Posted on 03/27/2007 10:53:30 AM PDT by Mount Athos
Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, the Pope has said.
Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, Benedict XVI said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to “admit blame and promise to sin no more”, they risked “eternal damnation — the Inferno”.
Hell “really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more”, he said.
The Pope, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was head of Catholic doctrine, noted that “forgiveness of sins” for those who repent was a cornerstone of Christian belief. He recalled that Jesus had forgiven the “woman taken in adultery” and prevented her from being stoned to death, observing: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
God had given men and women free will to choose whether “spontaneously to accept salvation . . . the Christian faith is not imposed on anyone, it is a gift, an offer to mankind”.
Vatican officials said that the Pope — who is also the Bishop of Rome — had been speaking in “straightfoward” language “like a parish priest”. He had wanted to reinforce the new Catholic catechism, which holds that Hell is a “state of eternal separation from God”, to be understood “symbolically rather than physically”.
Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a Church historian, said that the Pope was “right to remind us that Hell is not something to be put on one side” as an inconvenient or embarrassing aspect of belief.
It had been misused in the Middle Ages to scare the impressionable with “horrific visions” of damnation, as described in Dante’s Inferno.
It had a pedigree, however, that went back to Ancient Egypt and the Greek idea of Hades, and was described by St Matthew as a place of “everlasting fire” (Matthew xxv, 41).
“The problem is not only that our sense of sin has declined, but also that the world wars and totalitarianisms of the 20th century created a Hell on Earth as bad as anything we can imagine in the afterlife,” Professor Bagliani said.
In 1999 Pope John Paul II declared that Heaven was “neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but that fullness of communion with God which is the goal of human life.” Hell, by contrast, was “the ultimate consequence of sin itself . . . Rather than a place, Hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy”.
In October the Pope indicated that limbo, supposed since medieval times to be a “halfway house” between Heaven and Hell, inhabited by unbaptised infants and holy men and women who lived before Christ, was “only a theological hypothesis” and not a “definitive truth of the faith”.
Timely visions
— “Outer darkness . . . there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” St Matthew
Mothers try to help their children navigate a world that neither the mother nor child has any real control over. God created the world he wanted Adam (and Eve) to live in and choose to set up a giant, poisonous bear trap in the middle of a utopia. He then gets mad at Adam and Eve for spoiling his utopia, when it was really spoiled from the start-- by him.
And even if you try to argue that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was supposed to teach some lesson, it's still something straight out of the Saw movies that feature a serial killer named Jigsaw who tries to teach his victims a lesson with each trap (usually something he considers supremely profound)-- with death being the end result if they don't learn whatever lesson he's trying to teach and end up escaping. Jigsaw doesn't give second chances to his victims, either, like God didn't.
God gave man "free will" and knew what would happen as a result of it and then punishes man for exercising his free will, which makes it not truly free will (even saying that we have the free will to accept him as the creator and the spiritual savior of mankind and then saying that there is eternal torment for choosing an option other than acceptance is not really free will) and makes creation some kind of entertainment program for God.
Have you read "23 Minutes in Hell?" It WILL scare the hell right out of you. I wish more priests and pastors would talk about it in their pulpits.
Let me know how it feels when you get there, Bob.
Admit blame, yes. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
Promise to sin no more? Anyone can make a promise. . .it's the living up to the promise that can be impossible. I don't know of a living human being that has been able to 'sin no more.' (And no, Jesus isn't included in that, since He is more than a mere human being.)
No, but the flesh which He took on to dwell among us for a time did die. (And rose again.)
You couldn't be more wrong, Riverman. Hell is a real place where demons torment the unbeliever for all of eternity. It's horrible. Read "23 Minutes in Hell" for a little glimpse of hell. Not nice.
God made a way for us to avoid hell. It's not HIS fault if we choose to turn away from Him. He's not happy when we choose hell over heaven.
Yeah, but like any other ticket, you gotta have it in your hand. The bouncers tend to throw out those who claim they left it at home.
Where or what is Heaven?
Where? No one knows if it is a spatiotemporal location. It is not like you can get in your car and drive there. It is, simply, the place where God in His fulness resides, where pain and sorrow, insecurity, hate, loss and grief are simply swallowed up by LIFE and the love that flows from the person of God. Since physical insecurity and want are a product of cosmic treason and moral lapse, the things we lust for, strive for, see as a ticket to freedom and security are laughed at as meaningless. That is the idea behind streets of gold and buildings made of jewels. None of that crap will matter, as we simply won't have scarcity, and won't have the perverted appetites that continually want more, even at the expense of others. What will matter is love and proximity to LIFE and its source. Gold sux compared to that.
No one goes there who is not longing for it. If you despise the gift of forgiveness and restoration, you can be content to nurse your shriveled little hate fill soul for eternity in a perpetual orgy of despair, anger, pride, rebellion emptiness and loss. Do not think the silly pictures of denizens of hell who "long for heaven" or "long for one more chance to accept Christ" is any more than buncombe. As bad as it is, there is a fiery fury against the person and goodness of God, a bitter antipathy toward him, and a wheezing, chortling spite against Him and his people which both rattles on forever and progressively disintegrates from everything about you now which is good, pure, noble, happy, content, and honorable. Citizens of hell reject God (the old Norse word for God is "the GOOD") and they get what they choose.
To the rejoinder that men want to choose good but reject Christ, Jesus himself makes the statement that you reject good and God when you reject him. It is either the statement of a bonafide lunatic or God himself in human form.
All legislation is legislated morality. there is no such thing as a law that is not someones morality.
The only real question is WHOSE morality is legislated?
However, you may be surprised at how much I am against the attempts to bring some areas of personal morality into the judicial sphere. Read my "about" page if you care to and you may be surprised.
Yes. There is far more evidence for Christ existing as there is for 99.99% of people's ancestry beyond 10 generations. We can disagree about who He is, but there shouldn't be disagreement about whether He was.
I still like you.
When you are ready to talk seriously freepmail me and I will go slowly over your "free pass to heaven"
Regards
RB<><
It's all a matter of personal faith. You can't prove yours and I can't prove mine but mine does not require me to convert you.
Regards to you too RB but I inherited my faith from my ancestors the same as you inherited yours from your ancestors. My life revolves around my faith, just as yours does, and I have no desire to change.
Fair enough. However, don't think we're out for your conversion for any other reason than love. If you see your fellow man careening toward a cliff, you do what you can to get his attention.
I guess the only thing to argue about then is whether or not the cliff exists.
God bless you.
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