Vatican condemns April Fools Pranks.

A spokesperson for the Vatican has spoken out against practices common in Europe and North America such as the celebrations of Halloween, April Fools Day, and the 'pagan' elements of Mardi Gras.

This is particularly concerning this year as April Fools Day falls during Holy Week. 

Cardinal Duhamel of the Congregation for the Deffense of Condemnation, said  about pranks "Not only are such practices contrary to human dignity and rooted in anti Christian history, but they are directly contrary to scripture."  The scripture he refers to is Proverbs 26:18-19 which reads 

"Like a maniac shooting flaming arrows of death is one who deceives their neighbor

and says, “I was only joking!”

"Even Jesus Himself taught that anyone who says you fool is in danger of Hell Fire" (Matt 5:22) says Duhamel.

"That's bad!" says Jeannette Manser of the Western Canadian Association of Catholic Youth Ministers.

These issues may be addressed at the upcoming synod on Groundhogs Day and other Occult practices.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Catholic Youth Ministry Coordinator from Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, said "The danger here is that these conversations only reinforce stereotypes already held against Catholics as being humourless and incapable of irony.  Suppose someone only reads the first few paragraphs of this article, and ignores its publication date?"

3 motives which drive the Saints

Q:  Hey Peter, I was wondering if you could make a book recommendation.  I was wondering if you knew a book about Saints or other people (any religion, non-religious, etc.) and their lives, beliefs and motivations.  I think they must be some of the most interesting people I have heard of.

A: I love the saints, and I am fascinated by them as well.  I suspect that my interest in them is similar to the interest that an aspiring athlete has to a great professional athlete who has excelled in their sport.  I take seriously the statement that “We are all called to be saints”, and hope to be one myself (though this has been my hope for 18 years now, and I certainly have not come close to that goal so far. I just have to trust in God’s mercy and grace and continue to hope!)

That said, most of the books I know about saints are biographies that share their inspiring stories, or maybe some theological treatises which outline their beliefs…  but I don’t know of very many books that delve into their inner workings and motivations!  The one book that comes to mind is “The fulfillment of all desire” by Ralph Martin, which is a book that I would highly recommend to any Catholic who wants to enter into the depths of prayer, but it is hardly a beginners book for someone who is not Catholic!

If people reading this blog have any recommendations, I would be happy to pass them on to the questioner!

Maybe someone should write a book.  Whenever I think that, I think “Maybe I should write a book”, but then that book idea has to fall into the cue of ideas behind the books I want to write on simplicity and on the rosary and stations and the novels I want to write.

But were I to write a book, I would likely tackle it something like this;

Outline the major motives and themes of the Saints, then throw some fascinating stories into the book that illustrate these points.  I think the major motives for the saints are union with God, love and humility.  Maybe also self improvement, but I actually think that is just a cynical observation of what saints are doing, and probably not the motive of real saints. Actually the book may need a whole section debunking the false motives that cynical people ascribe to the saints!

There seems to be a set of assumptions regarding motivations, which maybe go back to Freud’s idea that every action is motivated either by a desire for sex or for power.  The assumption that a lot of people have is that there must be a selfish motive for everything we do.  So why do people have children?  For a sense of fulfillment or joy or whatever- for some selfish reason.  The idea that there is any altruistic motive for doing anything is for many people a foreign concept. 

This question came to me on Facebook just as I was sitting down to watch “The Drop Box”, a movie about a pastor in South Korea who put a box in the wall of his church where girls and women who felt they had to abandon their babies could abandon them anonymously but the baby would still be cared for.   The pastor has taken in hundreds of babies, and passed them on to various organizations, but he and his wife are now raising 15 children themselves, many with serious handicaps.

Why would he do that?  Again cynical people seem to think the only answer has to be a selfish one- that he must be seeking attention or glory or be trying to ease his hurting conscience or something.   But I suspect that he’s doing it for love.

I have on occasion done things purely out of love. At those moments, I have sensed what it must be like to be a saint.  There is a sense of fulfillment and purpose and freedom in doing these things. However, no one would do it for that sense- at least not to the degree that the saints do it!

One day a man watching Mother Teresa as she cared for the sick and the poor said “You couldn’t pay me enough to do what you do.”  Mother Teresa looked at him and said “Me neither.”

