The Roman Catholic Church has put the kibosh on Limbo in a new official document, called "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised." Publication of the document has been authorized by Pope Benedict.
This will come as welcome news to my friend Ron Bailey who has ‘anguished’ over the eschatological disposition of the unborn, although my admittedly vague understanding of Roman Catholic theology is that the question of when exactly ensoulment occurs in a human life in being is itself unclear. It should also be welcome news for those virtuous pagans Dante relegated to limbo and whose status apparently weren't upgraded during Christ's Harrowing of Hell.
It isn’t good form to make light or be critical of someone else’s religious beliefs, at least not beliefs of these sort since they have no bearing on the here and now. The Roman Catholic Church is free to believe and teach whatever it chooses on such matters as, indeed, God is free to dispose of our souls as He sees fit with or without Papal, let alone my concurrence. In any case, to anyone who might be offended by my somewhat flippant manner here, I apologize.
My point is only to observe that our Western collective imagination about such matters as Heaven and Hell derives more from the likes of Dante and his Protestant counterpart, Milton, than they do from Scripture or the musings of theologians, medieval or otherwise. However much we may believe one thing or another about what, if anything, happens to a person after his death, and however much any religious belief on this question may in fact be derived from divine inspiration, none of us can settle the matter once and for all until we pass through those Gates of Larger Life ourselves.
Let’s hope we are all happy with the answer.
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6 comments:
It isn’t good form to make light or be critical of someone else’s religious beliefs...
Given the amount of religious rhetoric in the U.S. this makes little sense.
I disagree. Civility makes sense and picking one's battles, verbal or otherwise, makes sense. So long as another person's beliefs do not translate into or lead to coercive acts, the sensible and civil thing to do is to abide whichever beliefs you disagree with in silence.
Of course, were someone to engage me on a religious topic, I would feel free to criticize their assertions as I would any disagreement I might have with them on a nonreligious topic.
Here, however, I commented on a topic in the news which, strictly speaking, is none of my business but which interests me nonetheless because I find religious language itself and theological assertions of this sort fascinating both for their intended purport and for their unintended role in our collective imagination.
Still, it is one thing for someone inside a community of faith to say "this is odd" or "look at this" and another for someone not a part of that community to do so in roughly the same way we might both believe that, say, your Uncle Fred is a drunken jerk but it would be impolite for me to be the one to say so.
the problem, of course, is - or at least was prior to the emergence of the "new" atheists - the extreme asymmetry of application of your maxim. one could - and many who should know better have - say almost any outrageous thing about the irreligious with relative impunity, but public criticism of even the most irrational tenet of a religion was a no-no. whatever else one wants to say about the dawkins-harris-dennett phenomenon, it has corrected - overcorrected some would argue - that imbalance.
"Let’s hope we are all happy with the answer."
I have the greatest confidence that all will be totally indifferent to the answer. (:>)
So long as another person's beliefs do not translate into or lead to coercive acts...
If revealed religion is taken seriously it necessarily does translate or lead to coercive acts. Indeed, that is the dirty little secret that moderate religionists so often don't like to own up to. Revealed religion, while not always a threat to civil society, always has the potential to threaten civil society. Some aspects of Islam as it exists today is a perfect example of this.
Still, it is one thing for someone inside a community of faith to say "this is odd" or "look at this" and another for someone not a part of that community to do so in roughly the same way we might both believe that, say, your Uncle Fred is a drunken jerk but it would be impolite for me to be the one to say so.
If Uncle Fred were excercising power within the public square it would be perfectly acceptable to refer to him as a drunken jerk.
And by public square I mean more than simply the political realm - I mean the social and economic life of a community as well. These aren't discussion free zones.
ctw,
I think a lot of the rhetoric about not discussing religious tenents derives from the failed Enlightenment notion that there exists private and public spheres in human lives.
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