Hell Alley

 

There are suggestions in the Bible that few people make it to heaven.

“Narrow is the path that leads to life, and few find it.”

Many read the book of Revelations to say that only 144,000 all told make it to heaven.

The visionaries of Fatima saw multitudes falling into hell.

This is troubling.

I wonder, however, if this is literal. It sounds to me like the Buddha’s description of upaya in the Lotus Sutra: whatever is necessary to lure the children out of the burning building. It is perhaps not so much an accurate description of the population of Hell or the consequences of sin, as a strategic or rhetorical device to illustrate the right path.

The point may more accurately be, we cannot get to heaven by going along with the crowd; by doing what everyone else does.

This is necessarily true, because going along with the crowd, or with others around us, or the social consensus, avoids making moral decisions; so we cannot be earning merit even if the deed is objectively good. It is the easy way, and, if by chance also the moral way, as Jesus says, “you already have your reward.”

But the situation is worse than that. Any crowd or social environment will tend toward the evil. As the Bible says, the Devil is the prince of this world. Those guilty of sin will have a vested interest in promoting that sin, encouraging others to that sin, avoiding personal responsibility for it. Those who go along will go along, making the sin conventional. As happened in Sodom and Gomorrah; or the world before the flood; or among the Canaanites or Carthaginians, who practiced child sacrifice; or the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany; or slavery in so many countries; or abortion today. The worse the sin, the stronger the social pressure to condone it. So as not to cause a fuss.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

 

So going along with the crowd, a failure to take moral responsibility, is doubly culpable. It is doing objective evil, and refusing to take responsibility for it. Taken together, that looks like  turning away from God himself, the sin against the Holy Spirit.

But does this interpretation give us any greater hope? Surely, by definition, if going along with the crowd leads to hell, most people must therefore be destined for hell.

Not necessarily. It is actually possible that “the crowd” or “the social consensus” is not the majority. It could be only the largest single group, the one that speaks with one voice, even if most people approach issues individually—since, after all, those who think for themselves do not operate as a crowd.

It is the NPCs; joined in Hell, of course, by those who think for themselves but have chosen evil.

What proportion is that of the general population? Your guess is probably as good as mine.

There are suggestions in the Bible that few people make it to heaven.

“Narrow is the path that leads to life, and few find it.”

Many read the book of Revelations to say that only 144,000 all told make it to heaven.

The visionaries of Fatima saw multitudes falling into hell.

This is troubling.

I wonder, however, if this is literal. It sounds to me like the Buddha’s description of upaya in the Lotus Sutra: whatever is necessary to lure the children out of the burning building. It is perhaps not so much an accurate description of the population of Hell or the consequences of sin, as a strategic or rhetorical device to illustrate the right path.

The point may more accurately be, we cannot get to heaven by going along with the crowd; by doing what everyone else does. 

This is necessarily true, because going along with the crowd, or with others around us, or the social consensus, avoids making moral decisions; so we cannot be earning merit even if the deed is objectively good. It is the easy way, and, if by chance also the moral way, as Jesus says, “you already have your reward.”

But the situation is worse than that. Any crowd or social environment will tend toward the evil. As the Bible says, the Devil is the prince of this world. Those guilty of sin will have a vested interest in promoting that sin, encouraging others to that sin, avoiding personal responsibility for it. Those who go along will go along, making the sin conventional. As happened in Sodom and Gomorrah; or the world before the flood; or among the Canaanites or Carthaginians, who practiced child sacrifice; or the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany; or slavery in so many countries; or abortion today. The worse the sin, the stronger the social pressure to condone it. So as not to cause a fuss.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

So going along with the crowd, a failure to take moral responsibility, is doubly culpable. It is doing objective evil, and refusing to take responsibility for it. Taken together, that looks like  turning away from God himself, the sin against the Holy Spirit.

But does this interpretation give us any greater hope? Surely, by definition, if going along with the crowd leads to hell, most people must therefore be destined for hell.

Not necessarily. It is actually possible, if not probable, that “the crowd” or “the social consensus” is not the majority. It could be only the largest single group, the one that speaks with one voice, even if most people approach issues individually—since, after all, those who think for themselves do not operate as a crowd.

It is the NPCs; joined in Hell, of course, by those who think for themselves but have chosen evil.

What proportion is that of the general population? Your guess is probably as good as mine.

