Escaping Catholic Totalitarianism

[Redoubtable]

You are talking about all sorts of exceptions, mitigating factors of culpability, etc. while I'm talking about the very root of the issue: the idea that a God who is supposedly just, merciful, good, and loving would set up a system of justice where a single offense (such as the pathetically insignificant things I listed), on a single occasion can cause someone to spend eternity in suffering. I find this purely barbaric, a leftover from the brutality of the ancient world. I want to know what is going on with the Catholic God that he is so concerned about being offended that he is willing to damn people who do something as minuscule as use misuse his name as a curse or miss mass on Sunday. What does it even mean to offend God? How is God harmed? An omnipotent God cannot have his divine existence harmed or threatened, and yet he defends himself with a terror that would even make the tyrannical egomaniacs of history give pause. We depraved and vulnerable sinners harm each other more than we could ever harm God and yet our justice is far more merciful and compassionate.

If that one action was done with a fully deliberate intent on turning away from God with no remorse for doing so, then I don't see why it matters if it happens once or a million times. "Hell" is the state of being of a person who separated themselves from God (or from goodness and love) by their own accord. If a person does not want to be with God, if that person rejects goodness and love, then they don't have to be with God if they don't want to be. That is Hell. It's the ultimate free will.

Also, the way you are talking about God, you don't sound like someone who genuinely doesn't believe he exists. You sound like someone who got so caught up in ocd/scruples, that you feel your only escape is to shut the whole thing off. Sorry if I'm wrong, and correct me if I am. But that's just what it is coming off as to me. It seems very emotional.

Well, one: I'm not an atheist, in my OP I said as much. At this point I guess people could call me something of a deist or non-religious theist, but I'm open-minded about it now, I don't feel compelled to believe under threat of damnation. What I don't believe in is the conception of God in Catholicism or in the Bible who is basically a collage of different jigsaw puzzles of religion put together. You have pieces mixed with the warrior God of the OT, the God of the Gospels, the God of the Medieval Church, and kumbaya God of post Vatican II Catholicism, among other conceptions. Apologists argue that the differences we see are due to our understanding of God developing over time, well isn't it convenient that our understanding of God just happens to align with what societies at particular times are comfortable with?

So according to you, they don't have to be with God if they don't want to be, but God will still keep them in existence solely to suffer? This sounds sadistic to me. Hitler was a genocidal maniac, but at least he put his victims out of their misery; I can't say the same about the God of Catholicism. If humans really had a free choice they would be able to will themselves out of an existence they didn't ask for to begin with once faced with their judgement.  

More to the point, I dispute that people choosing Hell is a fair choice to begin with. Catholics believe that God is the essence of love; adding onto to this I would say they believe God is the essence of reason and rationality, if God is truth as he claims to be in Catholicism. Now if God is the essence of truth and rationality then every act contrary to his will is contrary to rationality, just as every sin is contrary to a true spirit of love. If this is the case, then those who persist in sin and disbelief are acting irrationally and demonstrate by their mindset and actions that they are, in practice, incapable of acting or thinking rationally (or in accordance with truth). In humane society we do not damn and torment the irrational, we treat them; yet God sees fit to threaten to burn the irrational for eternity, many of those people being individuals of good conscience who cannot perceive the falseness of their own beliefs and the immorality of their actions despite their honest search for truth. Moreover, the choice we are presented with may be free in some sense, but it is neither fair nor informed. We are left to do the guesswork of faith-based belief and not truly know for certain what the truth is until we're dead, at which point we are judged and it is too late to change our mind or conduct. We are told of course that coming to belief in the truth of Catholicism requires a relationship with God based on faith and trust rather than simply acknowledging logical, provable, or self-evident truths. And to this I argue that if Catholicism was false, a con, the same exact explanation would be used to legitimize the religion, because it is the only explanation left once one has retreated from the realm of backing extraordinary belief with extraordinary evidence. Now then, is Catholicism true or false? If the argument for its truth is indistinguishable from the reasoning used by so many other false religions and cults, then I see no compelling reason to believe, balance of probability tips against Holy Mother Church.

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CT, This is not what the Catholic Church has taught, speaking, of course, from a strictly historical perspective:


This is why the Church taught that infants who perish without sacramental Baptism go to the Limbo of the Children, which is, basically, the highest level of Hell.  Read Dante's Inferno for more details.

You are, of course, free to make things up as you go along; religion is very good at doing that!

Jeanne, you always do this. You always claim I'm saying something false about the church, and then you back it up by linking to super old documents that I don't even recognize. If you want to know what the church teaches about something, you have to look at the catechism. That is very basic lol.

The catechism states that we have every reason to hope that all babies are indeed with God in heaven. While we cannot say for sure who is in heaven (with the exception of canonized saints), it is very much the general consensus among catholics that unbaptized babies are indeed in heaven.

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If I reject god and do not believe he is goodness and love is that a true rejection?

No. As I said, true rejection is knowing exactly what He is (goodness and love) and choosing to reject it all anyway. This is where full knowledge and consent of the will would apply here.

Actually, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is not in itself totally infallible by Catholic standards, few Catholics realize this. The Catechism references source documents which are often considered infallible teaching, but the Catechism as a whole is not unchangeable or infallible. More to the point the current Catechism is really not where one should go if they want to know what the Church actually teaches and has taught in detail, the current Catechism of the Catholic Church issued by John Paul II is just a glorified summary of past teaching that is mostly ambiguous and glosses over some of the more controversial issues. 

On the subject of unbaptized babies, the Church simply does not teach that God brings them to Heaven and never has. It has this "reason to hope" clause in the Catechism to pacify the justified empathetic concerns of compassionate people without actually saying anything definitive. The very fact that the Church hasn't dogmatically defined that unbaptized children go to Heaven is in itself a scandalous indictment of the God of Catholicism. The fact that the Church does not do this is because it very likely would be a dogmatic contradiction when it comes to previous Church teaching on original sin and the necessity of some form of Baptism for salvation. The consensus of Catholics today means nothing, if the consensus of those who identify as Catholic meant anything, Francis would at this very moment be composing an encyclical extolling the virtues of contraception since so many Catholics use it and see nothing wrong with it. 

At one point I believed in god. Now I do not.

I get that lol. If you don't even think God exists, that takes away full knowledge and full consent. It doesn't matter if you used to think differently or not.

Do you love goodness and love? Do you strive to live a life of virtue to the best of your understanding of it? Do you seek truth? Do you feel remorse when you think youve fallen short along the way, like when you lose your temper and hurt someone's feelings, etc? Do you try to reject such things as hatred and greed to the best of your understanding of them?  

If the answer is yes, then it is my opinion that you will go to heaven.

Question I have for you: Is salvation possible for someone who is not inside of the Church in any conceivable form?