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Luke_K
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Surely after experiencing hell for even a brief moment,no one would choose to stay there if they still had the choice. So why is our disposition towards God finalized at death?
Why can't we change our decision to accept or reject God after we die?
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Gabriel_Serafin
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God is outside of time. When we die our soul enters eternity in the state it is when it leaves the body: Either in God’s grace, or in a state of rebellion against God (mortal sin).
Here is a great short talk by Bishop Sheen on what death and judgment will be like. LISTEN TO AUDIO NOW
Here is a great short talk by Bishop Sheen on what death and judgment will be like. LISTEN TO AUDIO NOW
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Brendan_McCabe
Guest
Because in eternity there is no time, there is just the now, there is no change everything is set permanently forever.
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Whitacre_Girl
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Actually there is an example of this in scripture:
The man IS in hell and is not asking to be taken out of the pain. This leads me to personally believe that the people who are in hell are there of their own free will and have freely chosen it for whatever reason.
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Rawb
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As others have said, at some point we must enter Eternity, and what is choice there? Making a choice implies a change, a point at which something must be different than it was before. How, however, can something come before when that before is now and before the before? 
A good book on this (the choice of Heaven and hell and why some choose what they choose) is C. S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce”. I think you’d enjoy it. It’s an easy read, told in the style of a story. A good story at that lol.
A good book on this (the choice of Heaven and hell and why some choose what they choose) is C. S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce”. I think you’d enjoy it. It’s an easy read, told in the style of a story. A good story at that lol.
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InspiritCarol
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This verse seems to directly contradict that belief:
“Besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that those who want to pass from here to you are not able, and that none may cross over from there to us.”
Imagine if there were no chasm between Hell and Heaven. No means of quarantine. All that is good would be subjected to the defilement of the evil contained therein. It is simply how the state of things *must *be.
Whitacre_Girl, as much as I want to see it your way, I do have to admit that that perspective is a relatively new invention that does lead people to think that they can ignore, mock and hate God their entire lives and still have an “out” if they don’t care for Hell. There is nothing in scripture, or writings of the Fathers, or the Catechism that would remotely suggest that we can alter our state of being from Hell to Heaven simply by willing it.
The rich man does not request to leave Hell simply because he knows that that would be *beyond *impossible.
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Whitacre_Girl
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No, you’re right. What’s interesting is that the first thig he asks for, before he even knows it’s impossible, is water. He doesn’t ask to leave, which, if you were in torment, would be any rational person’s first request.
I believe that it is in life that we become so entrenched in our belief that we simply cannot change because of our own limitations we put on our self.
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Luke_K
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If we are in eternity after death, then how can we do anything at all, even think? Your replies make it sound like we will be frozen in ice!
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Brendan_McCabe
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There would be nothing to think about and thinking would have no purpose.
In eternity there is only the moment, forever, that moment can be suffering in hell forever or the experience of the beatific vision in heaven forever.
Eternal torment or eternal bliss.
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tonyrey
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I don’t believe it is finalized! No one is** ever** beyond the infinite love and mercy of God. If we ceased to have free will when we die we would no longer be persons…
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Birdpreacher
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I think its safe to say no one really knows
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Bob_Crowley
Guest
I wonder myself if what we call “formal rejection” of God is final.
I suppose I can use three real people here as examples. The first is my own father, who, as I’ve said ad infinitum, appeared in my room the night he died, we argued and conversed, and at the end he gave this terrifying scream and disappeared. Personally I believe he’s in Hell.
Now he was a Catholic when he was young, but lost his faith. I don’t know what caused that entirely - whether is was the gross cruelty he saw in the war, his own rebelliousness, his cruelty, or what, since he never spoke about it much. The fact remains however he rejected God, and his life became more and more entrenched in cruel despair. Nor did he do much to help anyone else.
So what would have happened after death in his case, and would a man like him have admitted Christ when faced with the truth?
On the other hand, there was a humanist called Fred Hollows, who used his eye specialist skills to help a lot of third world people avoid blindness. The Fred Hollows Foundation still stands today and still does good work. He was supposed to have a profane mouth, or so I believe, but he was also a good man - faithful to his wife (who was Catholic, and may therefore had something to do with it), charitable (far more so than most Catholics), and received a state funeral in St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney when he died.
Yet according to the Australian Humanist Society, "
“1991 - Dr. Fred Hollows (dec.) - Ophthalmologist and health activist - For his practical contributions to improving the eyesight of Aborigines, and his program to train local technicians to perform eye surgery in Eritrea, Nepal and Vietnam. He lived and died with these beliefs: “I am a humanist, I don’t believe in any higher power than the best expressions of the human spirit, and those are to be found in personal and social relationships”.”
So what happened to Fred Hollows after death, and would a man like him have admitted Christ when faced with the truth?
The third person is the brother of a bloke I knew through the Presbyterian Church when I was still a member. He and his two brothers were taken off their parents due to their alcoholism. The two younger brothers including the one I knew both seemed to have “fetal alcohol syndrome”, which made them look as though they had mild Downs Syndrome.
The two younger brothers both had very similair upbringings, being placed in a “Boys Home” run by the Anglican Church, and which had a reputation for cruelty (another of these church blunders - the Anglican Church wrote a letter of apology to former inmates eventually, but by that time most of them were victims in one way or another).