Going to Hell

 

A Buddhist image of hell.

“Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.' He said, 'No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"

My father once said the most shocking thing.

“I believe the Jews really are the chosen people. That’s why we have to keep them down. Otherwise they’d control everything.”

Leaving out any other details of my father’s life and deeds, this seems to sum up something essential and unambiguous.

The comment, made in all sincerity, is shocking, of course, for its antisemitism. And antisemitism, history, especially modern history, has shown us, is the most sinister and least forgivable form of racism. Anti-black or anti-Indian discrimination can often look like benevolence. People can convince themselves they are doing it in good heart. Not so antisemitism. 

A Muslim image of hell.

Of course, my father was also prejudiced against blacks and Indians, and other groups.

It is also an obvious expression of envy. It tracks closely the sin of Cain. Cain killed Abel because he thought Abel was favoured by God. After pride, envy is the worst of the deadly sins.

But there is something even more disturbing here. My father was saying

1. He believed in God.
2. He was God’s enemy.

So he did not have the alibi of ignorance. He knew he was going against God, and fully intended to do so.

Years later, my father has now died, without any sign of repentance, on this or as far as I can remember over any other of his acts or views. His will seemed spiteful. Always a heavy drinker, he encouraged everyone to get drunk at his funeral.

We can never be sure, but this looks like the perfect example of a soul bound for eternal torment.

“God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God is necessary, and persistence in it until the end.”

And God did seem to be merciful. He gave my father ample time, close to ninety years, to sort things out. He never did.

An early Renaissance Christian view of hell.

Why would anyone choose to go to hell? Milton gives the reason, in the words of Satan in Paradise Lost:

"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”

It is pride, the first and worst of vices.

It troubles me often to think of my father suffering in hell. The traditional image is of burning—supposedly the most painful way to die, but continuing forever. Muslim sources are, if anything, more disturbing than Christian ones. Buddhist sources too speak of awful tortures.

Of course this does not make literal sense, because after death one has no body. Old authorities argue this does not matter, that one may have the same sensation, without the physical organs. Modern authorities, and the Catechism of the Church, say “The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God.”

That makes the fire image a metaphor; but is hardly reassuring. Eternal separation from God seems likely to be more terrible than physical suffering—as mental anguish in this life is easily worse than the worst physical pain.

I think I did my best during his life to fraternally correct, to point out to him the need for a change of heart—and paid bitterly for it. That at least is some consolation. But it is a heavy thought, that one’s father is lost forever.

Reader, consider your own case.

The Levels of Hell

 

Dante's inferno.

The traditional view of Hell is as a place of many torments. Dante imagined it as having levels, with the punishments growing more severe to fit the crime.

Yet Catholic doctrine seems to make hell an up or down thing. There is really only one sin that sends you to hell. That is a willful turning away from God. This seems to imply that one punishment fits all, and that punishment is eternal separation from God.

However—justice seems to demand that, on top of this, there must be just retribution for harm caused to others.  And the story of the rich man and Lazarus speaks of undying thirst, and of fire.

The damned may eternally crave, like Tantalus in the Greek underworld. They crave because this is their nature: always seeking to satisfy their urges in life, they come to exist only as an enormous appetite thatcan never be satisfied. This is the essence of what we now call narcissism, and which the Greeks called hubris: a desire to possess or devour everything. This is an appetite that can never, in principle, be satisfied, and so it endures eternally. Buddhism, too, speaks of “hungry ghosts,” and sees the necessity of ending all cravings.

Heaven and God, by contrast, is living water, living bread, which if eaten once one can never hunger or thirst again.

As for the image of fire: perhaps this is the fire of desire, an automatic metaphor. The wicked cannot rest.

Isaiah 57:

Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death. But you--come here, you sons of a sorceress, you offspring of adulterers and prostitutes!

… You burn with lust among the oaks and under every spreading tree; you sacrifice your children in the ravines and under the overhanging crags.

… But the wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud.

The Death of Staliln

Apparently the death of Stalin was not entirely as in the film. He lingered for three days, drifting in and out of consciousness. And his daughter, who was present, says that at the last moment, he lifted his fist toward the ceiling, fell back and died.

Somehow, I expected him to show fear.

As Joan Crawford, lay dying, her housekeeper tried to pray in her behalf; and she objected: “Damn it! Don’t you dare ask God to help me.”

