ஏனைய பதிவுகள்:
DISTANCING FROM CHRISTIANITY
LINKS TO POSTS ON - MY RELIGIOUS TURNING POINT
RED COLOURED PARTS are of my personal opinions....
My school and
church were in the same campus and I grew up as a campus kid. Most of my
activities were in the campus. Early morning appa woke me up and I had to attend the second mass at 5.30 am.
After the service it was my duty to get daily milk from the farm in the Jesuits
house behind the church. This life
continued mostly all through my school and college days.
During schooling
for catholic students, we used to have
catechism classes where we were taught the 'history of church' and all that.
Many stories were taught in our catechism classes. I remember most of them very
well. I would give just two examples: It was the 'story' about the communion. In
catholic faith the ' consecrated host' changes into the
'flesh of Jesus' during the mass. A nun had a doubt on this and one day she
bit the host, which is a very thin bread made of wheat. She had the doubt
whether it had really become the flesh of Jesus. When she bit it, blood started
flowing from the host in her mouth. Only after great repentance and weeping of
the nun it stopped. This story was to make our faith stronger. This story was
routinely given to kids just before they went for receiving the holy sacrament
of communion for the first time. Later, this story faded from catechism
classes.
The second teaching was about birth control. In those story days Catholic
Church very strongly condemned
any method of family control. Even following the safe days of ovulation was
considered a sin. To convince us, another story was given. A new child is born
with one mouth to feed and two hands to work for the bread. This was to
convince us against birth control. It took us more than twenty to thirty years
to understand that the 'two hands' would take at least a quarter century to
earn bread. This story is also lost in the course of time. Nowadays they don’t
teach these 'kid stories' to children. A sign of modernization! Nowadays no
church is against birth control. It has been sidelined now.
Another
interesting thing of my school days was the annual religious retreats organized
by our school. It would normally start on a Friday evening. There would be a
sort of hourly sermons. Normally the first sermon would be about the rules and
regulation of the retreat and about what to do and what not to do. And then would
come the serious sermons. The very second sermon on the Friday evening after
supper would invariably revolve around "HELL"! It would be terribly
threatening. Elaborate description of an
eternal hell and the terrific satanic tortures there. This would terrify us so much that a cloud of
fear would follow us to our bed. So normally on that night there would not be
any catcalls or other pranks by us. Since this used to be a rare occasion for
us to be with our friends normally we would be tempted to play pranks in our
gang. This might happen in the next Saturday night and not on Friday night,
since we would still hear the tik-tok sound of the "eternal clock" of
the Hell! No nerve to play games then! Of course within one day this would slowly
fade away and in the next night the supervisors would face hard time to keep us
well behaved!
Another
important thing of those days, we used to be regular in attending masses
everyday in the church. So next best thing for the 'pious' boys like us was to
be altar boys. In sacristy, there would be a spacious room with the red-white
robes in all sizes. The altar boys first had to memorise Latin prayers. Well,
in those days mass was done in Latin. Over the course of time it switched over
to mother tongues. If we were able to render the Latin prayers to the person in charge of sacristy - nearly four pages of
Latin in Tamil script - we would be eligible as altar boys. We, then
could choose the loose red-white robe and be with the priest in the altar
during the mass. I too was an altar boy.
It was then considered a very big privilege for us. Such altar boys used
to say that they would all become priests later in their lives. I too had that
resolve for some years.
When I started
distancing from my faith, among the many questions I raised, one was on Hell
and Heaven. Hell seemed very illogical. Hell is considered eternal. On one hand, Christianity
claims at high pitch that their god is merciful. On the other hand it talks
about an eternal hell, punishment for the sins of a man in his life
time. There is not even any 'human justice' in that. Man for his sins in his
short life had to be in the eternal hell, suffering. They also keep saying
that Jesus came to redeem us for our sins. Incongruity at its height! It was
simply an arrangement - man has to be cautioned - so hell is there. Man has to
be made to feel good - so heaven is there! Some hope has to be given - so the
merciful messiah is there. Even the Hindu concept of many births before Mukti at least has some human reasoning.
In Christianity, there is no such thing. For the sin of a man, he should be
in the painful hell for ETERNITY. People
have been arguing for long to do away with capital punishment. By Bible, a merciful
god has a hell made ready for sinners.
Many a time I have found Christians relinquish the Old
Testament when I asked some pointed questions about the ridiculous and sensual stories
from it. They would say adamantly that the New Testament is their book and we
have to go by that. Naturally at such junctures my question would be: why then
have the Old Testament as your religious book?
The same escapism they adopt when questions on Hell are raised. They
will try to make it light and wriggle out from such a question. My question is
so simple: HOW A MERCIFUL GOD CAN CREATE
AN ETERNAL HELL. No meaning in denying hell because there are many very
clear verses about hell in the Bible.
Not only
Christianity, all the three Abrahmic religions also talk about "Seven
Heavens"! This concept might have been derived from the ancient
Mesopotamian religions. This concept is also found in Hinduism and Jainism. The
'seven' may correspond to the seven planets known to antiquity.
BIBLICAL
HEAVEN:
And throw them into the fiery furnace.
In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
And these will go away into eternal
punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
In my Father's house are many rooms. If
it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for
you? (Does this not sound so funny ?
Almost like a ordinary human vision .. big mansion .. so many rooms. Even
preacher Dinakaran - who visited heaven weekly for Sunday breakfast with Jesus,
never revealed anything like this!! please have a look at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8InbUvICDs )
Luke 16:23
And in Hades, being in torment, he
lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.
