HELL---A place of everlasting hopelessness

[Image_of_God]

What can we do to make note to other Catholics who are “lukewarm” that hell is real?

Does God love those in hell?

 

[Eileen_T]

Good luck to you, I tried to convince a nun that it was real, it was eternal and that there were actually souls there.

Thank you though, you have inspired me to give copies of Fr Corapi’s talk on Confession to my children for Christmas

He told someone that if they didn’t believe in Hell now, they will when they get there.

 

[Joe_Kelley]

A young man once informed Saint Padre Pio that he didn’t believe in hell.

Saint Pio told him: “Don’t worry. You will when you get there.”

 

[Polish]

Dear Image of God,

I have a relative who tells me there is no such place as hell, that the church only made it up to scare people. When I said that of course I believed in hell because Christ said so as quoted in the bible, my relative looked shocked .

I think God does love everyone, even those in hell. The difference is that those in hell choose not to accept His love. They love themselves more, they refuse His love and graces, and put themselves up as their own god.

 

[slyboots]

This is what I think hell is. Hell is that place where nothing appeals to your better instincts. Where you can’t seem to see good in anyone. Where everyone you meet has the possibility of being part of a conspiracy against you. Where even a kindness done by someone is suspect. Being paranoid is a prerequisite to living in hell. There is blood, and fire, and great pain there. There is screaming and cursing in a blurred cacophony. For those who crave silence there is none. For those who desire the beauty of a kind word, none is to be found. The pain is mental, spiritual and physical. All of it is excruciating and never ending.

Hell has a “time” aspect as well. A “when-ness” if you will. It’s when it seems nothing you do goes the way it needs to in order to complete the task. It’s when it takes forever to do the simplest things and they are never right. And in the blink of an eye, a horrible thing can occur. Hell goes on forever. It never ends.

Hell feeds on fear. It gets larger and denser when one is afraid. It makes things harder to do, to see, to overcome. And it desires that you should fear all things.

Hell is a place where there is never any satisfaction. Growth is always distorted and ugly. Nothing is enough.

Those in hell are selfish. The ones who desire to have more. The ones for whom any is too much. Even those who appear to be sniveling little cowards groveling and begging are selfish. They hate others with whom they come in contact because they always believe everyone has it better than they do.

Then there are those who grasp at everything. And even when they amass huge piles of what they thought they wanted, it gives them no pleasure. They hate those who don’t have anything because they are ashamed of possessing so much. And finding no joy in the “having”.

There are those in hell who deliberately cause pain to others. And while they may appear to laugh gleefully while they do it, they find it shameful and disgusting and hate themselves for their acts. And hate their victims as well for being too weak to defend themselves. And the victims feel guilty because they didn’t fight hard enough to save themselves.

There is no kind touch to ease the agony. No gentle word to stop the din of expectorated berating. No one to turn to to share the misery and lessen its vicious onslaught.

There are creatures too hideous to look upon. Their aspects are too evil and contorted for sanity to comprehend. Hatred is their signature. There jobs are to make all as miserable as it is satanically possible. They are imbued with a spirit of darkness, emptiness, and utter evil.

These hideous creatures were not always so malformed at least not to the eye. Once they were people you met on the street. They were neighbors. They came from all sorts of lives. They were rich bankers, politicians, movie stars, celebrities, millionaires and billionaires. They were working men and women who had homes and children and pets. They were drug addicts, thieves, murderers, hetero and homo sexuals. They were poor men and women who lived off the largess of others. They had one major thing in common.

They were unrepentant sinners.

 

[BlazingBolt]

Does God love those in hell?

Christ loved Judas Iscariot.

As far as what we can do to convince others… We can only testify to the truth and trust in the Holy Spirit to work through us as only the Spirit could convince them. We should also trust in the Spirit to tell us when to hold our tongue.

 

[Martin_Le_Fay]

Hell and all the eternal suffering that comes with it is easy to believe in. It’s Heaven that requires the real leap of faith.

 

[StRaphael]

Let them know that Hell is in perfect accordance with God’s infinite justice and mercy, over and against their objections. From a blog post of mine:

Objection 1: The punishment in Hell is infinite, and infinite punishment is unjust.

Reply 1: Infinite means “without beginning or end.” Hell is everlasting, meaning that it has no end, but it does have a beginning, so it is not infinite. The punishment also varies in intensity.

Objection 2: Hell is contrary to God’s love.

Reply 2: God is love, and love does not act coercively, but persuasively. Those who do not wish to be with God must be allowed to be separated from Him. Forgiveness must be freely given and freely accepted.

Objection 3: Hell has no redeeming value.

Reply 3: Hell has redeeming value in that is satisfies God’s justice and glorifies it by showing how majestic and fearful a standard it is.

Objection 4: Sins are temporal in act, and so they do not deserve eternal punishment.

