In my view, thinking may help us to overcome “ignorance as to the fate of such evildoers .”
Suppose such evildoers will not experience suffering in the afterlife. This would mean that they will be “rewarded with a closeness with their Creator”, the same way as their victims will be. But then they are actually not “evildoers”. They are rather “smart” people who understood to take advantage of harming, killing, and exploiting others on earth without being punished for this, neither during their earthly lives nor in their afterlife.
Suppose the officer who killed George Floyd would not be judged for this, neither here nor in the afterlife. Would you be happy with that?
as explained above, wanting to be with god is about wanting direct access to the wish fulfilling genie. wanting to remain an individual with its own free will granted whilst in your dream embodyment, a glorified self
I do NOT believe that ‘evildoers’ will be rewarded in the afterlife with ‘a closeness with their Creator’. On the contrary, what remains of their individuality, will realize that, by their actions on earth, they have lost that blessing. Their’s is a spiritual suffering, not a bodily one. Is that sufficient punishment for Hitler or a rouge cop? I don’t know. What do you think?
Al Leo
The view you express deserves to be discussed in depth.
To start with I quote Pope St. John Paul II, Audience July 28, 1999:
The images of hell that Sacred Scripture presents to us must be correctly interpreted. They show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God. Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy. This is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes the truths of faith on this subject: “To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called ‘hell’” (n. 1033).
“Eternal damnation”, therefore, is not attributed to God’s initiative because in his merciful love he can only desire the salvation of the beings he created. In reality, it is the creature who closes himself to his love. Damnation consists precisely in definitive separation from God, freely chosen by the human person and confirmed with death that seals his choice for ever. God’s judgement ratifies this state.
Do you agree to this explanation by John Paul II?
It seems to me this is basically the same idea you express, isn’t it?
The “correct” Christian interpretation of Scriptural references to punishment in the afterlife (via literal hellfire) seemed to prevail for two millennia in both Roman Catholic and Protestant circles. Pope JP II’s adress (1999) should have corrected this matter, at least for the RC faithful. I am pleased that you (and a few other RC intellectuals) accept this “corrected” interpretation, but, IMHO, the majority of the ‘Faithful’ have not. Are there any polling data on this matter?
Al Leo
The meaning of hell is work in progress. It may be worth to discuss the issue more in depth in this thread.
Here you express quite an interesting idea I try to develop:
‘Evildoers’ in the afterlife will remain separated from their Creator because they themselves do NOT want to be with God.
Thus, they will remain outside God’s knowledge and be unknown to God: They will have no name. What remains of their individuality will realize that they are nobody and have no importance at all in eternal life.
We all have sometimes experienced the following situation:
A board has to decide about some matter.
You consider yourself an expert in the field and submit your opinion to the board.
The board considers that what you claim is flawed and completely ignores your opinion.
You feel suddenly that you are considered a nobody: This is an appalling spiritual suffering.
This is the suffering of hell: you realize that you are really nobody forever!
Consider the question:
Is there anyone in hell?
The answer is:
There is ‘no one’. Hell is plenty of “nobodies”, individuals without a name, “unknowns”.
the ego is the whole point of the sin as eating from the tree if elf realisation is the root of the realisation of good and evil.why wuld you want to be an everlasting self with free will,e.g. will something different from God’s will? Where is the point of that ?
to live forever
is the art
to learn to live
in Jesus heart
I will be free from the constraints of time and space, why would I want a physical body again? If we believe in a resurrected Jesus that came to live again as a hard hologram (for the Red Dwarf fans amongst us) instead of him becoming alive inside our own heart that did not come alive in us we lost him. It was only a couple of days ago that I suddenly got the understanding what it means that Jesus died for me that my sin’s can be forgiven. It is through his death that he could come alive inside me so I could understand what it means to submit to God for all the suffering it would bring and to be able to geniunly repent, so that my sin can be forgiven. He did not die to get God pleased and to fulfill his desire to punish us for being disobedient as he knew we would be. He died so I can understand what it means to submit to God in any suffering I could endure, as after all, suffering is the discrepancy between my expectations and my obedience to God, so it is a self inflicted problem. He could endure all the suffering by being with God, by being in God. So God sent him not to please himself on him being sacrificed - as the atonement theory suggests - but so that I could understand. Thus the sacrifice was of his beloved son for me to become savable saved by changing me, not for God to be changed in his attitude towards mankind.
The human body surely includes constraints of time and space but is far more than such constraints.
Among many other things, your body reveals your status as a human being in the image of God, and entitles you to be respected by the others.
Actually the spiritual immortal soul is NOT contained in the body, but rather the other way around: the body is contained in the soul. The body is sort of highly complex soft-ware, through which the soul appears in and acts into the world.
Are you robbed of your laptop, or have you lost your mobile? You feel as if you had lost your hands. Mobiles and computers become more and more like extensions of our brains. So after you die, your body remain in your soul as a bunch of algorithms. In this sense you keep your personal bodily identity, although you cannot longer make decisions affecting your eternal destiny.
Through your bodily actions you create relationships that affect not only your contemporaries but even persons living after your death. The consequences of your actions will last in history till the end times very much like the messages or images we post in the web: they will remain and influence others forever.
The good we have done will be beneficial for many people after our death. At the end of history all this good will appear and thereby our body will reach achievement. And the other way around: we will also meet all the good we have received in our earthly life and those who have done this good to us. The resurrection of the bodies means this: All the bodies of the saints will come to completeness by being united through webs of love, and so they will be one in Jesus Christ and complete His resurrected body.
Your post inspires me many other thoughts.
Before continuing I would be thankful to know what you think about my comment here.
the body is the hardware, the soul is in the software running it. Just imagine the repeat of the fall, the AI robot rejecting our authority we assume to have.
we might look at our souls as a piece of code looking for its source, a piece of code that only makes sense when it works as part of the whole. If we are worried about our ego in the afterlife we have fallen to the temptation of the other one wanting to be like God, e.g. the eternal self.
If we can not see Jesus in the person we help we still look for a physical separate entity, but it goes the same the other way round. Tell me by what you want to be recognised in the afterlife and why.
Antoine, these are some of the views that I have incorporated into my ‘Weltanschaung’. These views (if I am correct) are, in turn, based on the reality (first proposed by Teilhard ?) that humankind initiated the Noosphere, a ‘realm’ destined to become more important than the Cosmosphere and Biosphere which preceded it. Will the Vatican ever grant any degree of ‘orthodoxy’ to this belief?
respectfully,
Al Leo
This is the view that Roman Catholic media and communications theorist Marshall McLuhan spoke about (in a post- or trans-evolutionary way) as “the extensions of man[kind]”.
“All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing is an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, people change.” (The Medium is the Massage, 1967)