Re: OT: Prayer, ritual and magic // was conlang website

On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Adrian Morgan wrote:

> As a protestant, I have to say I believe there's no such thing. The
> reason, in a nutshell, is that purgatory seems to make a mockery of
> forgiveness.
It does not seem to me (as a matter of logic, not faith) that there is
any contradiction.

> That statement could lead down either of two tracks:
>
> (1) My beliefs about the afterlife. The whole point of my faith is that
>     given personal committment, God will transform us into perfect beings
>     incapable of sin.
That is perfectly consistent with a place of rehabilitation (not punishment)
after death.  Do you expect that God will make you a perfect being merely
by waving his hand, after all?  If that happened, you would no longer be
yourself.

Souls in Purgatory are free of the *guilt* of sin, because they have
confessed their sins and been forgiven.  But the *stain* of sin, as the
mediaevals called it, what we would call the character defect, remains
part of the soul until purged by *voluntary* acts of spiritual reform.

>     That is what Heaven is all about. As for Hell, I
>     believe it to be the place where souls are destroyed if they refuse
>     to accept the only God who can possibly bring them fulfilment.
>     Since I believe that souls are literally destroyed in Hell, I do not
>     believe that Hell is eternal.
That view is unorthodox (except to 7th Day Adventists and related sects)
but (I suspect) privately widely held:  Lewis Carroll, otherwise an entirely
orthodox Anglican, believed it.

> (2) My beliefs about forgiveness and punishment. For one thing, I believe
>     that the idea of 'deserving' punishment is a human invention and not
>     a divine one.
As I noted, Purgatory is not a place of punishment, conceived as an act
of power imposed on an unwilling soul.  Souls in Purgatory are there
because, in the last analysis, they want to be.

Even Hell, considered as a place of punishment, is primarily the
punishment of separation from everything divine.

Disclaimer:  I'm an agnostic.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
        --Douglas Hofstadter