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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32230 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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Even if these in-laws are right, then surely a place where 99% of people go after death, can't be THAT bad.

I can never tell if people who are saying this are just being unserious, or are actually this unfamiliar with the thing that they're trying to criticize.

Hell is the absence of good. It is unpleasant be definition, if you are imagining being in a place and it not being so bad actually then you are by definition not talking about hell. There isn't a bargain to be made here where actually things aren't bad because "that's where all the cool people are" or something.

It doesn't make sense that pretty much everyone goes there but there's no good there. Are all non-Christians evil?

According to Christians, everyone is evil. Part of the whole salvation thing is that you give God root access, and he patches you to be capable of being incrementally less evil. One interpretation has it that without the patch, people get steadily more evil from the point at which they learn what evil actually is. Since death doesn't actually end them, this decay continues until they are completely evil, at which point they have achieved the state of Hell. There's no socializing with cool people in hell, because the part that makes people cool is one of the ones that goes away, along with the parts that allow socializing, and the parts that make one "people".

Yes, according to Christianity, and all Christians too (although they're being fixed over time).

Catholic doctrine isn’t so definitive as you’re likely familiar with from Protestants. While Jesus is the only savior, who is to be saved is not fully defined.

Here’s CCC 847:

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.

I think that's hard to fit with the supposedly infallible council of Florence damning all heretics and schismatics and jews and pagans, but I'm not Catholic so it's not a big deal to me.

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