I hope she is right. However, I believe that human ability to defy & reject God’s Love may well be as intransigent as God’s ability to Love infinitely. Also, there is the problem that while Scripture, including Jesus’ own words of the subject, can be interpreted to allow for eventual salvation of everyone, it can also be interpreted for the eventual cessation or the perpetual punishment of the incorrigibly defiant, and that defiance in this life can lead to a hardening of self that will last into Eternity.
I believe that Saint Thomas was a great thinker. While he certainly had the gift of the Holy Spirit I don’t think his works were inspired by God in a way qualitatively different from many other great writers. What makes the works of Aquinas appeal to me is their correspondence with common sense. Most modern philosophers are chiefly notable for their attachment to ideas that no ordinary person would accept, such as selfishness being good, or cause-effect reasoning being evil, or the human senses not being reliable, or mathematics not being objectively true, or so forth. The philosophy of Aquinas is instead in agreement with the sense of reality of ordinary men and women.
I think that religion is similar to Euclidian Geometry-there are two aspects of belief:
-axioms-these are the things that are accepted on faith-and cannot be proven
-postulates: these are the beliefs about a religion that developed over time, as the result of scholarship and debate
So, if you challenge the axioms, you therefore, must throw out the whole basis for that religion.
Are you sure you don’t mean “propositions”?
Of course it then becomes: what, exactly, would I be signing onboard for? What if I reject the “love” which is offered because it also comes associated with a lot of baggage & dogma which I don’t care for at all-along with the worship of what I might see as a false idol? What if instead I embrace a radically different kind of love, one which I see as much more authentic than that proposed by typical Christian sects? Or am I screwed because I refused to compromise what I thought was right, forsaking the One True Way?
Everything you say after this statement does not support this statement. It supports the idea that believe*** can ***exist in the face of incomplete information, and you are example of that because you believe. You didn’t choose your belief. You just believe. Now that you believe, you cannot choose to stop believing. You might stop believing someday, but it won’t be a choice, it will just happen. You’ll wake up one day and realize that in the back of your head when you are praying that you aren’t buying it, just like in the back of my head, if I were to pray, I’d know I wasn’t buying it.
I cannot choose to believe anything at all, I either believe it or I don’t, it is not a voluntary act. I cannot choose to believe in God, I cannot choose to believe in leprechauns, I cannot choose to believe that Area 51 is teaming with aliens that the government is experimenting on, I cannot choose to believe that I can talk to my dead sister and she will hear me.
I might in fact believe any of those things. But it is not something I can willfully choose to believe. The very closest I could come would be to say I wish I could and hope I could and I am open to believing, and I AM open to believing about all of them. Except maybe the leprechauns.
This seems much more likely to me. In my own spiritual quest during my life, the one thing that emerges above everything is the idea that love is the greatest thing there is. In my personal world life is love and love is life.
So if in fact there is a creator, the creator is love, and if the creator is the greatest being, the creator’s capacity for love is infinite and embraces everything. And the greatest expression of love is forgiveness; so to reject anyone on the basis that they failed to believe during life would be to fail to forgive them, and I cannot believe that any true creator would do that, could do that, or would in fact even care one way or another. Because to care implies ego, and if ego is anything it is human. Look around you: do animals have egos?
So my inability to believe in a creator doesn’t bother me because if the creator exists I know I’m forgiven for my failure. And if I’m not I can’t do anything about it. (See prior post regarding choosing to believe; I can’t fix it.)
And this also, by the way, extends to every other thing a human being does, no matter how heinous. If the creator exists, the creator is love, and love is forgiveness, so all is forgiven, no matter what. So I believe that Mother Theresa is no closer to God than Hitler is, if there is anything to any of it.
Then the gift wasn’t merely salvation, it was also the ability to perceive that the gift had been given at all.
I’m told that the gift is freely given to us all. I am not perceiving mine. Where’s the failure?
Selfishness is not good or bad, it depends on how selfishness is expressed. Everything we do is to please and satisfy our own desires, but some of desire to be loved and admired and appreciated, so we do nice things for other people. It makes us feel good. That’s selfish, but not damaging.
Anyway, the reasons I pulled this quote was because I understand how selfishness can be debatable, obviously, but the rest of what you say comes as a surprise to me. Where is that coming from?
I disagree. A God who took the attitude, “Meh, whatever you do is fine with me; I don’t care” would not be a supremely loving God. Love means caring, not apathy. If God is love, God cares how loving you are and how you treat yourself and the other beings whom God also loves.
What you define as apathy I define as acceptance and forgiveness. Not least because so many human being behave badly because of mental illness, trauma, ignorance, etc. Not to mention the fact that you seem here to be talking about god reviewing bad behavior, not lack of belief.
