp of its prior self. A substance hardly distinguishable from it’s earthly state. Actually, my question here is why the soul, since it is also spiritual and in the environment with other spirit forms, now not tied into earthly matter, is not capable of putting up an equivalent worthy fight with the other spirits since the substance of spirit is spirit. The answer I think is God deliberately makes it much weaker to favor his parolees.

There is no other place he can look for to escape. Hell is a last destination, not a way station.

Ref: Summa

AndyF
 
PePPaR:

I think you are in the same boat as I am.

Some thoughts.

Punishment of the fallen angels is a token punishment only.

In our world on occasion we reserve punishments of a differing nature than to the common citizen. The privileged get what amounts to a knuckle wrapping. He receives a “disgrace” punishment such as exile, or rejection from his social sphere. The punishment for the demons was exile, as they are now set apart from the beatific vision of God and heaven forever. So if they wished they can sniff daisies in far off alpha centauri if they get bored, or poke innocent people and maim babys for their amusement. The lowly of us are supposed to be aghast at the thought that this horrible punishment was applied. I say, Pshawww, …total crock. The punishment should not be based on an earthly standard of status, but be applied according to the immensity of the injury. They rejected God outright to His face, therefore they should receive total incarceration to an extent greater than humans, who have never had a one-on-one proximity to God.

This is why I call demons by their rightful status, Parolees, until such day they are moved out of their privileged state and receive their just punishment.

Secondly, he knows those who He WILL create that won’t make it. He gives them a poor success rate, (reprobate) THEN he creates them. I say every aware being has an inalienable right to CHOOSE TO EXIST. God can provide a moment of awareness to the potential soul where he is asked if he wants to remain existing. This question applied AFTER he is told his chances are slim and of the existance of hell if he fails.

It is not this way because of one possible limitation of God. It would seem that He has no control over the non-existing, nor that it has ever been proven that he can return anyone to it. It could be an irritation of sorts that in another state a conceptual potential creature can find contentment and be non affected(if he was aware of his state of course) by what occurs in the existing world and His Kingdom.

Thirdly, original sin. It would seem that from the onset if one loved a creature, I mean truly loved a creature, one would be first inclined to the aspects of it that are positive first, not negative. If I’m drawn to the negative first, then I can see one thing that rejects him and that is all it would take. If the positive, I am drawn to search out his positive aspects out of charity, and here in this creature called human, I would find a billion differing DNA genetic reasons why one differs from another. There is not one exact clone of another human, (at least not naturally so far).

Another point here, our sperm and egg simply set in motion a set of events that create a being. We do not in a sense procreate in the form we were in. The blueprint for recreation was in place before our form was even fully human, creating in effect proto humans for the eventual aware human. We set in motion biological events to bring it about. In the primordial era cells in cooperation perform the functions of protein breakdown as well as other functions, and even now keep us intact. So once again we are inclined to favor this creature, not reject him.

AndyF
 
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