What motivates Mother Teresa or Pastor Lee of Korea or Fr Damien who lived with the lepers in Hawaii?

None of the selfish explanations suffice for these people.  So there must be something else.

The Christian idea is that we were made originally to love.  (People even try to pin selfish motives on God, and ask “Why did God make us?” as if there must have been some sort of selfish motive. But he made us simply to love us!).  We were designed for love with each other and with our creator.  But we chose selfishness, sin, and chaos. And so now most of our desires are tainted by those things.  But Jesus’ death on the cross, the ultimate selfless act, was so that we could be restored to our original condition.   God does not just declare us holy, but rather he makes us holy, sanctifies us, which is a process which takes time and effort and cooperation with God’s grace.

Maximilian Kolbe said that sainthood is when your will is in perfect alignment with God’s will. You want precisely the thing that God wants.  You are motivated entirely by love, and not by selfishness. And the third point is of course that you do not want attention or glory, because you want humility, which underpins everything you do.  That’s why I say that even self improvement cannot be the real motive, since this turns into a form of narcissism.

I also think this illustrates an error that we make in Christianity when we evangelize-  we try to promote our religion by the joy and satisfaction and meaning we find in it, or by a longing for Heaven, or some people will even employ a fear of Hell. But we promote a philosophy that is fundamentally selfless by appealing to selfishness!  Jesus on the other hand invited people to take up his cross, to suffer, to serve, to give, to love, to die.  I suspect that even if someone does not agree with the Christian propositions, we all feel a certain resonance in the call to holiness.  This is precisely why Christianity is ‘good news’ and offers hope. 

Why the biggest questions people ask to challenge Catholics don't make sense unless you already believe that Catholicism is true.

Wisdom-  Let us be attentive!

That's what they chant in Ukrainian Catholic Churches before a reading.  I'm always tempted to chant that at the beginning of one of my talks, but I've never done it yet.  Probably I will some day.

I think that when people think of wisdom, they think of someone like Master Oogway from Kung Fu Panda saying "Yesterday is history, Tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift- that is why it is called the present."  They want a succinct poetic and slightly mystical sounding sentence- a proverb I suppose- about some profound subject. But I always suspect that true wisdom is applied knowledge through the lense of experience with a natural ability to recognize truth.  Here's the problem with that.  I suspect that if someone is truly wise, than the wise things they say will not be understood by people who are not wise unless they have a minimum of the same knowledge.  So when a fool (ie: someone lacking wisdom) asks a hard question about Catholicism and the answer is a wise answer, the fool fails to understand the answer and they assume that their failure to understand the answer implies that the answer is either incorrect or incomprehensible, when actually the logical thing to assume is that your own ability to grasp the truth is limited, and that's why you don't get it.

For example-  I don't get quantum mechanics.  Or the theory of relativity.  Or string theory. I've tried to understand these things, but truth be told my understanding of basic physics is so limited that I can't really begin to grasp these applied physics.  And there are elements in these theories that defy logic in my mind-  but I am prepared to admit that the limitation is in my mind, rather than in the logic.  So rather than assume that these theories are false because I don't get them, I assume that my understanding is limited.

But I think that people should approach theology with at least the same level of humility.  Like the student in my office today who stated that Jesus work could have been just magic or the work of aliens, based on a really superficial understanding of the gospel story.  Or the Jehovah's witness who dismissed the trinity because if he went door to door he would get any number of contradictory explanations of the trinity and it is hard to grasp. Or people who reject the faith because they can't figure out how God could allow suffering or evil to exist, or why stories in the Old Testament make God look like an evil being, or why Catholics don't allow condoms in Africa or bless homosexual marriages.  People will dismiss Catholicism on any one of these grounds, and will ask a question as a challenge, and take the fact that Catholics are named able to answer the question in a succinct one liner that they will understand and be persuaded by as evidence that the Catholic Church does not have a good answer.

But-  the Church does have good answers to each of these objections.  I happen to know the answer to each of them- or at least I know a part of them. Each questions has an answer that you cannot plumb the depths of... but again, this is precisely what wisdom is.

