I know because you are human. And ENOUGH of it for long enough will overwhelm anyone, macho chestbeating aside.
Edit : And as far as pride goes, saying that you can maintain a sense of satisfaction for millenia after millenia of relentless torture sounds pretty prideful to me.
Satisfaction and smugness are two entirely different things.
I don’t know if you don’t like me or if you don’t like my position or if you just want to argue, but there is an enoromous difference between satisfaction and smugness or self-righteousness.
And I didn’t “assume” to suffer for all humanity. According to the hypothetical, I was offered a choice. And I’d make that choice if offered to me, and make it easily.
Let’s look at the passaages you’ve bolded:
That’s not a desire to be more important than others, it’s a desire to be beneath all others, a desire to emulate Christ.
As far as “excessive love of self (especially holding self out of proper position toward God).” Love of myself? I would happily put myself last if it meant that the rest of humanity could be first. Hell isn’t exactly a picnic.
You seem to be under the impression that Catholics are supposed to suffer and feel bad about themselves all the time. Quite the contrary- we can and are happy doing God’s work. My mission as a Catholic is to represent Christ to others, like in Matthew 25. Taking satisfaction in something I’ve done isn’t sinful. it’s be sinful if I thought that doing ONE thing was enough.
And how is it prideful to want God to know even if I don’t? You’ve misread my post. If, as Der Trihs says, my knowledge of the sacrifice I had made would be taken away from me, I’d still do it.
I am going to try to overcome my intense personal dislike of you to attempt to explain this. Please try to overcome your absolute bar toward comprehending the religious in order to parse my explanation.
If God and the Devil came down and made themselves known to me, it would be absolute proof that my Christian faith was on the money- not just faith, but faith rewarded. I cannot conceive of any physical agony that would entirely take away from me the fact that I was able to serve my fellow man not just in Christ’s name, but because he ASKED.
Um, no it wouldn’t be proof; it would be fairly good evidence that God or godlike being exists; but not “absolute proof” that God exists. But it wouldn’t require a being of remotely omnipotent powers to fool a human that it’s God. Nor does this amount to proof that this God is at all like you believe.
It would also be evidence that’s he’s not worth following, God or not. You are NOT serving your fellow man; being God, he doesn’t need a sacrifice to do whatever he wants. You are suffering simply for his pleasure, since there is no other possibility given his omnipotence.
But the thing is, no human being can suffer for eternity. You’d go crazy, you’d become catatonic, you’d turn into one of those guys that just drool and twitch. OK, so God changes you so that suffering for eternity doesn’t make you crazy. Could such an entity be said to be a human being? Could it be said to be YOU?
Don’t fight the hypothetical, man. We’re almost getting along here. 
Have you been talking to my ex’s momma?
Just to clarify…are all other humans definately going to Hell if I DON’T sacrifice myself? Or can you still get to Heaven through “normal” means (i.e. living a good/kind life, kowtowing to and kissing the celestial ass Yahweh, whatever.)?
But here’s the thing. Can you imagine being ass-raped with a barbed-wire dildo for 500 years without a coffee break? I mean, I suppose hell could be different, but if we’re imaging a sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God style hell, it’s not gonna be one of those hells where you sit around in the desert by yourself, it’s gonna be one of the nasty lake of boiling blood style hells.
Imagine the worst physical and psychological pain you’ve ever experienced, now imagine that pain extending on, forever. A merely physical human being would be destroyed by such pain. A merely physical human body and brain would be destroyed by such pain. So how exactly could you get any psychological or spiritual satisfaction while Satan is ripping your anus open and dunking your head in a lake of boiling blood every five minutes? And how could you get any spiritual satisfaction knowing that it wasn’t Satan, but rather God that was doing this to you?
I don’t think I could. Not if other avenues to heaven remained open and at least marginally accessible. And if I got into Heaven under someone else’s sacrifice, I don’t know if I could enjoy it.
At a Christian Summer Camp I once attended, one of the preachers tried to make the analogy to Christ of a convict in death row. “If you were sentenced to death, and someone else offered to take your place and be sacrificed in your stead, you’d accept, wouldn’t you?” Fuck, no! If I was justly convicted, then I’d just be compounding my crimes if I let an innocent take the rap. If I was unjustly or wrongly convicted, then why is my life worth more than yours? I suppose I could be convinced if I had a family, or was Victor Laszlo or something, but even then the enormity of the sacrifice would weigh on me for the rest of my life.
I couldn’t ask or even tolerate someone else taking my punishment for all time. Death is permanent, hell even moreso. Christ, Christ I could accept only because He had an escape clause us mere mortals didn’t. I could live with someone taking three days of torment for me, not an eternity.
Well, technically, I’d have done it to myself.
As for the rest, I have no answer but faith.
Would the world know of my sacrifice? Because if there’s anything more boundless than my love, it’s my ego.
If that were the case, I might.
Buddhists have the term boddhisatva, or someone who has reached enlightenment and broken the cycle of rebirth, but then choosen to be deliberately reborn (and risk re-entering the cycle of rebirth).