“living one’s life on the brink of *eternal doom” *is the direct consequence of not trusting in God’s love and mercy. It is better not to believe rather than have a distorted belief.
No my friend, living one’s life on the brink of eternal doom is a direct consequence of
existence. Existence is fundamental and prior to “will.” Your children are at risk, and so are you. So am I. So are all of us. We are all at risk that we will “choose hell” and be tortured forever and ever. If we are to believe the saints, popes, doctors, mystics, councils, visionaries, and Jesus himself, it is
more likely than not we
will “choose hell.”
The question is: is it
right to force this situation upon another person?
The glib answer of “God says it is right so therefore it is” is unsatisfactory. This is an appeal to authority (namely all the teachings/interpretations of the RCC) that I (and most of our fellow human beings) do not accept as legitimate or truthful. In fact, I am here engaged in the project of exposing a contradiction and failure within that system to show that it isn’t self-consistent (and thus can’t be the truth), or requires the destruction of meaningful language, or the acceptance of radically counter-intuitive corollaries that are deeply ugly. One cannot appeal to the system I suspect is corrupt to justify the truth value of that system! This isn’t an effective means of convincing anyone other than those who
already believe in the totality of the system and are OK calling obviously sinister contradictions “divine mysteries.”
Actually, my position is stronger than this to be honest. I actually think many of the RCC’s teachings are literally
unbelievable in the sense that they can’t be held by a rational person. Part of my project here is to expose this to readers so they will begin to see that they don’t even actually believe what they think they believe. I submit that
no one actually believes hell is justifiable, or that the Eucharist “changes substance,” or that the RCC “speaks with the voice of God.” RCC believers parrot the creed and go through the motions, but if only people would examine the beliefs in depth they would see that they can’t be held, in my opinion. I believe this because I had to confront the fact that I did not
actually believe many of the things required for RC faith upon deep and serious study.
I now experience such a freedom and joy since discovering that many of the propositions required for belief are simply not true. I tried
so hard to convince myself of the RCC’s beliefs but just haven’t been successful. I retain an element of doubt of course, but my purpose here is to draw out the best arguments to either confirm or disconfirm my hypothesis.
Secondarily, the glib response that “free-will makes it all OK” is also unacceptable. This is not a sufficient justification for hell, or more importantly for the choice to have children while holding the belief in the RCC’s version of hell, because we do not have the ability to know whether our children will “choose hell” and thus it is unconscionable to expose them to the the risk of
infinite loss. I feel that I have explained this clearly but maybe I’ve failed.
