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wittgenstein
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Hell is superfluous to spirituality. Reward and punishment is Skinnerian. Once one experiences the joy of God,all intellectual sophistication becomes redundant.
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OxygenMan
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I know how you feel. It pains me whenever I think of anyone suffering in Hell. Not just loved ones, but even strangers. That’s why I think God is more cautious of damnation than we think He is. He is infinitely more loving than we are. Christ himself wanted forgiveness for those who killed them. As to how we can know someone is suffering and not suffer because of that knowledge, I don’t know. My mind isn’t great enough.
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wittgenstein
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Continuation of post 21
See Matthew 6:33
Love God and morality will follow! Do not care about reward and punishment (Skinner).
See Matthew 6:33
Love God and morality will follow! Do not care about reward and punishment (Skinner).
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Fomalhaut
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A lot of christian use Hell as a threat. Do you suggest it shouldn’t be mentioned at all ? Why does God let us know about Hell ? Wouldn’t our love be more sincere if we didn’t have this huge threat above our heads ?
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OxygenMan
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Although I know I can only speak for myself, I don’t think about Hell much in my love for God. I’ve loved Him and wanted to please Him out of that love, rather than out of a fear of Hell. I’ve wanted to do good in the world.
I think there’s a reason that most of the times hell is mentioned in the scriptures, it is related to people who are not doing good for their fellow man. The rich man who allows the poor man to starve at his gate; the pharisees and sadducees who don’t care about the common people. Hell is what waits when we abandon the love for others and the responsibilities attached to that love.
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zro_x
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I’m going to go with the first one, myself. one must remember to distinguish empathy from love. It is possible for people to act with love without acting with empathy. with that in mind, what would empathy be good for in heaven? On earth, it is just an extra motivation for people to act loveingly. In heaven, where we love to a much greater degree, empathy is no longer necessary or useful.
C.S. Lewis, as usual, says it best in The Great Divorce:
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Paddy_Walker
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why stick only to the choices you said you could think of. why the language of ‘stripped of empathy’?
because this is all you could think of does not mean it is true.
i’ve told you my own thoughts theres no need to change them.
emotions and feelings are with us for a reason. we are not pointless beings and our emotions and feelings are not pointless either. empathy, sorrow, etc., have a purpose on earth for creatures who have an inherent purpose in this creation.
they make us closer to our Creator, to sympathize with anothers suffering is to feel what God feels, to act on that emotion is to act in the place of God. our hands are the only hands He has, our feet are the only feet He has.
but when our time on earth is finished, and if we go to heaven, then these things are finished for us too. there is no suffering for us in heaven or else there would be no heaven, no God, no Creation.
He takes over the empathy and the suffering for us and gives in its place the joyful knowledge that now everything is in the good hands of God.
in heaven we can see earth but we do not worry about the things we see, He does make it plain that everything is in his hands and we do not worry at all.
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NeedImprovement
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Hell is a consequence - not a threat. If we perceive Hell as a threat , it’s probably time to change our interpreter.
Although I could follow a non-believer’s logic in arriving at the error of thinking there is no Hell, to say “Hell doesn’t exist”, does not appear to be a “solution” at all for one who is a believer, and the OP does claim to be Catholic.
The non existence of Hell is not an option for anyone who believes in Christ, and the logic we follow is even simpler than the atheistic logic:
**If there is no such thing as Hell, then there is no such thing as sin. If there is no such thing as sin, then why did Jesus come . . . what did he come to save us from ?
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Arrow8
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I appreciate all of the answers to my post. This reply from OxygenMan really struck a chord with me especially where he says, “My mind isn’t great enough.”. I think that the answer to my post will remain a mystery because the situation is seemingly a contradiction (ie: that we can be happy while knowing that those we love are in eternal torment). Ultimately, I fall back on faith and on my experience of how God has loved me during my life.
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Psychlo
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Hell doesn’t make a whole lot of rational sense to me. I’d opt for reincarnation, or progressive stages of evolutionary advancement.
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CandideWest
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No reason other than that I can’t think of any other choices. If you can think of an alternative I’m all ears.
Just seemed to be the most direct means of saying it. You could say “we lose all capacity for empathy” or simply “we cease caring about anyone other than ourselves”. It makes little difference to the meaning though.
Yes, nor did I try to change them, indeed since you agreed (as far as i can tell) with my original post I’m not sure why I would seek to.
Yep, they enable us to live in social groups as we evolved to do.
Righto, so we no longer feel any empathy then. We know that our children or loved ones are suffering immeasurably and unendingly and we simply don’t care.
Righto, so again you’re saying we’ll be able to see rape and torture and all manner of suffering and not give two figs for the poor people suffering in their agony.
We seem to have agreement here. It’s an odd sort of agreement, but as far as I can tell agreement nonetheless.
Just out of interest, in your view (and this is an open question to anyone on the thread) - is there any purpose to continued existence when we reach heaven?
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Paddy_Walker
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i’ll just respond to your last points.
- you see, you are changing the idea again. you cannot just leave it at the point where empathy cannot exist in a state without suffering. you must colour it with the extra “we just don’t care”. it is not a question of caring or not it is the fact that some things don’t exist in an eternal heaven; like death or illness, for example.
- and there you go again. we can see everything we want or go anywhere we want in heaven including seeing earth and all its inhabitants. and if we did not give two figs for the people suffering on earth we would not, as catholicism teaches, be praying to God for those in need on earth.
you see ‘rape and torture and all manner of suffering’ every day on the news. yet, you still go on vacation and enjoy yourself, knowing all the while that there are people experiencing ‘rape and torture and all manner of suffering’ in the world.
- we will agree when you leave my argument as it stands and not add colour to it.
- yes. because even heaven is not the final state of souls. according to catholicism the souls and their bodies will be reunited at the end of time and a new heavens and earth will be made.
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wittgenstein
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Response to post 3
Why would anyone choose to go to hell? At best one can say that it would have to be an uninformed decision. Is hell for the intellectually unsophisticated?. That hardly seems right.
Why would anyone choose to go to hell? At best one can say that it would have to be an uninformed decision. Is hell for the intellectually unsophisticated?. That hardly seems right.
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davidv
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Because they want things their way and not the right way.
This is not for lack of information.
No, its for the proud.
What is, is sometime not as it appears.
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Paddy_Walker
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people who go there are not people with a clear conscience. they run to the darkness to escape the light. like criminals run from the law.
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wittgenstein
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Suppose I feel guilty and ashamed. Would I hide in a furnace?
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jonathan_hili
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Hi Wittgenstein, I wouldn’t say anyone chooses to go to hell. Rather, their choice - or will - is to reject God, even though it is an unreasonable thing to do. But we see it all the time. Take, for instance, someone who is eaten up by bitterness or hatred against someone else, perhaps even God. Can such a person be reasoned with? Usually not, because he or she has set his or her will against the “other”. In the beginning it may not have been so difficult but over time one is confirmed in one’s decision (in biblical language, “one’s heart is hardened”).
I think Gollum in Lord Of The Rings is something like this: he could have let go of the ring immediately, and then, in the beginning with more or less ease, but over time it gets more and more difficult, until eventually he finds himself identifying with the ring.
Well, hell may be something like this. The individual has so rejected God - and by this, I don’t mean the intellectual concept of God or belief in the deity, more so what God is in His being: love (caritas), goodness, beauty, truth - and what sharing in the divine life means, that he cannot be reasoned or willed back into God’s love.
Jonathan
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Paddy_Walker
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12 while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
“Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.”
“'And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”
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NeedImprovement
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I usually try to hide in the confessional instead.
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NeedImprovement
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