How low can you go?
The Vatican announced on Friday the results of a papal investigation of the concept of limbo. Church doctrine now states that unbaptized babies can go to heaven instead of getting stuck somewhere between heaven and hell. - Slate, April 23, 2007I'm sorry, but this is simply comical. I don't understand how anyone can take these sorts of doctrines seriously. And isn't the Catholic Church supposed to know these sorts of things definitively, important things like the different available planes of existence in the afterlife? (Oh . . . that.) Papal investigation? Of something you have been telling people for centuries? What's next, transubstantiation isn't real? My coffee table doesn't contain a shard of the True Cross? Where does it all end?
Limbo strikes me as a theological "square root of -1". We can't have those unbaptized infants (and virtuous pagans!) having molten lead poured into all of their orifices for all eternity, but we can't let an unbaptized person into heaven either. So . . . violà!
One of the many things I've never understood is this . . . over here we've got our little allotted lifetimes . . . and over here we've got eternity. Logically, the one that is infinitely longer seems like it should be more important, perhaps even infinitely more important, than the little short one. But if you mess up during the little short corporeal existence, your fate is settled for all eternity and there is nothing you can do later on to make things better. What a coincidence that the short little corporeal existence is both the only thing we know for sure is real, and has absolutely critical importance in slotting us for all eternity.
Labels: religion
posted at 8:43 PM
2 Comments:
Really like what you've written here and will share with friends. True cross comment hilarious; last paragraph says something I "knew" but never put into words. Feels fine to have left God and all such doctrines behind.
YUP
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