RE: Eternity
September 16, 2019 at 7:57 am
(This post was last modified: September 16, 2019 at 7:58 am by Fake Messiah.)
(September 15, 2019 at 5:22 pm)Belaqua Wrote: Dante's Paradiso is a good example of the radically different type, and it's in keeping with the official theology of the Catholic church -- allowing for certain poetic differences.
Talking about Dante and Catholics, Roger Ebert was a catholic when he was a kid and he had a conversation with a priest about Dante's ideas/ visions of afterlife and the priest dismissed Dante's ideas about afterlife as nonsense. Here's from Ebert's autobiography
Quote:I was already a little smartass, and asked my seminarian: "If hell is the way they describe it, how can the punishment for impurity be worse than the punishment for anything else?" The seminarian smiled condescendingly. "The notion of levels of hell comes from Dante," he said. "He was a great poet but an amateur theologian."
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"