Hitler seems to have been unrepentant too. He cursed the German people for having let him down.

There seems something troublingly admirable in this holding out defiant and unrepentant to the end. One thinks of Jacob wrestling with the angel. God gave us free will; should we surrender it so easily?

There is obviously a conflict in our consciences.

Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day
Rage, rage, at the dying of the light.

And aren’t these ends more admirable, at least, than Judas’s reported end, hanging himself from a tree in his remorse? That seems, by comparison, rather more despicable. It feels like an attempt to get out of making amends. As Saul did. As Peter did.

Judas is, by tradition, the one person we know with certainty to be in Hell.

Catholic teaching is that God sends nobody to Hell. We decide to go ourselves. Is this what we see here? In their defiance, are Stalin or Hitler or Crawford choosing Hell?

Milton has Satan justify his rebellion against God with the famous phrase, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

This sounds plausibly like the rationale here: a proud refusal to submit your own will to another.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

And yet, again, many or most of us find the sentiment in that famous poem admirable.

Stalin or Crawford or Hitler are, in the end, taking full responsibility for their actions, and in doing so, are also implicitly accepting punishment for their actions.

Perhaps they merit an incalculably long period in purgatory, rather than Hell. Or perhaps at least the lower circles of Hell are reserved for those who, like Judas, do their evil in secret and sly ways, pretend to piety, do harm while feigning affection, and then deny they did it.

Hell, Yes!

Michelangelo's Last Judgement.

Hans von Balthasar and Bishop Robert Barron argue the possibility that there are no souls in hell. Yes, there is a hell, and going to hell must be a real possibility, so long as there is free will, but maybe not ever an actuality.

Reportedly, Pope Francis himself told one interviewer that nobody actually goes to hell, that failed souls instead face annihilation at death.

There are reasons to suppose this is so, to, beyond wishful thinking. Why, after all, would a good God create a soul only for eternal suffering? Surely extended times in purgatory ought to be enough? What about God’s infinite love and infinite mercy?

But a view close to this one was ruled out as heresy very early on in Church history. The assertion that all souls eventually made heaven got Origen declared heretical.

The New Testament seems to say not only that some will go to hell, but that many will go there. This is the “broad gate”; “few are chosen.” Jesus tells the story of Lazarus, in which a rich man is in hell, and he seems to emphasize here that there is no exit, no way out.

The Rich Man and Lazarus.

“Then he will say also to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you didn’t give me food to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and you didn’t take me in; naked, and you didn’t clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’
… These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

It may be possible to tease a different interpretation out of such passages, but the literal meaning seems plain.

In the visions of Our Lady of Fatima, the child seers reported seeing a great number of souls descending to hell.

“As Our Lady spoke these last words, she opened her hands once more, as she had done during the two previous months. The rays of light seemed to penetrate the earth, and we saw as it were a sea of fire. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke now falling back on every side like sparks in huge fires, without weight or equilibrium, amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear…. Terrified and as if to plead for succour, we looked up at Our Lady, who said to us, so kindly and so sadly: You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go.”

Fatima comes with some impressive miracles to attest to its authenticity, and is endorsed as genuine by the Church.

How can we reconcile this severity with a good and merciful creator?

According to Catholic doctrine, God sends no one to hell. Nevertheless, free will necessarily means that it is possible for some to choose to go to hell. Milton saw this when he had his Satan say “I would sooner rule in hell than serve in heaven.”

One can choose to turn away from God in a systematic, definitive way. All of us probably know someone who has. In a word, narcissists: we call people “narcissists” who choose systematically to put self above God, to think of themselves as godlike. This is the same pride we see in Milton’s Satan.

Heaven is the presence of God; hell is his absence. If they do this, they are choosing hell. And a hardened pride may indeed make this choice irrevocable.

Muhammed Visits Hell.

What about atheists? You may ask. Is belief in God all that is needed? And are all atheists then condemned?

No; nominal allegiance to God, or to the person of Jesus, is not the issue. The New Testament makes this clear enough. Jesus condemns, and seems to assign to hell, the religious authorities of his day: these are the Pharisees. Conversely, even the demons he casts out acknowledge him as the son of God.

Remove, if you like, as atheists do, the notion of a personal God. The Logos remains: that is, the transcendentals, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These are God himself, as he manifests in creation.