St Augustine said "Theology is faith seeking understanding".  What this means is that before you can understand the Churches teachings on something deep and theological, you first have to have faith.  Many people would rather have it the other way.  They would rather already know have the answer to the questions before they will even acknowledge that there is such a thing as a God, or that Jesus was God, or so on. And the fact that they have not heard a satisfying answer to their pet objection will to them suggest that the whole framework is false. But the truth is that the answer depends on a sufficient understanding of the framework.

This realization came to me clearly when I gave a talk the other day about redemptive suffering.  "Why does God allow bad things to happen?"  is one of those questions that I think takes wisdom to answer-  a foundation of Catholic teaching accompanied by the experience both of grace and of suffering, and the ability to recognize truth.  I suspect that the answer to that question is so profound that no one can properly summarize it, but you have to be immersed in it.

But I do think, despite my own lack of wisdom, that I have some insights based on Church teachings and a solid grasp of scripture.  My intention is to write a series of blog entries which explore these deep questions based on that foundation, and outlines the foundation in a way that anyone can understand.  This may take time.

Meanwhile, let me conclude by saying that when you ask a question and the answer to the question is unsatisfying, do no assume that the framework of Catholicism must therefore be faulty. Rather consider the evidence for Catholicism, and use it as the foundation to begin exploring the truly deep questions.

How do you do effective youth ministry?

I tend to think of youth ministry in largely marketing terms.  I think an error that we make in catholic formation is that we go straight to catechesis without first evangelizing.  This just makes the faith seem that much more boring and irrelevant.  Then we spend our time doing apologetics-  defending the church against objections that most people don't actually have.  I suspect that this only makes the Church look defensive, which in turn makes youth (and everyone) less likely to trust the church.

I see evangelization as being like Aladdin on his magic carpet and saying to Jasmine "Do you trust me?"  At some point the youth have to decide whether or not they trust God/the Church/youth minister enough to let go of what is safe and to jump onto the carpet.  So rather than arguing or coercing people into it, we need to entice them onto it.  We need to understand how people make decisions, and make them want to choose the faith.  Here is my strategy;

#1- Fun!  I get kids involved in the ministry through extremely fun games, with titles like Nerf Revolution, Communism, KGB, Alien Invasion, Zombie Apocalypse, Secret Service, etc.  These are large scale games then when kids hear about them, they want to come play them! 

#2 Funny! Then I make the formative aspects fun (funny) and interactive.  People respond much better to a talk if it is funny-  and being funny can be as easy as looking up some good pastor jokes, or adding puns into your presentation.  Someone who is laughing is making themselves malleable to the message.  This makes the message feel relevant.

#3 Relational.  Kids will come at first because they think it sounds fun, but they will continue to come if they feel like someone cares whether they do or not. 

#4 Inculturation. I invite kids to enough youth events, with enough different groups, that they begin to realize that Christianity is a whole subculture, and that they like it.  In doing this my hope is that youth will start self identifying as Christian.

#5 Experience of God.  The hope is that we will eventually bring the kids to a place where they can have an encounter with God. Usually this will take the form of a profound, and sometimes inexplicable emotional encounter.  When I say it like that, it sounds like we are emotionally manipulating people into accepting some precepts.  But the truth is almost every decision we make is based in emotion, and while we justify our decisions rationally often rationality takes a back seat to emotion. I heard a freakonomics podcast recently which likened the way we make decisions to the american political system.  We like to think that our reason is the Oval office, making decisions.  But really the decisions are made by our emotions.  Our Reason is just the department that makes the press release. So to motivate people we need to impact them emotionally.  

I think people critical of Christianity will jump on this,and say that I admit that I am trying to impact their decision by impacting their emotions. To that I say yes-  and I think everyone does it when they try to sell their ideology.  When i asked Catherine to marry me, I set up an elaborate day of quality time, beauty and romance. Was I manipulating her emotionally?  I suppose I could have just made a cold, calculated, reasoned argument for why she should commit her whole life to me. But I also suppose that that wouldn't have worked. God is asking people for a committed life long relationship.  Why not set the atmosphere? 

This is difficult to do at a one night youth group event-  instead we need to get kids to a retreat or camp where they can spend more time opening up.

