RE: Atheists, tell me, a Roman Catholic: why should I become an atheist?
December 5, 2016 at 5:28 pm
(This post was last modified: December 5, 2016 at 5:32 pm by Fake Messiah.)
(December 5, 2016 at 4:55 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: I've discussed this in a different thread. Read my responses here: http://atheistforums.org/thread-45905-page-6.html
Particularly post 56.
^Edited because I posted the wrong link lol.
OK, CL so you basically compare unbaptized stillborn babies and fetuses to people of other religion, that can apparently go to Heaven if they somehow live according to Catholic rules and have some sort of desire for baptism. But I just looked at Vatican's pages under document called "The Hope Of Salvation For Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised" and even they don't seem to agree with you:
During the 20th century, some theologians, developing certain more ancient theological theses, proposed to recognize for little children either some kind of Baptism of blood (by taking into consideration the suffering and death of these infants), or some kind of Baptism of desire (by invoking an “unconscious desire” for Baptism in these infants oriented toward justification, or the desire of the Church).[58] The proposals invoking some kind of Baptism of desire or Baptism of blood, however, involved certain difficulties.
On the one hand, the adult's act of desire for Baptism can hardly be attributed to children. The little child is scarcely capable of supplying the fully free and responsible personal act which would constitute a substitution for sacramental Baptism; such a fully free and responsible act is rooted in a judgement of reason and cannot be properly achieved before the human person has reached a sufficient or appropriate use of reason (aetas discretionis: “age of discretion”). That is why Pope Pius XII, recalling the importance of sacramental Baptism, explained in the “Allocution to Italian Midwives” in 1951: “The state of grace is absolutely necessary for salvation: without it supernatural happiness, the beatific vision of God, cannot be attained. In an adult an act of love may suffice to obtain him sanctifying grace and so supply for the lack of Baptism; to the child still unborn, or newly born, this way is not open”.
Granted the whole document is the usual magical mumbo jumbo, they sometime want to instill some hope, like the continuation:
On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how the Church could properly “supply” for unbaptised infants. The case of sacramental Baptism, instead, is quite different because sacramental Baptism, administered to infants, obtains grace in virtue of that which is specifically proper to the sacrament as such, that is, the certain gift of regeneration by the power of Christ himself.
And it goes back and forth, but the truth is it it's like they're trying on a polite way to say "They don't go to heaven". Which is especially visible in the ending (the conclusion) where they admit they simply don't know:
we have sought to read the signs of the times and to interpret them in the light of the Gospel. Our conclusion is that the many factors that we have considered above give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptised infants who die will be saved and enjoy the Beatific Vision. We emphasise that these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge. There is much that simply has not been revealed to us.
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congre...ts_en.html
This is something that I tried to explain: if Jesus was real God why kill himself? Why not stay for few decades and actually clarify these and many other things.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"