A good atheist is an atheist because he believes this is the truth. If so, he is a true worshipper of Christ, the Logos. A good atheist is adamant that he is obliged to act morally. If so, he is a true worshipper of Christ, the Logos. Conversely, someone who declares himself a true worshipper of Jesus Christ, yet who is not genuinely convinced this is the truth, is a Pharisee, a hypocrite. He is a worshipper of Satan. Someone who declares himself a worshipper of Jesus Christ, yet who does not consider himself bound to act morally, is a Pharisee, a hypocrite. He is a worshipper of Satan.
And the same, perhaps less obviously, is true of beauty. One who genuinely values and seeks to preserve beauty is a follower of Christ; one who does not worships Satan.

Anyone, nominally Christian or atheist or Hindu, chooses hell if they deliberately turn away from truth, good, and beauty.

We all do, of course, some times. Having sinned does not send you to hell. Repentance, not sinlessness, is what separates the sheep from the goats. 2 Peter 3:9 speaks of God “. . . not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” A good person sins, even again and again, like Peter himself. But he admits he has sinned, and repents. A narcissist will instead insist he never has. He or she will, if necessary, deny the very possibility of good, or truth, in order to preserve the godlike delusion of self.

Sisyphus, Ixion, and Tantalus in the Pagan Greek Conception of Hell.

Now, surely it is plain to anyone that a great many people are currently doing exactly this. It is the dominant doctrine among our educated elite. When a postmodernist says “there is no truth,” they are deliberately choosing hell in just this way. When they say that morality is culturally determined, purely a matter of group consensus, they have turned away from good. They have chosen hell.
Hitler, for one, barring some sort of last-second private repentance, is plainly in hell on these grounds.

It is also a commonplace among academics and others commenting on art today to reject the beautiful and seek the ugly. Much contemporary art is deliberately ugly. I hesitate to say this view is common among artists—I find in my own experience of practicing artists that it is not. It comes from elsewhere, from art criticism. And I expect it is not definitionally possible to be an artist without seeking beauty. Not the pretty or cute; beauty is something other than this, and must include the sublime. But if you simply set up a urinal on its side, and call it art, you are of the devil’s party.
Given all this, it seems obvious that a large number of people are indeed bound for hell.
Is it an absolute majority?

I think there are hopeful reasons to believe it is not. While the educated elite may be officially committed to postmodernism, the average person, having it explained, probably sees it as madness. These are the “little ones” Jesus praised in the Beatitudes. Even many of the “elite” are probably, like Nicodemus, in private dissent.

A Buddhist Conception of Hell.

When the Book of Revelations describes the cosmic war between the loyal and the fallen angels, it says that one third of the stars are torn from the sky: “Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth.” This may be a reference to how far evil can extend in cosmic terms. Beyond about that proportion, it tends to be self-defeating. If everybody lies, for example, lying is no longer of advantage. If everybody is out to kill everybody, there is no longer any crime of murder; killing is self-defense. If everybody steals at will, in effect, nobody has any property. And so there is nothing to steal. And so on: moral evil needs good, and good to predominate, in order to exist.
By this rule, which seems at least as solid as the law of gravity, up to one third of souls probably end up in hell.

Hell and Damnation

A further thought on how many go to Hell; mentioned here some time back as a current controversry between Church Militant and Bishop Barron.

The meaning and purpose of life is not obscure. It is to seek the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. This comes in the West from Plato; but it also seems to correspond to the Hindu trinity of sat, sit, ananda, usually translated, inaccurately, as “being, consciousness, bliss.” Sat is the Good, honesty; sit is Truth (true knowledge); ananda is aesthetic appreciation. These three things, at minimum, are of intrinsic value, and their presence gives value to all else.

Although this seems self-evident once pointed out—the real or true is of more value than the false, and the good is of more value than the bad—it is also true that some people—many people—do not seek the True, the Beautiful, or the Good. Some will insist the Truth is socially determined, or the Good is up for grabs, or our idea of Beauty is purely a matter of taste. The whole Postmodernist thing is to deny the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. And a huge proportion of people are assertively postmodern in this way.

This is ultimately cynical. The advantage of rejecting Truth and the Good, even if self-evident, is that it leaves you free to do or believe whatever you want.