#6 Discipleship. Finally, the end game is to turn the kids into disciples, who are committed to living out their faith long term, and living by it's precepts.  Key to this is regular prayer life, and service. Youth need to become evangelists themselves, so go on OLVC team, or NET, or become leaders within our home grown ministries. Then they will own the faith, and will no longer be mere consumer Christians. The key to Christianity is that it transforms us from being selfish, self consumed people, to people of love who live for others. At some point all Christians need top stop being Christian for selfish reasons and start being a force for transformation, or Christianity will die.

This sums up my strategies-  but obviously it doesn't apply only to youth ministry.  I think that any Christian that thinks that they are at stage 6, discipleship, should also be evangelizing, and I think most of these principals are true no matter who you are evangelizing to. 

Is there such a thing as objective sin, or does it always depend on the situation?

Q:  I've been reading through your blog entries and I've noticed that a few times you draw on the point that people often want an overly legalistic definition of what sin is and isn't. That this is a flawed way of looking at it, because "[sins] are things that are not loving and so take you or others away from God", and that "people living by the rules miss the point entirely".

That makes perfect sense to me, but how then can one make a blanket statement that something is always a sin? Like if someone breaks into a families house in the middle of the night and the dad yells a choice selection of four letter words to scare the intruder away, he is doing it out of love for his family. 

That might be a bad example given your response to "Why is swearing a sin?", but the point I'm trying to make is that I don't see how there can be certain things that are always wrong, regardless of context. Given the right circumstances, is there not always a case in which something is not actually sinful?

Intuitively, that doesn't sound right to me. To say, "It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you're not opposing love by doing it" seems to me to be on the path towards moral relativism. By extension then, it doesn't matter what Church you belong to, as long as you're a good person, but I've heard this notion mocked more than once. And rightly so, Jesus was pretty clear about the necessity to all be one in Christ. 

I may have strayed from the point a bit here, but what I'm trying to get at is that I don't understand how love can be the only consideration in determining what is and isn't sinful. That sounds great and makes logical sense to me, but it seems very counter intuitive to what I've grown up thinking.

A:  This is a fascinating question, but one that I struggled to sum up in a single sentence for the title, so I doubt many people will read it!

I theology professor of mine once explained that every heresy is the overemphasis of one truth over another, while the truth always falls somewhere in the middle.  So, for example, some heresies emphasized Jesus' humanity, and ignored or denied his divinity, and others emphasized his divinity.  But the truth is he is both human and divine.

You use the example of 'four letter words', but I actually think that swearing is the perfect example of one end of the spectrum.  I don't use the 'f-word' our of respect, but I don't think it is inherently sinful, and think that when french people describe seals there's nothing wrong with using the 'ph-word'.  

So on one end of the spectrum you have people who want to declare that "Swearing is a sin" and then they want to define what precisely is a swear, and struggle to differentiate between ass as a swear referring to a gluteus maximus, and the innocent bible friendly term referring to a donkey.  So the most flexible man in the Bible is lot, who tied his ass to a tree and walked a mile.  I don't even think that within this context, I have sinned by using the term!  

Anyway, that is the legalistic end, and I think it is the end to which most of us err.  We want strict definitions on how far is too far and which words are swears and conditions for cohabitation and for wars.  And if it is not clearly defined we are frustrated.  But truth is, it is not clearly defined! Because moral life is a skill, not a list of rules.  Like in any other skill, say Basketball, there are rules, guidelines, and advice, all of which we have to function within.  But even if you do everything technically within the defined guidelines, you need to hone your skill before you can score!

At the other end of the spectrum are the 'relativists'.  These are the people who want to say that whatever they feel is right, is right.  This philosophy is very popular, because it is very tolerant and accepting. There seems to be a general movement in our culture to thinking that this is totally right, and that legalism, and so all rules, is very wrong.  You notice the irony even in saying that.  But the last thing people want to do is to be 'condemning', or to try to declare anything to be a sin.  Interestingly, people who adopt that philosophy tend to pretty readily condemn anyone they perceive as being judgmental. At the extreme ends of that spectrum are people who want to explain away things like the holocaust and say that it wasn't really wrong, and we can't judge what they did, etc.  Sure, there were extenuating circumstances, competing philosophies, but I would argue that it is important and even our responsibility to acknowledge that the holocaust was wrong.  I think most people intuitively agree with me.

