CATHOLIC DISBELIEF IN FORGIVENESS

Jesus said that if you do not forgive everybody else, God will never give you forgiveness.  The Church agrees with this bullying and unsympathetic attitude.

Jesus told the parable about the man who got forgiven a lot of debt and who did not forgive a man who owed him a little money.  He told the story to show the point that if you are forgiven a lot and can't forgive smaller sins in others then you are bad in the extreme.  You will be treated by God as if you were never forgiven.

Real forgiveness would not be given to an unrepentant person.  That cheapens forgiveness.  This is the case whether its awarded by God or man.  A person who repents will not want to be treated as if his repentance doesn't matter and he will be forgiven anyway.  It is an insult to those who go to great lengths to turn their lives around.

We believe we should be hated and punished for we deserve it.  We seek forgiveness so that this may not happen and that we may get better than we deserve.  The result is that broken relationships begin to be built up again.  Christians see sin as a break in your relationship with God.  The Christian teaching of love the sinner and hate the sin separates the sin from the sinner.  If we really believe that rubbish we will never be satisfied with the forgiveness we get from those who believe it.  To treat a person as if their sin is not a mark of their character is to deny that person forgiveness.  It is persons that are forgiven not sins.

Real forgiving is about changing your mind that a person should be punished - by disapproval, by hatred or by suffering some penalty or two or more of these. It is not about feelings.

When you feel the desire to see evil befall somebody for having done something very wrong and it disappears, many people think this is forgiveness. People also think that if you get over somebody hurting you that is forgiveness as well.

If you are tormented against your will by the desire to see the evil person suffer and you feel hurt and anger against that person and this feeling disappears, that is not forgiveness at all. You didn’t consent to those feelings. They hurt you not the evil person. When you are able to let go, that is recovery not forgiveness.

The Church takes advantage of the fact that people confuse recovery with forgiveness to promote itself. It plays on that confusion  to make its evil bullying teaching that forgiveness is necessary for salvation look caring and kindly. The Church does this to mask its true nature. The doctrine of forgiveness is about forgiving for God. Not you.  Not the person who hurt you.  It bullies those who have been gravely hurt for God says he does not forgive those who do not forgive others.

Forgiveness has nothing to do with feelings at all.

Forgiveness means that you do not intend to see vengeance visited upon the evil person any more. You might emotionally want it but it is what you intend that counts.

Recovery is selfish for it is meant to benefit you and not the other person.  When its disguised as forgiveness, its more selfish for deceit is added into the cake-mix. 

Life is too short for bickering and holding grudges. This is worried about the trouble bickering and grudges cause. It is claiming that if life were longer the troubles would be more acceptable. You can forgive somebody in the sense that you refuse to exact justice or revenge on them but still feel seething rage against them. So it is not failing to forgive that causes the bother but the anger.

People often say, “I hope whoever has committed this crime gets caught.” This is incompatible with really forgiving.

Praying for help to forgive somebody only makes the ill-feelings worse because it is not the right method for dealing with anger feelings and feelings of being hurt.  It is not the real starting point.   If you try to keep finding things about people to like and if you treat them like you like them you are practicing for liking them. You will end up liking them before you know it. Remember that you never dislike anybody. You only partly dislike them. See that. That is your starting point.  No religion, no mysticism, just commonsense.  Anything else is like giving a person with flu a massage first instead of Paracetemol.  It makes the problem worse for its not the right thing to do.

Perhaps forgiving and tolerating are the same thing?  No.  Some people however mix them up.  They tolerate a sinner and they think that is forgiveness.  If you really forgive you accept the person.  Tolerating is putting up with a person not accepting them.

TEMPORAL PUNISHMENT BY GOD

To forgive is to treat a sin as if it never happened when the sinner repents and to declare her or him not guilty anymore in your sight. Obviously, you can’t forgive unless you cancel the punishment that person deserves.

