Do you have relatives in hell?

Originally posted by DoctorScribbles
Ivanhoe claimed that you may not assume a particular person is in hell.

Suppose you contemplate that person's fate after he dies. As you always insist, you can't know his fate, so your contemplation will take the form of assumptions. Since you are disallowed to assume he is in hell, and there are only two options, then you must assume that per ...[text shortened]... e's fates, then it must be the case that your are required to assume all people are in heaven.)

Since you are disallowed to assume he is in hell, and there are only two options, then you must assume that person is in heaven.

Actually, there are three options - the third being purgatory. And that would be the normal assumption for most persons. Of course, I can't presume† or take for granted that the person is in purgatory - but we pray for their souls as though they were.

The exception being saints - Catholics believe these souls are already in heaven.

Well, I guess there's a third case. The Church can simply decree that somebody is a saint and therefore in heaven, at which point you are required to believe that person is in heaven. But then I have to ask, why does the Church get to contemplate people's fates, such as potential saints, if the lower members are forbidden to?

Because it's infallible.

But, more generally, the laity is allowed to privately venerate or make intercessory prayers to people they judge to have lived lives of heroic virtue and are, probably, in heaven. When the Church judges that such persons are, indeed, in heaven, then it canonizes‡ them and permits public veneration.

Does that answer your question(s)?

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† http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/usage/assume?view=uk
‡ A term that includes both formal 'beatification' and 'canonization'. See
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02364b.htm

Originally posted by lucifershammer

Because it's infallible.

I should have known. Yes, that answers my question.

Originally posted by DoctorScribbles
So, it wouldn't be better if those loved ones were with you instead of roasting in separation?

No.

Whatever was worthy of love in them was destroyed when they died in a state of mortal sin. With death, the corruption of their soul is final and absolute.

I pray that no one I know will die in such a state.

Originally posted by lucifershammer

Whatever was worthy of love in them was destroyed when they died in a state of mortal sin. With death, the corruption of their soul is final and absolute.

Good riddance to bad relatives. Pass me the grapes.

Originally posted by DoctorScribbles
Good riddance to bad relatives. Pass me the grapes.

If/When you get to heaven, you will know exactly why those souls (and I do not know yet that I will not be one of them) who inflicted Hell upon themselves deserve to be there.

Originally posted by kingdanwa
I haven't the time (nor generally the patience) for many of these discussions. But if I may add a brief recommendation. C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce is a fascinating little book. It is important to read his preface, where he lays out the ground rules for what is to follow. The book can be read in a weekend, and I'd like to think that you wouldn't regret the two hours spent reading.

I just finished this book and second the recommendation.

I think the narrator would address my question in the following way.
There is not in fact compassion in heaven, to the extent that compassion is an emotion and not an act, for joy is the only emotion available in heaven, and any attempt to hold on to any other competing emotion keeps one from entering heaven; hell essentially consists in clinging to things other than joy, such as sorrow or revenge.

However, the narrator also finds that nobody is damned to hell against his will; all people in hell choose to be there, and all who want to leave it are free to. Thus, there is ultimately no need for compassion, for those that are in hell have chosen it and are free to reject it. ( The premise of the story is that a busload of people in hell take a trip to heaven and are given the option to stay there; most don't because they insist on clinging to non-joy.)

Further, if compassion did exist among heaven's residents, it would be exploited by those in hell to hold power over those in heaven, much as people on earth exploit the pity of others, and inject a bit of hell into heaven. This is illustrated by a man who takes the bus to heaven to visit his wife and grows furious that she has not missed him, and berates her for not coming to hell to be with him.

Says the Teacher to the narrator, who has asked about the absence of pity on the part of those in heaven for those in hell, "Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject in themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye'll accept no salvation which leaves even once creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye'll make a Dog in the Manger the tyrant of the universe."*


Finally, the narrator would say that "Wouldn't heaven be even better if ..." is a meaningless question. Heaven doesn't exist along a spectrum, even at the very tip, of goodness. Heaven's joy is completely binary - you experience all of it or none of it. If you have to ask, "Wouldn't this place be better if ...", then you are in hell.