So simply, are somethings wrong in every circumstance?  Sure. Torturing the innocent.  Sexually molesting a child.  I cannot imagine a circumstance where these things would not be wrong.

But I will go further.

Abortion is always wrong.  In every circumstance.  Now I don't judge the individual who has an abortion-  they may have had faulty information, a poorly formed conscience, extenuating circumstances. It is because of this that the responsibility of the Church is to provide good information, help form consciences properly, and provide for solutions to the extenuating circumstances.  When we say that something is wrong that does not give us licence to judge and condemn people.  It means that what they did was inherently, spiritually destructive.

Think of you spiritual health as being comparable to physical health.  Some things are ok in moderation, but harmful in excess.  Other things are always harmful.  And other things kill you.   The Catholic Church are the doctors who help identify the threats, and then treat the damage done by them.  Some things which are harmful in some situations- like lopping off a limb- are the necessary medicine in other situations.  But this requires judgement and expertise.

This is why it does matter which religion you believe in.  The Church has been given the Holy Spirit to help it identify the various threats.  So the Church isn't just guessing-  the Church has guidance and the guarantee of getting it right.  

If all you have to go on is instinct to from your conscience, I doubt that you would ever come to the conclusion that contraception is contrary to the dignity of human life and thus of sex, and so is wrong.  (Though some people do figure it out on their own).  The Church then has 2000 years of accumulated wisdom coupled with the guarantee and guidance of the Holy Spirit.  

What we need to do as individuals is first of all give our 'assent of faith' to the Church.  This means that if our own judgement does not align with that of the Church, we assume that the Church got it right instead of ourselves.  Under this we allow our consciences to be formed.  This means we hone our skills, learn how to apply the principals of morality to our daily lives. After that we "Love, but do what we will" as St Augustine put it.  

There isn't some rule book which you can just look up your particular moral dilemma in and get a hard and fast answer.  That's because God doesn't want people who are just skilled at following rules.  God wants people who are skilled at loving. 

Is it wrong to live together before you're married?

Q:  My boyfriend wants me to move in with him.  This makes a lot of sense to me since I can’t stay where I am anyway, and we would save a lot of money, and will probably get married eventually.  But my Mom is mad about it, and says that if we move in together she won’t even visit us at our new house.  What’s so wrong about living together?

A: I actually got this question quite some time ago, so I hope the one asking is still interested in my answer!  I try to always answer according to the Churches teaching, rather than opinion.  So in order to make sure I got it right, I first read a letter on Cohabitation put out the American Catholic Bishops in the late 90’s.

From my read on it, there’s nothing wrong with living together per se…  but it is a really bad idea.  I find people always want really black and white answers, like “This is a sin, this is not a sin, this would be a sin if conditions A, B, and C were met, unless condition D applied.”  People keep wanting to reduce sin to some sort of strict moral code or set of laws, like the priests in confession will have some law book in which they can look up sins and the appropriate penance for them!  (Actually, at one point such books existed…)

To understand sin you have to understand that they are not strictly delineated, but are things that are not loving and so take you or others away from God, so some things are sins in some contexts and not in others.  Like the f-word is a swear in English, but when French sealers use the word phoque, it’s different.

The letter from the Bishops basically said that living together increases the likelihood of divorce (as studies have repeatedly shown), and that while there are good reasons to want to live together, they are not as good as the reasons to not!

It is interesting and counter intuitive that divorce rates go up.  Maybe there is no causal relationship.  Maybe divorce rates are just higher among people who are willing to take moral risks.  But maybe the impermanent nature of the cohabiting relationship is brought into the marriage, and actually becomes a threat itself!

Part of the problem is that most people who want to live together are probably already sexually active.  If that’s the case, you have already chosen to go your own way, and to ignore the clear teachings of the Church on chastity.  Living together may exacerbate the problem, but the problem really is that you are sexually active, not the living together.  It’s like teens will ask questions like “If you are a man, having sex with a male prostitute, and he has Aids, is it OK to use a condom?”  Teens are surprised to learn that in that context, Catholics don’t care if you use a condom-  in fact it may be wise. 