In any case, something else I embrace because it makes sense to me is the idea that “sin” and “evil” are constructs, not realities, and can only exist in the context of living beings. Every act which we consider evil is only one which can be committed within the flesh. If all of us have a spiritual existence which transcends flesh, then no real harm can come to us, and any harm done to us is transient and meaningless and only matters in this transient form, it has no permanence. And if that is true, then any evil acts can easily be forgiven.
(I know, this will make some heads explode. But for the record, I don’t know that I genuinely believe in my heart that anything is true that involves an existence which transcends flesh, but to the extent that I might or could, these are the ways in which it makes sense to me.)
With the caveat that I feel there’s much to say in favor of a broad Thomism … I would be very interested to learn that more than a tiny minority of non-fringe philosophers believe the things on your list, particularly the goodness of selfishness and the evil of cause/effect reasoning. Egoism (in particular) is not a popular brand of ethical theory. On the other hand, many of the key bits of Thomistic philosophy – the separation between act and potency; the composition of matter and form; the distinction between vegetable, animal, and rational souls; a psychology that is dualist but not really dualist; the natural law and its apparently strange implications – can sound very strange to modern ears.
But I suppose that is a hijack.
Thanks, RT
I was beginning to think no one had even read my post.
Stoid,
I think some people are closer to God, here in the physical world, than others. I know that I am not so close to Him on some days as I am on others. You say you do not perceive your gift. That is a feeling I can well understand. I am turned now, toward God, where once I was turned away, and in my case it was first petulance, then anger, and finally pride that stood between me and Him.
You cannot prove salvation. Salvation is not logical, and makes no sense. It is extraordinarily unlikely, and absurdly contrary to the obvious laws of nature. Someone on this board went into a rant on another occasion when his criticism that my “theology is utterly lacking in logical validity” elicited my response to him of “And you said you didn’t understand!”
Logic, and science, and philosophy are incredibly powerful tools of the mind which men use to understand the universe, and even to change the universe itself. But the limits of logic are not the limits of all that may be. They are not even the limits of man himself. Love is not logical, and those who believe it to be merely hormones, and synapses are hiding from it.
If debate is your desire, better to discuss theology and doctrine from within their own structures. But faith is not an intellectual phenomenon. If I could understand it, it wouldn’t be a miracle.
For my own part, if you love, and treat every soul you meet upon this Earth as if that were the God Himself, some day, it will be. And then, although you won’t have any answers, you will have forgotten what the questions were.
Tris
Ok, so a rogue group many years ago basically told the druids, celts, and pagans of europe that if they did not convert to this new religion, that they would be wiped out. The creators of this new religion wiped out all of the indigenous peoples of europe, stole all of the ideas from their books and ways, and then took all of their stories/mythology, and wrote the “big book” manipulated in their own lying words, and then proceeded to take over the entire world by force, under the guise of science,christianity, and white racism. little did/do they know that people such as the native americans were far more in touch and far more advanced than they were before they were wiped out.
I still can’t tell if this is comedy or dead serious.
totally serious, all on record, all on the books. look up the crusades, search the celts, druids,
etc.
Actually, no, your argument, if serious, is pretty much just bullshit. The indigenous people of Europe were never exterminated, the native Americans were not wiped out (although they did endure massive deaths), the “entire world” has never been conquered by anybody at all. And so on.
You’ll find that the type of unhinged rhetoric that you’re using won’t go over well here. There are all sorts of political ideologies represented on the Dope, but most people will not take kindly to the type of nonsense you’re spewing. I guess you’ll find that out in time, but if you can’t discuss things factually, then nonsense won’t serve you well at all.
There is no celtic or druid people left in europe, so i think they were mostly exterminiated, i can’t think of any other word for it. I live in the u.s and live on what used to be native land, I have not even seen a native in years. they were forced onto reservations secluded in the middle of nowhere. Colonialism is in every country in the world. Christians dominate most of the countries in the world with exception of asian countries. Even africa is colonialized, the richest people in africa are european christians. south america is dominated by catholicism.
Name one country besides the asian countries that are not ruled by euro/american christians.
we dominate and police the world with zealotry and superiority
I will rewind and say that these “christians” are not really christians anyway, i know thousands of good christians personally and they do not condone superiourity or colonialism.
God created everything out of His Love, if someone was still rejecting, God can remove everything, as if someone still wanted to resist god’s Love God will comply. I think that would be motivation enough, and IMHO it is worse then Hell.
Look at the similarities and differences in Rev 14:11 and Rev 20:10, particularly the word smoke of their torment, instead of directly stating they will be tormented like it is for the Devil’s treo.
There is also a lot of their fire won’t be quenched and their worm will not die, but it doesn’'t say that the person (soul) will continue to be there forever.