Yeah, what bothers me is the giving of free will, paired with damnation for making the wrong choice and heaven for the right ones.
If anyone set up a scenario for their pet with the intention of eternally punishing them if they make the “wrong” choice, they’d be considered an asshole.
Granted, some interpretations of hell is really just being without the love of God, but knowing how great it should feel, which makes it slightly better? Still icky though.
You touched on it, but for completeness, the official Catholic stance is actually a pretty interesting interpretation that is the result of a kind of wild assumption, and the absolute upholding of free will. Basically God is meant to be the source of all positive things, including feeling and sensation. Every person has a 2 way connection to God. Any positive feeling you’ve ever had was from him through this connection. When someone commits a Mortal Sin, they are showing they reject God, and sever their side of the connection. Truly repenting will pick the line back up, and God never drops his side so long as you live. If you die with a severed line, he accepts that you really don’t want to associate with him, and he drops his side too. And so Hell is not a place, nor a punishment, it’s a state of being. All the gnashing of teeth and lakes of fire were originally metaphors for how badly a total lack of Grace, that connection, is. Later Dante’s Inferno and other works painted it in a striking way that caught the imagination, but it is not the Church’s official stance.
The really fun part is smashing together the idea that Mortal Sin is a rejection of God, and the core concept of the Silent Christian. IE, the Bible very literally, and repeatedly, states that God is love. Like, not that he embodies it, or that he is the source of it (though it also does claim that) but that the two concepts are literally interchangeable. You basically can rewrite it using a replace tool and swap out any instance of God, Jesus, or the Holy Ghost with Love. It does make some kind of philosophical strange abstractness when it talks about loving Love, not that weird, with Love loving things, pretty weird. And it kind of takes “tough love,” to a whole new level with some of the wrath he brings in the 1st Testament, but that is fairly low on the list of weirdness between the two Testaments, and the God = love stuff is mostly from the 2nd.
But the core concept in the “invisible Christian,” is that those with no faith in a sky daddy can still be good Christians by letting God love into their hearts. Therefore, anyone that has empathy can really be taken to be a good Chrostian, and obtain all the benefits whenever the Bible says you need to beleive in and accept God. And the corollary here is that committing Mortal Sin, IE willingly committing a heinous act such as murder, is a rejection of God love in your life. Of course, the definition of what qualifies as Mortal Sin remains a contentious affair. Though the Catholics are generally more tolerant than the more hard-line sects, they are still pretty backwards here. But if you restrict it to things that cause serious harm to another person, then it becomes a comparatively reasonable model. Much more so than it is popularly presented, at any rate.
A big part that disrupted my religious beliefs was, while leading a homeless outreach ministry in college, one of the most regular attendees was in fact sikh. Did some learning about their religion, and I really dug it.
Massive respect and admiration for her to come out regularly - we weren’t that Christian when we went out, meaning we never proselytized, but we still prayed together before and after each night, and did some stuff like offer to wash the feet of folks. And she stayed with us through this stuff because she loved helping. I just couldn’t accept that someone who is driven to the same loving actions would be judged as going to hell, just because their family was born with a different culture.
Given that context, I really enjoyed the perspective you shared. Thank you!
To be fair, the I don’t think the Church has ever officially taken a stance on the idea of the Invisible Christian. But Pope Francis was a proponent of the idea.
Yeah, what bothers me is the giving of free will, paired with damnation for making the wrong choice and heaven for the right ones.
If anyone set up a scenario for their pet with the intention of eternally punishing them if they make the “wrong” choice, they’d be considered an asshole.
Granted, some interpretations of hell is really just being without the love of God, but knowing how great it should feel, which makes it slightly better? Still icky though.
You touched on it, but for completeness, the official Catholic stance is actually a pretty interesting interpretation that is the result of a kind of wild assumption, and the absolute upholding of free will. Basically God is meant to be the source of all positive things, including feeling and sensation. Every person has a 2 way connection to God. Any positive feeling you’ve ever had was from him through this connection. When someone commits a Mortal Sin, they are showing they reject God, and sever their side of the connection. Truly repenting will pick the line back up, and God never drops his side so long as you live. If you die with a severed line, he accepts that you really don’t want to associate with him, and he drops his side too. And so Hell is not a place, nor a punishment, it’s a state of being. All the gnashing of teeth and lakes of fire were originally metaphors for how badly a total lack of Grace, that connection, is. Later Dante’s Inferno and other works painted it in a striking way that caught the imagination, but it is not the Church’s official stance.
The really fun part is smashing together the idea that Mortal Sin is a rejection of God, and the core concept of the Silent Christian. IE, the Bible very literally, and repeatedly, states that God is love. Like, not that he embodies it, or that he is the source of it (though it also does claim that) but that the two concepts are literally interchangeable. You basically can rewrite it using a replace tool and swap out any instance of God, Jesus, or the Holy Ghost with Love. It does make some kind of philosophical strange abstractness when it talks about loving Love, not that weird, with Love loving things, pretty weird. And it kind of takes “tough love,” to a whole new level with some of the wrath he brings in the 1st Testament, but that is fairly low on the list of weirdness between the two Testaments, and the God = love stuff is mostly from the 2nd.
But the core concept in the “invisible Christian,” is that those with no faith in a sky daddy can still be good Christians by letting
Godlove into their hearts. Therefore, anyone that has empathy can really be taken to be a good Chrostian, and obtain all the benefits whenever the Bible says you need to beleive in and accept God. And the corollary here is that committing Mortal Sin, IE willingly committing a heinous act such as murder, is a rejection ofGodlove in your life. Of course, the definition of what qualifies as Mortal Sin remains a contentious affair. Though the Catholics are generally more tolerant than the more hard-line sects, they are still pretty backwards here. But if you restrict it to things that cause serious harm to another person, then it becomes a comparatively reasonable model. Much more so than it is popularly presented, at any rate.That’s actually pretty wild.
A big part that disrupted my religious beliefs was, while leading a homeless outreach ministry in college, one of the most regular attendees was in fact sikh. Did some learning about their religion, and I really dug it.
Massive respect and admiration for her to come out regularly - we weren’t that Christian when we went out, meaning we never proselytized, but we still prayed together before and after each night, and did some stuff like offer to wash the feet of folks. And she stayed with us through this stuff because she loved helping. I just couldn’t accept that someone who is driven to the same loving actions would be judged as going to hell, just because their family was born with a different culture.
Given that context, I really enjoyed the perspective you shared. Thank you!
To be fair, the I don’t think the Church has ever officially taken a stance on the idea of the Invisible Christian. But Pope Francis was a proponent of the idea.