Great comments in this thread, Chiro.
the situation is not literally an angry father throwing you into hell for bad behavior
You choose hell of your own free will and in the separation from the One which results, your soul is liberated into perfect freedom at the moment of your death. This is not punishment. It is honoring your free will, which is God's will. Hell as I have described it is equivalent to ultimate liberation, and it is perfect justice, because you choose it.
I would say the former presentation is a Biblically inaccurate characterization of the four last things, whereas the latter of the presentations above accords perfectly with Church teaching on the four last things - and this holds at the exoteric level.
I just want to caution against the temptation to dismiss the exoteric as overly trivialized, or inaccurate, or untrue. If anything, it is the masses' understanding or perception of exoteric teachings that are too simplistic, or inaccurate, or untrue, but what the Church teaches is fully true and requires no reference to the esoteric for its real truth to be understood. There is God, and there is us. There is a real distinction between us and God, both exoterically and esoterically - we are the emanations, we are the creatures, and God is the Image, God is the Creator. And it is in accordance with Divine Justice for God to condemn us to hell / cooperate with our choosing of hell, insofar as it is through our sin and our lack of repentance and our denial of grace that we merit such damnation. Hell just is existence without God. We need God's help in order to ascend to God (since we obviously can't do it by our own power). If we deny God, deny His grace, then we have closed off our only means to reaching God. And then we complain when we don't reach Him? It's absurd.
Modernity believes that man is the highest being; that anything that is knowable can be known by man's natural power. This is an assumption, and it happens to be false. If man is not the highest being (and logically he cannot be, given the kinds of considerations to which you've already referred), then there must be some knowledge outside man's natural ability to know. Therefore, if we seek to know such things, it must be through deference to a higher power. It must be by humbly acknowledging our own limitations and asking the Higher Power to inform us. This is what faith is. And it just so happens that, by opening ourselves up to such grace, we actually obtain this higher knowing. Atheists don't seem to appreciate the significance of a person submitting to a higher power, and through / after this submission actually gaining a sincere conviction about higher things. They like to pretend that this is just a matter of fools deluding themselves into believing what they wish were true. But belief doesn't work this way. There are plenty of things that I would like to be true, but my desiring this is insufficient to actually convince me that this is the case. Either there is a rational basis, and even a rational necessity for this belief (in which case we are talking about demonstration, and not faith, which is the case when proving God's existence), or through humility whatever higher power necessarily exists has actually helped me to belief something in spite of the limits of my nature. Faith and conversion via grace.
The skeptic will of course rebut that there are many religious followers who all claim the same convictions. But I perceive this as being in the same vein as those skeptics who claim that the propensity for similar symbolism or mythic details is somehow evidence against the truth of these myths. On the contrary, I perceive this only as evidence in support of their truth. I won't deny that Hindus and Muslims can experience an authentic sense of God, insofar as they too are capable of humbly submitting to this higher power and asking Him for help. God does not leave them entirely without aid. But this aid, this grace, still comes to them through Christ, through His Church, just as all grace enters the world this way. Theirs is a less potent kind, and does not constitute sanctifying grace, but only what Aquinas would call actual grace. Nevertheless, their sense of God can still be genuine, and that they have sincere belief without doubt on this matter is at least suggestive of such higher influences afoot. (Of course, if the appeal to higher power is done without humility, as is the case among idolators and Satanists, then they may still receive their higher knowledge, but it does not come from God, but rather from demons).
I think what you've said is otherwise sufficient. The appeal to science as a requirement for justifying knowledge is just a profane modern superstition - it is incoherent, for it forgets the very non-scientific kinds of knowledge that are necessary as first principles to render science possible in the first place.
Thanks, PS.
They like to pretend that this is just a matter of fools deluding themselves into believing what they wish were true.
Ah yes, the old 'wishful thinking' gambit. Really, it relies on a gross caricature picked out of a basket of false teachings, namely what we associate with prosperity gospel and southern evangelical protestants.
It has always struck me with the most profound irony that anyone would refer to true belief in what the Bible actually says as 'wishful thinking'.
There was a movie from the late 90s called Stigmata with Gabe Byrne and Patricia Arquette (Frankie) that featured a quote which has always stuck with me. At one point after first receiving the stigmata and doing some research into medieval Christianity, Frankie is talking to her friends (a bunch of 20-somethings) and she says,
“You know what's scarier than not believing in God? Believing in him. I mean, really believing in him. It's a fucking terrifying thought.”
This is patently true. Really believing in God does not amount merely to wishful thinking, but a confrontation with something utterly terrifying. It amounts to this: at the moment of death, existence does not stop. It goes on, forever in fact. And the actions/choices/beliefs that one assumes in this life will impact your eternity irrevocably. That death is not an extermination but a door, before and after which you are accountable to your creator who holds any and all potential for the experience of love, beauty, and order. There are a lot of Christians who imply they've confronted this, but it's doubtful if there are many that truly confront it. In one sense, there is a way in which it is beyond understanding, i.e. our thoughts struggle to grip with the idea that there is no extermination. I have always believed (and wrote at length about it once) that the fundamental death fear which the existentialists emphasized does not actually derive from our fear of ending, but of not ending.
Wishful thinking? There was a reason Paul said to the church in Philippi (and which was echoed by Kierkegaard): "work out your own salvation in fear and trembling."
God is the source of all which is Good, and the part which causes us to tremble is the word all. It means all. Therefore, implied by Paul's statement is that failure to work out one's salvation is just to be liberated into the timeless separation from the possibility of Good.
The Christian does wish. We wish for salvation, but beyond what the term 'wish' connotes we encounter the grace of the sacrifice of the Son of God which is salvation, such that wishing is transmuted to faith. But never is there a point at which the seriousness of ultimate reality is not there, where the gravity of man's fallen nature is not lurking. The Christian which sees his situation as one of mere prayer and prosperity, who sees only the loving aspect of the Father, and not His wrath, has missed the significance of Christendom entirely.
As Frankie said: "...really believing in him. It's a fucking terrifying thought."
who sees only the loving aspect of the Father, and not His wrath, has missed the significance of Christendom entirely.
Bingo. And I will readily admit that the modernist heretics in the Church herself - and the masses of lay people they influence - are guilty of precisely this. Ask your run-of-the-mill Catholic today about God, and they will gush about his mercy, which is good, but they will neglect His wrath, His chastisements, His justice. And this is not good (to neglect).
I’m not scared of death, the scary part is that it is forever. How tragic it is to be born into the great life i have and to never return to it again and to see loved ones again. I wish i can restart this life over and over again.
Ah, but this fear can only refer to prior-to-death. Think about it for a moment. If death is actually just extermination, then your regretful feelings about it can only issue during life. At the precise moment of death, there's nothing. Nothing to remember, nothing to regret, nothing to feel. It's absolutely senseless to fear extermination. If it is what you think it is, it represents an end of fear.
The true fear refers to after-death. If death is not what you think it is, then you have absolutely no concept (and without God, no possibility to gain a concept) about what follows. That's something to be afraid of.
This is what I meant by part of my last comment. Our fear of death is incoherent if death is the end. I believe you fear it because there is a part of you which you are unable to reject that is not certain it is the end. You don't fear death as terminal, you're afraid of what it means if it isn't.
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