In summary, since heaven is a place of perfect joy, compassion, due to its exploitability, is not a compatible emotion. But it is also a useless emotion, for there exist no souls for whom one would feel compassion - in the afterlife, everybody gets exactly what they want. (This is a major departure from traditional notions of damnation. There were no roasting humans or hot pokers in the story.) If you insist on maintaining compassion at the expense of joy, you will not enter heaven; entering heaven is a matter of choosing to experience nothing but joy. The issue is that this is difficult for many people because they have invested so much of their life in non-joy.

There were several other interesting aspects peripherally related to the topic at hand, such as commentary on the Heisenberg-like nature of the interrelationship between time, eternity and freedom.

I would like to share a final quote from the book with this forum:

"Give no fool the pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows."

Dr. S

*Fans of Ayn Rand's philosophy will appreciate the logic and conclusion of this theme of the story. It's remarkably analogous to the motivation and goal of the strike in Atlas Shrugged, which created a heaven on earth in the midst of a hell, on the either-or principle that people of joy must refuse, without compromise, to be enslaved by people of misery who had in fact become the "tyrants of the universe."

Okay, I DEFINITELY need to go give it a read. CS Lewis is always good at this kind of thing.

I will say, though, that the notion that "in the afterlife, everybody gets exactly what they want" is one that I have come across many, many times before and subscribe to myself. I don't know if it's that much of a departure from traditional thought.

Of course CS Lewis himself has expressed that idea a few times. The last book of the Narnia series certainly has that view.

My 2 cents on hell.

There is no doctrine I would rather remove from my Christianity than the doctrine of hell. I know I've alluded many times to free will and I do so here again.

If the acceptance and happiness of a creature (heaven) lay in self-surrender, then no one can make that surrender except himself.

A man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness. I think that an evil man's perdition is not a sentence imposed on him, but the mere fact of being what he is. I think the characteristic of a lost soul is the rejection of everything that is not him/herself. Such a person has turned everything around them into an appendage of the self. A true egoist. Their selfishness has quenched them to a rudimentary contact with the world outside themselves. Death removes this last contact. There this soul has his/her wish; to lie wholly immersed in itself and to make the best of what it finds there. What it finds there is Hell.

When it comes to "eternal torture", I don't think we should to easily be swept along by frightful images suggested in medieval art and some parts of scripture for that matter. Christ speaks of Hell under three symbols: first, that of punishment (Matt 25:46), second that of destruction (Matt 10:28) and thirdly that of exclusion or banishment "into outer darkness". The prevalent image of fire is significant because it combines the ideas of torment and destruction. I have no doubt these expressions are meant to convey something unspeakably horrible, but it is not necessary to concentrate on the images of torture to the exclusion of those suggesting destruction and banishment.

Destruction, we could assume to mean the unmaking, or the cessation of the soul. It is our experience though, that the destruction of one thing means the emergence of another. Burn a log, and you have gasses, heat and ash.

In the parable in Matt 25:34,41 the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never prepared for men at all. I contend that to enter heaven, is to become more human than you ever succeeded on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself)into hell, is not a man: it is the "remains". By becoming the complete human, I mean to have our passions obedient to our will, and our will offered to God. The other extreme is our passions utterly uncontrollable by the will, and the will totally centered on itself: hell.

I notice Christ, while stressing the terror of hell, usually emphasizes the idea not of duration, but of finality. Consignment to the destroying fire is usually treated as the end of the story, not the beginning of a new story. Whether this eternal fixity implies eternal duration, or duration at all, I cannot say.

We know much more about heaven than hell, because heaven is the home of humanity, and therefore contains all that is implied in a glorified human life. Hell is in no sense a parallel to heaven. It is the darkness outside, the outer rim where beings fade into nonentity.

I willingly believe that the doors of hell are locked from the inside, where those lost souls enjoy the freedom without God they have demanded. They are therefore self-enslaved; just like the souls in heaven, forever submitting to obedience, become through eternity more and more free.

Originally posted by Halitose
My 2 cents on hell.

There is no doctrine I would rather remove from my Christianity than the doctrine of hell. I know I've alluded many times to free will and I do so here again.

If the acceptance and happiness of a creature (heaven) lay in self-surrender, then no one can make that surrender except himself.

A man who admits no guilt can accept ...[text shortened]... he souls in heaven, forever submitting to obedience, become through eternity more and more free.

free to do what?

Originally posted by frogstomp
free to do what?

What we were made for... have perfect fellowship with God.