Rome teaches the doctrine of temporal punishment.  This is the idea that God demands you be punished for sin even though he has forgiven you for it.  Roman Catholicism sees temporal punishment as a divine demand for compensation and penance as paying it (The Question and Answer Catholic Catechism, questions 1382-1400). It is pointed out that it is possible to forgive a person who has broken your window and still ask him to pay for it (The Catholic Church has the Answer, pages 32-35). That is true but an all-powerful God does not need compensation. Rome agrees that he doesn’t but explains that he wants it for it is good discipline for us. But now she is contradicting her dogma of indulgences (and that the prayers of the living can earn the release from Purgatory of the souls who are suffering there to pay for their temporal punishment). An indulgence is a remission of the debt of temporal punishment. When God just forgets it like that it isn’t for our sake at all. When God commands compensation that he has no need of it is for meting out justice. He does not really forgive for an offence is either forgiven or it is not. The availability of indulgences does not mean that there is true forgiveness for if there were there would be no indulgences.

You cannot be saved unless you believe that God pardons sins (Romans 4:5; Hebrews 11:6) because salvation is mainly about getting forgiven. The Catholic Church does not genuinely believe in a God of forgiveness but in one who partly condones sin by imagining that it ought not to be punished as much as it ought to be instead. This proves that her God sort of blesses sin. The Catholic cannot be saved until she or he starts to believe in forgiveness which means severance from the Church and becoming a Protestant.

The Catholic Church declares that though Christ has paid the price for our sins in full – for his atoning work is infinite in value – it says that God kindly leaves a bit for us to pay ourselves.

Impossible. It wouldn’t be fair for Jesus to pay for all our sins and then ask us to partly pay for them ourselves. It would be punishing sin more than it deserves.

The bit we have to pay by undertaking punishment is called temporal punishment.

Catholics cannot be saved if they believe in temporal punishment for it prevents sincere belief in the atonement of Christ. They may only think they believe in the atonement but that is no good. To believe because of a mistake is not acceptable for you don’t know what you are doing. God will only accept real faith which is sane faith. He will not bless a vice.

Rome’s god tells us to forgive and won’t do it himself. He has no right to do this. He expects us to suffer in forgiving while he does not really forgive.

We see that the Catholic has to earn God’s forgiveness – now earning forgiveness, isn’t that a contradiction? Pardon cannot be deserved. You need money to buy the prayers and talismans required for gaining indulgences and the more money you donate to the priest the more forgiveness you get. Catholicism sells salvation and that is the sin of simony (Acts 10). When Rome says she does not put pardon up for sale she just means her own twisted and wrong definition of pardon.

The man Roman Catholicism calls the first pope, Peter, wrote that Jesus died for us to bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18). He could not have written this if we have temporal punishment to pay. To delay paying it is to risk not paying it at all and if it is for our good like Catholicism says we are refusing to make ourselves better people. Moreover, delaying to pay could result in sickness or disaster befalling us for it has to be paid. We see that to put off paying is a sin. It is not a perfection so it must be a sin though many Catholics might say it is not a sin. If we are not paying our debt then the Catholic doctrine that we can omit this and be really in fellowship with God is false. Jesus could not have brought us to God if the Catholic doctrines of temporal punishment and being free from mortal sin are true. It would be a mortal sin to give the thing you are most sure of, your own life, to God in death with a sin on your soul. It is degrading the worst thing that can happen to you. It is refusing to make the best possible sacrifice of it. How could that not be mortal? You have to pay now and only those who die free from sin, that is babies who are baptised, have any hope of eternal salvation.

God would not needlessly ask for payment of the debt of temporal punishment when so much sin has arisen over it. God hates sin. Temporal punishment proves that the Catholic God is not love.

By the way, notice how the doctrine of temporal punishment forbids pleasure for we are all sinners.

The Catholic Church must start believing in pardon all the way when it considers it to be a great thing.

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CONCLUSION

Temporal punishment makes no sense and is a denial of the forgiveness of God. Instead of forgiving, God deems you must still be punished but less. KS CONSULTED

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PENANCE CONSIDERED Michael S Bostock, Wickliffe Press London, 1985

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BIBLE VERSIONS USED

The Amplified Bible

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