Heaven is Good, True, and Beautiful to a maximum degree. To seek these transcendent values is to seek Heaven; and to seek God, who is a perfect being, so perfect Goodness, perfect Being, perfect Beauty. The immediate presence of God is definitive of Heaven. Those who are not seeking them are, therefore, rejecting God, and choosing to turn from the path to Heaven. They are declaring in favour of Hell, and against Heaven, as their intended destination.

And this makes sense in Catholic doctrine: God, being all-merciful, wants no one to end up in Hell, but some of us choose Hell for ourselves. Anyone who is not seeking the Good, the True, and the Beautiful has quite expressly chosen not to go to Heaven.

Sin, in turn, is when we choose anything else before the Good, the True, or the Beautiful. For example, immediate physical pleasure, or social status, or self-regard. These are the three great temptations: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

Any of us can slip up in this way at any time. The difference between the saved and the damned, however, is that the saved will understand this as sin, feel regret, and eventually repent. The damned will refuse to accept this, and deny they have done anything wrong.

They may instead protest, like Pontius Pilate, “What is Truth?”

The Sheep and the Goats

If I were to write that there are fundamentally two kinds of people in the world, good people and bad people, you would probably condemn me for being un-Christian.

There are two kinds of people in the world: good and evil.

What? We are supposed to love the sinner, we say, even if we despise the sin. We are not to judge. The line between good and evil, we often say, runs through the hearts of every one of us. Real life is not about white hats and black hats: there is moral ambiguity everywhere. Most of that is true enough.

But not the moral ambiguity part. Nor any notion that everyone might be saved eventually. Origen, among others, suggested this in the early Church, and it was soon seen to be a heresy.

That is not what Jesus says; that is not what the Gospel says.

He tells us to love our neighbour. But then, when asked, “who is your neighbour?” he does not say “everyone.” He tells the story of the Good Samaritan.

In the consecration at mass, the English version used to say “shed for all.” This has now been corrected. The original Latin of the Vulgate says “for many.” Not for all.

Indeed, it is implicit in the doctrine of hell.

“But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. Before him all the nations will be gathered, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.” (Matthew 25-31).

So there it is. There are two kinds of people.

The existence of hell presupposes that, even given an infinite amount of time, some people will never repent. Goats are goats, sheep are sheep.

The same point is pretty clear in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes; and almost as clear in Matthew’s. They are half of a parallel construction, defining the good and the bad people.

Looking at his disciples, he said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
21 Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
22 Blessed are you when people hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil,
because of the Son of Man.

23 “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.

24 “But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
25 Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.”

There it is again. There are two kinds of people: the sheep and the goats; the pharisees and the salt of the earth.

John’s Gospel seems to include the same point:

“The gatekeeper opens the gate ..., and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.”

Not sheep and goats here, but sheep who belong to the flock of Jesus, and those who simply do not.

In case there is any confusion, John’s Jesus quickly makes the point that this is not a matter of subscribing to this or that doctrine, this or that faith. The parable of the Good Samaritan, of course, makes the same point. Simply saying you are Catholic does nothing at all.

“I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me—just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.”

Nominally Catholic or not, nominally Christian or not, some people are of good heart, and some people are not. Those who are of good heart follow the shepherd as soon as they hear his voice. Those of bad heart do not.

But, you will say, what about the need to follow Jesus specifically? Isn’t this religious indifferentism?

No; the need is to follow Christ. Christ is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” This does not refer to a particular Latinized Hebrew name. This refers to following “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Anyone who makes the pursuit of the good, the truth, and the beautiful above self is following Christ, the Logos, regardless of the word they use. Anyone who does not pursue the good, the truth, and the beautiful above self is not following Christ, the Logos, regardless of the word they use.

Again, in John’s third chapter:

“Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”

That seems like a pretty clear division. We all sin, but some of us—most of us, if the Bible is to be taken in its plain meaning—are dedicated followers of evil.

To these people, Jesus does not seem even to make the offer of salvation.

Matthew 3: 7:

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”

Matthew 13: 10-15:

The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”

He replied, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. This is why I speak to them in parables:

“Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.

14 In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:

“‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
15 For this people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’”

Given that God is infinite in his mercy, this must mean—and the doctrine of Hell must mean—that some people have taken a basic, foundational position that means they are never going to repent, no matter what. Otherwise it would be a failure of mercy for God/Jesus to withhold the chance of salvation from them.

They are, in a word, evil. Evil to the core.

