What the heck... I've said this before but the night my own father died, he appeared ("materialised") in my bed room in the unit where I was living at the time. He started with an apology for the way he treated me, we argued and talked, and at the end he gave this almighty, terrifying scream.
Then he just disappeared. It was however quite obvious something was coming for him as he was screaming. Sheer terror - it was so frightening I started to scream, and all I could see was his fear.
I was an atheist back then. Since then I've become Christian, first Protestant and now Catholic.
I also believe in the approved apparitions of Mary, and I think Fatima on the 13th October 1917, when World War I was at its height, with the "Christian" nations of the West slaughtering each other's young men by the million, was the most relevant to our times.
There were also three, not one, miracles at that time -
1. The well known and most publicized "dancing Sun", witnessed by 70,000 people.
2. The fact people were staring at the "dancing Sun" for about 10 minutes on end, without a single case of reported eye damage.
They were all and individually protected, since normally you risk permanent damage after
10 seconds, not 10 minutes.
3. It had been raining for hours beforehand and the ground and their clothes were saturated (and dirty). Suddenly (instantaneously) the ground and their clothes were dry, and not only that, their clothes were clean. Since water has a high specific heat, scientists have calculated that the energy required to do this in such a short time was of the order of a 10 megaton nuclear explosion. But everybody merely felt comfortable, and they certainly weren't vaporised.
During the proceedings, Mary showed the three children a vision of Hell, as follows -
Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. This vision lasted but an instant. How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first Apparition, to take us to heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror.
I believe that description was accurate. That's why my father screamed that night.
The business of hoping that Hell is annihlation is not based on Scripture, but on our humanitarian instinct. It's so horrible that we think God couldn't possibly allow it to happen.
He has so far allowed the Holocaust, 2 atomic bombs, the Black Death, Genghis Khan, hideous diseases, crucifixions, tidal waves and rotting corpses on the beaches and in the bush, 2 World Wars, the Wars of Religion which tore Western Europe apart in the 16th and 17th century (with Germany's population dropping from 16 million to 6 million, with France suffering 3 million dead), the Gulags, Stalin's millions, Pol Pot and any number of other tyrants.
If God's so soft, then why does He allow all this evil as part of His plan? I don't like it, and I don't even like God much sometimes for more personal reason.
But I know this much - He isn't soft. The price for our salvation was the crucifixion of His own Son.
I wonder what that cost Him? And if we just throw it back in His face, then we will pay the price.
