Well, first of all, you have kind of a messed up idea of God. That isn’t surprising though and it’s probably where all your other problems come from too. So, let’s see what we can do to help the situation…
You say: gives us no (name removed by moderator)ut on what we want for our lives, gives us very unclear rules through very old and inconsistent sources, expects us to be perfect like Him, and we get stuck with eternal punishment if we’re not good enough.
It looks like from ‘old and inconsistent sources’ you mean the Bible? Jesus actually didn’t leave us a Bible, He left us a Church. The Church is a very current, consistent and clear source of what God wants from us. So, there’s that problem solved.
The second part of what you said here is also very distorted. Yes, God expects us to be perfect like Him, but He also gives us the means and the way to do it. He doesn’t expect something from us that we can’t do. He gives us grace and He even gives us purgatory in case we can’t get all the way there. We don’t ‘get stuck with eternal punishment’. If we end up in Hell, we choose it. Heaven is all about being with God. Hell is all about being without God. Just leave all of those cartoon versions of hell out of it and focus on that fact. If you don’t want to be with God throughout your whole life, then why would you want to be with Him in eternity? Kind of simple.
You say: ‘I just want God to know that if I’m going to go to Hell, I’d rather that He never made me.’
He knows. It seems like you have this image of God as some sort of unpleasable tyrant but if you got to know Him better, you wouldn’t have this problem. He didn’t make you so He could send you to Hell. He made you because He loves you.
You say: ‘I’m sick of trying to be perfect and please some unknown being who hasn’t made Himself very easy to find.’
Well, Jesus said seek and you will find. I think that’s about the only thing you have to do to find God. Just seek Him. It’s not that hard.
You say: ‘But I’m not selling everything I own and have worked for. I’m not blindly following some guy in Rome who doesn’t even know I exist. And I’m not going to constantly worry about the rest of forever when I’m just trying to make it through today.’
For one thing, you don’t have to sell everything you own. Don’t know where you got that from. For another, you don’t have to constantly worry. Jesus explicitly said numerous times, DON’T WORRY. ‘Let not your hearts be troubled’, ‘Be not afraid’…He said it lots of times in lots of different ways. He also said, let the day’s evil be sufficient for the day, in other words, one day at a time. No trouble there either.
Also, you don’t have to ‘blindly follow some guy in Rome’. You don’t have to blindly follow anything. If you come to a real belief in Catholicism, then you can learn your faith and use your reason (without all this emotion) and there will be nothing blind about it.
Finally you ask: ‘Can someone set me straight on what God actually wants from us and why He would bother making us if He knew we would go to Hell?’
God want us to have life and have it abundantly. He wants us to be in love. He wants us to have that for eternity.
We can’t know what nothing is, truly. The closest we can come to it is sin. So, I guess if you want to know what not existing is like, the closest you could come to it is thinking of a horrific act of sin, something Jeffrey Dahmer did maybe, or something from the concentration camps…you can come up with your own. Some theologians say that Hell is an eternal unmaking of a person. So, maybe if you go to Hell you get your wish of not existing, in a certain sense. But again, what I’m getting at is, we don’t know.
What we DO KNOW is that the reason there is a Hell is because we have free will. God has given us radical freedom. He seems hidden and far away, because if He was in our face, our free will would be gone. We have free will so we can love. No free will, no love. It is the teaching of the Church that God gives every grace and every chance for someone to go to heaven. So, if someone goes to hell it really is their choice. If you think of God as an unpleasable tyrant…that will color how you see everything else. But, if you know God as He is, as Love, then that will color how you see everything else, even Hell. Some theologians say we all go to God and those in heaven are burned in the flames of God’s love and it’s bliss and those in hell are burned in the flames of God’s love and it’s torment. It’s all in how you see God, how you know Him…either He is Love or He is a tyrant. If you kept on seeing God as a tyrant the rest of your life and you died and went to be with Him for all eternity, then it wouldn’t be a happy thing for you.