And they must have chosen to be evil. I see no room here for the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, in which you are born this way, and there is nothing you can do about it. That is a convenient alibi. There is nothing the Bible so clear about as the concept of free will. See the Garden of Eden story in Genesis. Rather, it is that there is some fundamental choice that some people make—that, indeed, Satan too made, in the story of the fallen angels—which then precludes repentance.

What might that be?

Jesus calls these irredeemables “goats.” What then is the apparent difference between goats and sheep?

It is that goats are not herd animals. Sheep stay with the shepherd and the flock, while goats strike out on their own.

This looks, at first glance, like a condemnation of individualism, eccentricity, or of thinking for yourself. But this is not a possible interpretation. We are misled by our metaphoric use of “sheep” to mean conformists. It would not be compatible with Jesus’s saying

Matthew 7:14:

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

This suggests that it is precisely conformists, conformists in the eyes of the world, who are going to hell. Jesus himself was anything but obedient and a conformist in this sense. And the same is true of the apostles, or John the Baptist.

Being a sheep and not a goat means being obedient to the voice of the shepherd, and to the needs of all, instead of to egotism and one’s personal desires. Jesus gave the two prime commandments as “love God, and love your neighbour as yourself.” That could be given pictorially as “follow the shepherd and keep with the flock.”

In John’s gospel, Jesus uses the metaphor of darkness and light. Once one has done something wrong, one immediately faces a critical choice: admit it, repent, and get back on the narrow path, or deny it. Everyone stumbles. Everyone sometimes gives in to a selfish urge, or an immediate desire. Make the second choice, and you have turned away from the path itself, and begun down a road from which there is in principle no turning: you then start to shun the light itself. You will soon come to deny the very concept of truth, of God, of right and wrong, of beauty, rather than admit you have done this thing, or that it is wrong to have done this thing. That is the road to hell, and it is fairly clear in daily life that many people are always taking it.

This distinction is the distinction between a mortal and a venial sin. A mortal sin is a turning away from God, and implies the death of the soul.

But, in principle, no sin you repent remains mortal.

All of this means that, while it is true that the struggle between good and evil runs through the heart of each one of us who is still on the path, it is also a real dividing line in human society as a whole. At any time or place, there is a faction on the side of evil, and a faction of the side of God.

This means, in turn, that it is not enough to mind our prayer life in solitude. For some, that might be wise, but everyone cannot. There is a war on. There really are good guys and bad guys, and they are always fighting.

Consider any group or ideology that holds that there is no God, there is no objective truth, there is no such thing as objective beauty, or some obvious sin is good.

There are a lot of them, aren’t there? Postmodernism, Marxism, atheism, abortion, many feminists.

Any group or ideology that holds one of these tenets is, pretty much necessarily, on the side of Satan. They have made their bargain with the devil, and at this point there is probably no turning back.

George Michael in Hell

A bit of anti-Christian propaganda came down the Facebook feed of late. Twice, from two different sources. So I guess it’s getting good distribution.

Maybe there really have been comments somewhere that Michael is damned because he was gay. None are cited. But they certainly would not be in accord with Christian doctrine.

To be fair, I can only speak definitively for Catholicism here. Protestantism, with thousands of denominations, has no clear voice on anything. It is probably possible to find a self-declared “Protestant” who believes almost anything you choose, and accepts no higher authority to gainsay it.

But then, you need to be specific, and not call “Christian” a doctrine most Christians would consider heretical. Otherwise, all possible human views become “Christian.”

First off, for Catholics, nobody is certainly damned. Repentance is always possible. Accordingly, nobody is damned for, at any point, “being gay.” Damnation requires not just sin, but a final and definitive turning away from God. That’s what purgatory is about.

Second, “being gay” is not a sin. Homosexual sex is--as is any sex outside marriage, and any sex not open to having children. This includes extramarital sex, using artificial birth control within marriage, or masturbation. Or, for that matter, coveting your neighbour’s wife. Or looking at a woman with lust in your heart. Homosexuals are not singled out as sinners here. One might just as well say that being heterosexual is a sin.

Which is exactly why everyone feigns to care so much about supposed discrimination against homosexuals here. What it is really all about is heterosexuals wanting free license for lust without feeling guilty about it. If they can convince themselves that the church’s teaching on sex is just prudishness, they can salve their conscience.

You want sin? There is one unforgivable sin. That is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

That is, misrepresenting religion in an attempt to mislead.