Do not marvel at this, for an hour is
coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those
who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to
the resurrection of judgment.
A
PARTIALITY
Matthew 12:32
32 Anyone
who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who
speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this
age or in the age to come. (What a partiality
in the Trinity! Why one member of the trinity - the Holy Spirit - should be
valued more than Jesus - the Son of Man??)
Then Death and Hades were thrown into
the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone's
name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of
fire .
Revelation
21: describes the City of Heaven - that
the height, length, and width of the walls are of equal dimensions –
as it was with the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and First Temple – and they
measure 12,000 furlongs (which is approximately 1500.3 miles, or 1 furlong =
approx 220 yards) (This "data" also very much stands
like a human imagination / invention! Anyway I fear / wonder - this Heaven is
so tiny and small comparing the human populations of present, past and future.
Can we - I mean the believers - all get some accommodation there? It is really a
Hellish problem!)
Since the concept of
hell and heaven were so much discussed from the beginning of the Church, lately
some attempts were made to distance
Christianity from this hellish or heavenly problem! (Like me,) the conscience of
some Christians was there from the beginning of Chrisitianity, who find it
difficult to reconcile the existence of a just, loving God with a doctrine that
dooms billions of people to eternal punishment.
In theological circles
this doctrine is known as Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT). Critics fault
it for its lack of proportion. Why would a loving God punish a single lifetime
of sin with endless lifetimes of torture? And, among sinners, does an adulterer
merit the same punishment as a murderer? And what about the billions of people
whose only sin was to follow a different faith?
In its earliest years, Christianity didn’t have a consensus
on the nature of hell. Earliest theologians were on two sides: one is UNIVERSALISM (Hell and the punishment there
is NOT eternal.) and second is ANNIHILATIONISM
(The
'mortal soul' will die and fade away.)
These two views are quoted here:
Origen
Adamantius,
a third-century theologian, believed the wicked were punished after death, but only long enough for their souls to repent and be
restored to their original state of purity. This doctrine, known as universalism, envisioned that
everyone—including Satan—would eventually be redeemed and reunited with God.
Contemporary theologians generally credit Irenaeus of
Lyons,
a second-century bishop, as the intellectual forefather of annihilationism. In his seminal five-volume work, Against
Heresies,
he emphasized that the soul is not inherently immortal—eternal life would be
bestowed upon the good with the resurrection of Christ, while the wicked would
be left to die and fade from existence.
Augustine of
Hippo and
his book, City of God, published in A.D. 426, that set the tone for official doctrine over the next 1,500 years. Hell
existed not to reform or deter sinners, he argued. Its primary purpose was to
satisfy the demands of justice. Augustine believed in the literal existence of
a lake of fire, where “by a miracle of their most omnipotent Creator, can burn
without being consumed, and suffer without dying.”
"Everlasting
torment is intolerable from a moral point of view because it makes God into a
bloodthirsty monster who maintains an everlasting Auschwitz for victims whom he
does not even allow to die," wrote the late Clark Pinnock, an influential evangelical theologian.
Edward Fudge, whose 1982 book, The Fire That
Consumes,
is widely regarded as the scholarly work that jump-started the current debate.
A new generation of
evangelical scholars are challenging the idea that sinners are doomed to
eternal torment— and traditionalists are pushing back.
POPE FRANCIS (ALLEGED)
STATEMENT ON HELL
Eugenio Scalfari — a
longtime friend and intellectual sparring partner of Pope Francis and an
atheist.
Speaking to this
newspaper’s founder, journalist and atheist Scalfari, Francis was quoted as
saying of those who die in a state of mortal sin: “They are not punished. Those
who repent obtain God’s forgiveness and take their place among the ranks of
those who contemplate him, yhose who do not repent and cannot be forgiven
disappear. A hell doesn’t exist, the
disappearance of sinning souls exists.”
However Vatican became
serious after this statement of Pope got published. The chief communications
secretary, Dario Vigano, resigned under pressure.
In short, whether people say yes or no to hell, still such
things exist in the Bible. Theologians,
because of their conscience cannot ignore what is said in the Bible.
In
addition to hell and heaven, Roman Catholic
Christians believe in purgatory.
It is mostly by their own Biblical interpretations.
(In my childhood, purgatory was given importance in our prayers
too. Now I have found that Catholics
had dropped this concept, like what they did to family planning. There is also another mystic thing in catholic church. it is "limbo" - a place for unbaptised infant souls. This has also lost its importance in due course of time in catholic teaching.
P.S.
In Christianity more discussions are on hell. While in Islam it is their heaven or Jannah
which is much talked about subject - especially
between the believers (mumins) and non-believers (kafirs).
Al-Qur'an 44:51-57
"Verily,
the muttaqun (the pious), will be in place of security
(Jannah). Among Gardens and springs dressed in fine
silk and (also) in thick silk, facing each other. So (it will be). And We shall
marry them to hur (fair
females) with wide, lovely eyes.
Al-Qur'an 83:22-28
They will
be given to drink of pure sealed wine.
Of course,
more that the wine in golden cups, getting a share of 72 ever-virginal houris
(fair females with large eyes) is more tempting ..!
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-WUBu4iDiY&t=377s
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/05/160513-theology-hell-history-christianity/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/05/160513-theology-hell-history-christianity/
