Speaking as an ex-Catholic…I was brought up VERY Catholic and so,thinking back…this is how I would have answered back then.
For the guy in the OP…probably not. He is soon to be on his way to hell. In the unlikely event he was completley serious in his conversion (an unlikely possibility) then it is possible he will be heading to Purgatory instead…and will be there a LONG time.
Just professing sorrow does not give you forgiveness. Confessing to a priest does not necessarily give you forgiveness. You must genuinely be contrite for what you did and have done all you could to reverse the damage you did. My next door neighbor is on her way to hell…even though she says she has been forgiven for lying to the police and insurance company when she hit my wifes car…she may have prayed to God for forgivenss…gone to confession and confessed…but the sin is still there because my wife is still here…suffered damage that could still remedied by her and she does not do it. That means her sin is still on her soul.
Waiting until your deathbed to be contrite is dangerous because it may not cut it…you have not given yourself time to show your anguish over the sins you committed.
Please note I am no longer Catholic and am pretty solidly in the athiest camp now…so I don’t believe the above. However, I used to.
“This can happen in a instant, such as the thief on the cross, or you can ‘refined’ over a long time, perhaps spend some time in Hell.”
Wow. I didn’t know you could spend SOME time in hell. I though it was the REST of time that you had to spend there. So, parole from hell. What’s next? :dubious:
I think kanicbird may have C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce in mind, in which it is vacations from what could be considered Hell are allowed. I write “could be considered” because some of the damned who visit Heaven on such vacations elect (or manage) to repent, and from their point of view the Grey City was never Hell at all: merely Purgatory, at best.
If I make a false presumption, it’s meaningless to then try to use logic to justify or refute a consequence based on that false presumption.
In this particular example, anyone can end up in heaven because the Christian religion absolves humans from all the consequences of their behavior and acknowledges only an ultimate divine judgment from an imaginary being.
So Hitler can very well be in heaven and no Christian has any theological argument to deny it.
Even Christians themselves know about this seeming paradox since the first millennium of theological writings.
However, repeating a truth may make the truth a bit boring but it doesn’t affect its truth value.
Coming up with endless hypothetical scenarios where someone assumes a falsity and then tries to wade through unlimited fantastic possibilities that this falsity generates, may be less boring to some, but utterly meaningless.
Christian theologians have admitted this since the turn of the first millennium.
They can’t resolve the issue of evil and they side with the direct instruction of their book for human beings to refrain from making ultimate judgments because their imaginary spirit will make the final decision of who goes where.
My own view is that Christian theology should understand itself to be committed to Universalism–the view that everyone, eventually, is united ecstatically with God.
Any other situation would make God less than perfect, and Christian Theology is supposed to take God’s perfection as axiomatic.
The answer “there is no heaven” is more appropriate than trying to provide substantiation based on a book of fairy tales and fantasies.
It’s like a sailor with Columbus asking if they’ll fall off the earth if they sail West since the earth is flat. One approach is to answer that they won’t fall off because some religious book says they won’t. My approach is that it’s better to tell the sailor that the earth is not flat and to stop asking moronic, meaningless questions like that.
No, it’s more like asking “Did Columbus and his crew really think that they’d fall off the edge of the world” and then you stomping in and saying “NO ONE ANSWER THAT! WE ALL KNOW THERE’S NO EDGE OF THE WORLD!”
You seriously can’t see why going into every single thread about discussions of religion - in any context - and yelling LOL THIS IS STUPID THERE’S NO RELIGION is threadshitting?
Your answer is not “more appropriate” because it does not answer the question at all. Every single person who has posted in this thread, including the moderators, agree that what you said wasn’t appropriate at all. Even the most outspoken atheists think you’re threadshitting.
You are one of the people who make atheists look like assholes with a chip on their shoulder. Please, on behalf of all of us, stop it.
I find that disintegrating a thread into meta-discussions about posts rather than discussing the issue at hand is way more worthless and mindless than repeating simple truths that no gods exist so all assumptions that they do can have any consequent they please.
Can a tree go to heaven? Of course. There’s no heaven therefore anything you attach to a false premise can be any claim at all.
The Roman Catholic Church does not rule out (although it does not exactly endorse) the possibility of universal salvation (Julian of Norwich is worth reading on this subject, as well as for purely literary reasons). So, if all are saved, you are saved, whether or not you confess your sins and truly repent.
But sins are forgiven upon valid confession. Even if a priest isn’t available in the hour of need.
The RCC does not teach that only the baptized are saved, despite what rat avatar may think.
You’re wrong because THIS IS THE ISSUE AT HAND. No one said “Does heaven exist?”, they’re asking “According to Christian theology, would this hypothetical person qualify for heaven?”
Answering the question directly laid out in the OP with the sort of answer he intended to receive cannot possibly be “disintengrating into meta-discussions” - it’s answering the very question the OP poses - it’s satisfying the reason for the very existance of this thread.
How do people not understand that when every single person involved in a discussion - even the people who should be your ideological allies and on your side, are all saying “woah, dude, you’re wrong here”, they don’t become the least bit introspective?
Does Christian theology say that trees can go into heaven?
Do you honestly not see the difference between those two questions? If you can’t, you have some sort of medical disorder.
Naxos, this is getting very annoying. This thread seems to have been written to exclude exactly the answers you are giving, so you’re now stating that you don’t care about the premise of the discussion. So I suggest you stop posting in this thread. You’ve been told about threadshitting before and you need to stop doing it.
So let’s get this thread back on topic and drop the analogy discussion.
Yeah, sorry, I’ll stop my part in engaging him too. Just frustrating/baffling. And since I have to suffer through the consequences know it all/aggressive/obnoxious atheist stereotype it bothers me more than it bothers religious people.
According to Christian theology, everyone and everything qualifies for heaven.
If any self proclaimed Christian doesn’t know this basic tenet of their own religion then they’re not Christians and a public forum like this is not where they should be looking to be indoctrinated in their own religion’s beliefs.
The OP, like countless similar inquiries on this and many other forums, online or otherwise, make a significant logical error in assuming a falsity and then asking the general public to confirm or refute an arbitrary consequent.