Reply 4: Pope St. Gregory I the Great said that although sins are temporal in act, they are eternal in will, and so deserve eternal punishment. In the afterlife the mortal sinner never turns away from sin through a sincere conversion. Sin is also an offense against God’s infinite goodness, and thus is like infinite malice, which deserves eternal punishment.

Objection 5: The only just punishment is reformative/corrective. Everlasting damnation is not remedial or corrective to the damned and others and is therefore unjust.

Reply 5: The punishment of the damned is for the correction of people presently on earth, and is not just intended to correct when being carried out, but also when it is decreed. God does everything in His power to reform people while they are still on earth, but cannot violate their free will. Justice demands that happiness must be deprived from one who leaves the right path on his search for happiness. Hell is only for the completely irreformable. At the same time, God cannot extinguish souls because that is contrary to His perfect justice (see #7).

Objection 6: Punishment is accidental and therefore cannot be everlasting.

Reply 6: Punishment is related in essence to the guilty soul, and because guilt forever remains in the soul, its punishment will last forever.

Objection 7: The soul should be annihilated because the ungrateful deserve to lose all benefits, and a benefit from God to be lost is that of being/existence.

Reply 7: Annihilation cannot be used to punish any sin because merit and demerit presuppose existence, and existence is not corrupted or ended by sin’s inordinateness.
Objection 8: Hell means that God is not finally victorious over evil.

Reply 8: On the contrary, there is no final victory over evil unless Hell exists because there needs to be an ultimate separation of good and evil in order for good to prevail. Hell is demanded by God’s sovereignty.

Objection 9: Hell removes freedom of choice.

Reply 9: People go to Heaven or Hell by their free will. Many people do not repent when warned of Hell, and so free choice is not removed. Some people are warned about the dangers of playing with fire, but they can still choose whether to play with fire.

Objection 10: The damned do not deserve bodily punishment by fire.

Reply 10: Justice demands that punishment correspond to the gravity of sin. In sinning, the soul subjected itself to the body by its wicked desires. Thus it is just that the soul should be punished by being subjected to a bodily thing by suffering from it.

 

[StRaphael]

Let them know that Hell is in perfect accordance with God’s infinite justice and mercy, over and against their objections. From a blog post of mine:

Objection 1: The punishment in Hell is infinite, and infinite punishment is unjust.

Reply 1: Infinite means “without beginning or end.” Hell is everlasting, meaning that it has no end, but it does have a beginning, so it is not infinite. The punishment also varies in intensity.

Objection 2: Hell is contrary to God’s love.

Reply 2: God is love, and love does not act coercively, but persuasively. Those who do not wish to be with God must be allowed to be separated from Him. Forgiveness must be freely given and freely accepted.

Objection 3: Hell has no redeeming value.

Reply 3: Hell has redeeming value in that is satisfies God’s justice and glorifies it by showing how majestic and fearful a standard it is.

Objection 4: Sins are temporal in act, and so they do not deserve eternal punishment.

Reply 4: Pope St. Gregory I the Great said that although sins are temporal in act, they are eternal in will, and so deserve eternal punishment. In the afterlife the mortal sinner never turns away from sin through a sincere conversion. Sin is also an offense against God’s infinite goodness, and thus is like infinite malice, which deserves eternal punishment.

Objection 5: The only just punishment is reformative/corrective. Everlasting damnation is not remedial or corrective to the damned and others and is therefore unjust.

Reply 5: The punishment of the damned is for the correction of people presently on earth, and is not just intended to correct when being carried out, but also when it is decreed. God does everything in His power to reform people while they are still on earth, but cannot violate their free will. Justice demands that happiness must be deprived from one who leaves the right path on his search for happiness. Hell is only for the completely irreformable. At the same time, God cannot extinguish souls because that is contrary to His perfect justice (see #7).

Objection 6: Punishment is accidental and therefore cannot be everlasting.

Reply 6: Punishment is related in essence to the guilty soul, and because guilt forever remains in the soul, its punishment will last forever.

Objection 7: The soul should be annihilated because the ungrateful deserve to lose all benefits, and a benefit from God to be lost is that of being/existence.

Reply 7: Annihilation cannot be used to punish any sin because merit and demerit presuppose existence, and existence is not corrupted or ended by sin’s inordinateness.
Objection 8: Hell means that God is not finally victorious over evil.

Reply 8: On the contrary, there is no final victory over evil unless Hell exists because there needs to be an ultimate separation of good and evil in order for good to prevail. Hell is demanded by God’s sovereignty.

Objection 9: Hell removes freedom of choice.

Reply 9: People go to Heaven or Hell by their free will. Many people do not repent when warned of Hell, and so free choice is not removed. Some people are warned about the dangers of playing with fire, but they can still choose whether to play with fire.

Objection 10: The damned do not deserve bodily punishment by fire.

Reply 10: Justice demands that punishment correspond to the gravity of sin. In sinning, the soul subjected itself to the body by its wicked desires. Thus it is just that the soul should be punished by being subjected to a bodily thing by suffering from it.