Now for some reason the bloke I knew always had a sense of God, and despite his limited education, did quite well for himself, although he owed some of his stability to my old pastor, who gave him guidance (as the pastor said though, “he listened to what I tell him, and did it”). Yet his sibling had no sense of God and his ultimate and very lonely fate was to have his remains washed up on a farm fence after sheltering from flooding rain under a bridge. He must have been terribly lonely.
Did he go to hell? I don’t think so. For one think God wasn’t very fair to him, really. He gave him alcoholic parents, fetal alcohol sydrome, put him in a church run yet cruel boys home, no job, limited education and very poor employment prospects, and no sense of belonging anywhere. If God cares for all His children, then its up to Him to live up to His own reputation. When He doesn’t do so, or is unfair to people, then at their judgement I think He admits He hasn’t been fair and does something about it. He can’t say He’s “Love” and then put someone through life like that and declare him guilty of rejecting God. Why should a bloke like that think God loves him? When did God ever demonstrate it?
That’s how I see it. I have a couple of spiritual reasons for this also, including a dream by the church going brother where he claims that he had a vision of his deceased brother, and I did too. But I won’t bring that into this particular discussion.
My own opinion is that we take a very grave risk by rejecting God in this life, but I also think there is hope for some, even if they have rejected him, and that we’re better to leave the judgement to God. Because we don’t know all the circumstances.
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Luke_K
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puzzleannie
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Hell IS the choice to remain eternally separated from God, it can’t change because it is always in the now, not in the future or past, which do not exist after death. What you are overlooking is the moment of death, when we come face to face with God, are given all the knowledge necessary to make a choice based on “informed consent” and confronted in the personal judgment with the truth about all of our life choices and actions. It is not as if once the choice is made we finally read the fine print, we know all that at the moment of decision. And yes, those in hell DO chose to remain there in spite of knowing who God is, what heaven is and all they are rejecting. They still chose their own will over God’s even knowing their own will leads to eternal unhappiness.
that however is not Catholic teaching and it ignores the meaning of “eternity” and its logic remains fixed in a terrestrial finite view of time.
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tonyrey
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Bob, it is unwise to believe your father is in hell simply because he gave a terrifying scream. No one can blame him for losing his faith after seeing the horrors of war at first hand. People full of malice don’t have time for despair! They’re too busy delighting in inflicting unnecessary misery and suffering on others. If he was in such torment it wasn’t because he rejected God. (You cannot reject what you don’t believe!) It was because he rejected common ideas of God - which are naive and simplistic - and had probably never discussed the question in any depth. His scream may well have been caused by a vision of hell, not because he was a disciple of the Devil - who would be more likely to let out a diabolical laugh - but because he realised the futility of life without God! Some of the Saints have had similar experiences before they died…
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tonyrey
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If that is the case in heaven we are fossilised!
Since no one has experienced and described coming face to face to God there is no evidence that our eternal destiny is based on an instantaneous decision.
If they cannot change their mind they cannot choose!
It is not Catholic teaching that any specific person is in hell - except Satan. It is Catholic teaching that we have the opportunity to make amends for our sins in Purgatory…
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josephback
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tonyrey
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No one knows but it makes an enormous difference what we believe!
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InspiritCarol
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Ain’t that the truth.
This is very complicated metaphysics to try to discuss in a thread, but I think the New Testament, especially Paul’s writings give us all the information we need to understand how this works.
Please, read this yourselves, especially Romans. Paul talks a lot about sin and it’s relation to both knowledge and the flesh. I think these are the two overriding factors in our eternal destiny.
Take knowledge. How can God hold anything against us that we had no way of knowing? Or when the world has presented us with a very convincing image of reality that turns out to be a lie, where is the mercy in condemning the individual based on that? No. In the story of the rich man and Lazarus as in Romans 1:19-23, it is clear that the rich man knew better, he was taught better, he was warned who knows how many times, he was EVEN given the very easy opportunity of helping the poor beggar Lazarus at his very doorstep. Yet time and again, the rich man chose to follow the path of fleshly desire and self-satisfaction; consistently rejecting God’s overtures. It is that great seducer: the flesh, that pulls us down from the lofty heights God would have us attain in our lives.
Now consider the flesh. We can know that, unless we are assumed into heaven as Mary, Moses and Elijah were, we lack our flesh. Think about physics for a moment. Any kind of motion, be it lateral ascent or descent, requires friction. The force of our feet must meet resistance on the ground in order for us to climb, or even move about. Yes? Try wearing treadles shoes and trying to climb a steep grassy slope. It’s hard. The less friction encountered, the harder this becomes. In the afterlife, without the resistance that is offered in the form of “flesh” we have no way to will ourselves from the state we are in. There is nothing to strive against because all is “perfect”. Moreover, I expect, our free will is completely overshadowed by the presence of the Almighty. That’s not to say that we are not ourselves, but that identity that we carry with us into the afterlife, though mercifully cleansed by purgatory, must remain as it is, or risk being consumed by the vastness of the Most High.
Does this make it more clear? I think this is all within the bounds of Catholic teaching and it is only what I get from reading scripture v e r y s l o w l y.
Please correct me if I have blundered somehow here.
Thanks.
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tonyrey
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Carol, the parable could be interpreted to be about Purgatory rather than Hell. The rich man failed to help Lazarus but there is no evidence he was responsible for terrible atrocities. Would you condemn him for all eternity?
Your last two sentences seem difficult to reconcile.
I hope you do the same for me! We all have our blind spots. It’s a good thing God knows us better than we know ourselves.
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