Ask a Catholic

[Randy Carson]

What was the question?

Why do you feel it is acceptable to dictate to a bunch of strangers what their positions are, and to speculate, bindingly, on the motivations of people you literally cannot know about?

Isn't that a question that I could just as easily ask of most any member of this forum chosen at random?

That's why we're chatting...to get to know the other side better.

Is there a specific religious doctrine that you feel empowers you to tell other people what they think, or are you doing it for other, equally dishonest, reasons?

I have never beaten my wife if that's the question.

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I made it through 20 pages of this stuff, and just skipped to here, so apologies if it's already been asked.

God has always known a bunch of us aren't going to make the cut.  The consequence being "hell" which sounds like an unpleasant place.  To the point that, and I may be misremembering a bit, but I think the (para)phrase "better off never been born" gets tossed around a couple times in the bible.  

With the knowledge that much of His creation is going to end up in a situation so bad they'd be better off never having been created, why go ahead and create us anyways?  Are us bad eggs a means to an end?  Collateral damage to get the good one's their eternal happiness?  Could He not have created a system with just the nice folks who make the right choices, and left the rest of us with our non-existence?

Excellent questions.

Some people are predestined to heaven. But Catholics do not accept double-predestination (a Calvinist belief) that some are predestined to hell.

God knows what our choice is before we make it, but that does not limit the fact that it was ours to freely make. He simply sees further down the road than we do, so to speak.

Nice folks with free will can, do and did make bad choices. Without the ability to choose badly, we would be robots.