Please, utilitarians, I don't need any of your "mercy," and neither does Angela. Besides the completely arbitrary decisions concerning what constitutes a "full life," I remind people that we know when life begins--at conception. It's a biological fact that the organism is neither composed entirely of genetic material from its father or its mother, but possesses its own genetic code. It is not nascent fox life or tree life or dolphin life; we have before us human life, a human person, only prevented from the full realization of her full capacities by the passage of time.
You don't need a Bible for this; the Bible, repeating the very law written into the universe, says, "You shall not murder." The Bible tells you that if you don't repent (stop doing it) and plead for mercy, the just God will cast you away from any shred or hint of His loving presence, forever. Your perfected senses and conscience, says Tradition, will constantly remind you of the infinite distance between you and God, a distance you can never cross. The worst part is, if you end up here, it means that, at the moment of your death, your will was definitively turned against God. It will be permanently fixed that way, and you will perfectly hate the very One you were destined to be with forever.
In one sense, if I were a secularist, my best hope would be that the Christian teaching merely consisted in old men making up stodgy, theocratic rules! That's cake, compared to eternal hell-fire! These secularists today are low-budget; they get all mad when some nice dudes with Bibles from Something-Creek Community Church preach about the love and mercy of Jesus. Are you kidding? If my second paragraph is true, you'd get out there and help them!
You don't need a Bible for this; the Bible, repeating the very law written into the universe, says, "You shall not murder." The Bible tells you that if you don't repent (stop doing it) and plead for mercy, the just God will cast you away from any shred or hint of His loving presence, forever. Your perfected senses and conscience, says Tradition, will constantly remind you of the infinite distance between you and God, a distance you can never cross. The worst part is, if you end up here, it means that, at the moment of your death, your will was definitively turned against God. It will be permanently fixed that way, and you will perfectly hate the very One you were destined to be with forever.
In one sense, if I were a secularist, my best hope would be that the Christian teaching merely consisted in old men making up stodgy, theocratic rules! That's cake, compared to eternal hell-fire! These secularists today are low-budget; they get all mad when some nice dudes with Bibles from Something-Creek Community Church preach about the love and mercy of Jesus. Are you kidding? If my second paragraph is true, you'd get out there and help them!
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