If God had some news for the world, would He use the Internet? Yes, She would. Volume 1, Issue Number 1 -- September 2013 GOD SAYS HELL IS NOT A PLACE THAT EXISTS Surprisingly, a recent Pope agreed --- and said so out loud There is no such place as hell, God said in Conversations with God, and Pope John Paul II agreed with Him. It is also not true that it’s God’s job to condemn people – and once again, the Pope John Paul agreed with him. Many humans have been told, of course, that God’s desire is for people to live good lives, and for good people to go to Heaven or Paradise after their deaths; while bad people go to Hell, Gehenna, or Hades. Those in Heaven will live in unending bliss in reunion with God, and those in Hell will live with other evildoers who have been damned to eternal torture. Where each individual soul goes will be decided at the Reckoning on Judgment Day. Some humans have been told that hell is a temporary experience during which sinners are tormented by demons until the debt created by the evil of their lives has been paid, while others have been informed that hell is but a phase in a soul’s journey as it passes through many experiences of reincarnation. One result of this teaching: Millions of people have structured their entire lives around the struggle to avoid “going to hell” and around the hope of “getting to heaven.” They have done extraordinary and sometimes shocking things to produce this outcome. The concept of heaven and hell has shaped not only their behavior, but their entire understanding of life itself. It has also shaped human history. Yet the statements attributed to God in one of the most widely read books on spirituality published in the last 25 years says this concept and understanding is mistaken. “Hell does not exist as this place you have fantasized, where you burn in some everlasting fire, or exist in some state of everlasting torment.,” God’s statement in CWG-Book 1 says. “What purpose could God have in that? Even if God did hold the extraordinarily unGodly thought that you did not ‘deserve’ heaven, why would God have a need to seek some kind of revenge, or punishment, for your failing?”, God then asked. “Wouldn’t it be a simple matter for God to just dispose of you?” And then, in this dialogue—which has been read by over 15 million people in 37 languages around the world—God went on to ask, “What vengeful part of God would require that He subject you to eternal suffering of a type and at a level beyond description? If you’re thinking ‘justice,’ wouldn’t a simple denial of communion with God in heaven serve that end? Is the unending infliction of pain also required?” In a separate and theologically breathtaking statement before a papal audience at the Vatican on July 28, 1999, John Paul II told an astonished gathering that hell does not exist as a place, but is “a situation in which one finds oneself after freely and definitively withdrawing from God, the source of life and joy.” The Pope said people must be very careful in interpreting the biblical descriptions of hell—the “inextinguishable fire” and “the burning oven”—which he said are symbolic and metaphorical. These picture phrases are meant to “indicate the complete frustration and vacuity of a life without God,” John Paul declared. God’s statement in CWG is crystal clear regarding the lack of any role by Deity in condemnation and punishment, and the statement of Pope John Paul II is no less specific and direct. Said the Pope in his July, 1999 pronouncement: “Damnation cannot be attributed to an initiative of God, because in His merciful love He cannot want anything but the salvation of the beings He created.” While eternal damnation is never the initiative of God, it is the self-imposed punishment of those who choose to refuse God’s love and mercy, the pontiff asserted. Hell is therefore “a situation in which one finds oneself after freely and definitively withdrawing from God, the source of life and joy,” he explained. Astonished observers noted that these statements by the then head of the Roman Catholic Church (John Paul celebrated his Continuation Day in 2005) were almost word-for-word replications of the statements attributed to God and published in the first CWG book four years earlier, in 1995. “There is no such experience after death as you have constructed in your fear-based theologies,” God said. “Yet there is an experience of the soul so unhappy, so incomplete, so less than whole, so separated from God’s greatest joy, that to your soul this would be hell. But God does not send you there, nor does He cause this experience to be visited upon you.” “You, yourself, create the experience, whenever and however you separate your Self from your own highest thought about you. You, yourself, create the experience, whenever you deny your Self; whenever you reject Who and What You Really Are,” God’s statement went on. “Yet even this experience is never eternal. It cannot be, for it is not God’s plan that you shall be separated from Him forever and ever. Indeed, such a thing is an impossibility, for to achieve such an event, not only would you have to deny Who You Are, God would have to as well. This God will never do. And so long as one of us holds the truth about you, the truth about you shall ultimately prevail.” It is clear from both the Conversations with God dialogue and the message of Pope John Paul II (whose word on spiritual matters is considered to be infallible when speaking ex cathedra) that an experience of hell can certainly be real—but that such an experience would never be visited upon us by God, but rather, would be self-chosen. The extraordinary similarity of the remarks made by the Pope in his papal audience and by God in Conversations with God led some of those who follow Rome closely to wonder if John Paul II may have read this contemporary spiritual literature during a period of failing health leading up to his death, and if he then experienced a personal epiphany of some sort. So what is the truth? Are any human beings in hell? That is, Pope John Paul II shockingly said, “not something we can know.” Not something we can know? This is an extraordinary statement from the spiritual leader of one of the largest religious organizations in the world. Asked that question ten years prior, there are very few priests, ministers, rabbis, or mullahs on the planet who would have responded with anything other than an immediate and unequivocal: “Yes! What do you think we’ve been trying to tell you???” But the Pope apparently had some new ideas on this subject that he spoke out loud six years before he died — ideas that are very much in concert with the messages in Conversations with God, in that they eliminate the fear of hell as a theological tool with which to construct an entire spiritual reality that has deeply affected humanity. One result of this new teaching: People’s concept of life will no longer be shaped by a win-lose construction of the Afterlife. They’ll begin to formulate new ideas of what is experienced after death. Humans will then no longer structure their lives around the hope of getting to heaven or the fear of going to hell. They’ll stop doing extraordinary, shocking, or self-destructive things to produce the first outcome. They’ll find different reasons to act as they act, choose what they choose, say what they say, and think what they think. They’ll create that new measure of morality for which the world has been searching. Persons close to the Pope are said to have reported that the aging pontiff had become increasingly self-reflective during his later years, inwardly looking closely at the central questions of life and death, judgment, condemnation, and punishment. Whatever the case, no one can deny the striking similarity and the remarkable convergence of the messages regarding the afterlife emerging from these two apparently highly divergent sources.
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 23:46:43 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015