This is because you are already abandoning the Churches teachings on sex-  that it is only moral when it is open to life and an act of love.  If it is impossible for the act to transmit life anyway, who cares if you use a condom?  I think the inclination to make Catholic morality a string of rules blinds us to the fact that they are all logical and have a common underpinning.

So if you’re sleeping together anyway-  living together makes it harder to break up, harder to repent from your sin, and put’s faith filled people in the awkward position of feeling like they are acknowledging the sin if they come over…  but the real problem is unchastity.

That aside-  what if you are in a relationship with someone and you are not sleeping together, and you intend to save sex for marriage?  Is living together wrong then?

Yes-  for two reasons.  One, it is the occasion for sin.  And two because it is the cause of scandal.  If you can live in the same house with someone that you are romantically involved with and somehow maintain appropriate physical boundaries, then you are much stronger than I ever was!  I know of at least one couple where they moved in together and wanted to save sex for marriage, but eventually gave in.  Don’t think there could be a problem?  I suggest you watch some old friends episodes, and I think you will quickly realize the pitfalls of living too closely!

Even in my situation today, I would never, say, share a hotel room with a woman besides my wife on a business trip.  Partly because of the temptation which would only increase if I got tired or intoxicated.  And partly because of the scandal!  Someone might discover that we were sharing a room, and draw the logical conclusion.  Not only would that be an issue for my marriage, I might very well lead them to sin.  There would be an implicit endorsement of sinful activity by the presumption that I am living a publicly sinful life!  We must not only be chaste, we must appear to be chaste.  If an engaged couple moved in together, everybody would assume what they were up to, and while people might not be scandalized in the same way as they were in the past, it would imply that you too are OK with premarital sex.

So the moral of the story is, that while there are many practical reasons why someone would want to live together, from a faith perspective it is bad for you and for the others around you.  We have a moral responsibility to avoid sin, the near occasion of sin, and the appearance of sin.

Who goes to Hell?

Q: Suppose I'm wrong. Suppose your son is wrong. I'm standing outside the pearly gates and St. Peter, or God Himself, gives me one chance to explain myself. What would I say except "I'm sorry--I got it wrong. I really tried. But I got it wrong. I saw all the different religions, each saying different things, all changing over time. It seemed just a part of human culture, not ultimate truth. I saw unnecessary suffering and couldn't make heads or tails of it, if you were good and all-powerful. It didn't make sense to me to posit something existing to explain existence: that gets it backwards. I'm sorry, God, that I didn't believe in you, but it wasn't malicious--I just--I just screwed up."

What would Jesus say to that? Would he send me to suffer forever? Do I deserve to be tortured eternally because I read Lucretius as a young man--the 2,000 year old Roman poet who professed his atheism before Christ ever walked desert sand? Because I looked at the ontological argument and found it wanting?

Or would he press me to Him and forgive me? And wouldn't I desire that forgiveness---?

If there is a God that would send me to Hell for making this mistake, I don't want it in my life. Nothing justifies torture. Nothing at all. And He would not be worthy of worship--or even respect. If He is merciful, then I will apologize. If I am right--and he doesn't exist--then I live my life as a free man.

A:  There are so many directions that I can go with this that I feel like I have to first create the outline of my argument, then elaborate on each point.  That way if you don't care about each individual point, you can skip it and get to the parts you do care about! Part of the reason that there are so many directions to go with it is that the question itself is loaded with misunderstandings.  So here's my argument in point form.

1. The nature of Hell:  It is not eternal torture at the hands of a vengeful God.
2. You don't go to Hell for being wrong-  this idea is the confused interpretation by non Christians of the confused oversimplification of the Gospel by Evangelicals based on the confused theology of Martin Luther who was responding to the confusing writings of saint Paul who was trying to dispel the confusion of the Pharisees.  I'll elaborate, but as you can probably guess, it might get confusing!
3. If you ask Jesus why people go to Hell, it's because of a failure to love.
4. Jesus `saves`us by making it possible for us to love through His Grace.
5. People can always reject love, which means rejecting God, but they cannot reject their own existence, so they will continue to exist eternally without love or God, and would in effect torture themselves for this choice.
6. Rejecting Christianity does not make you free.

Ok, so now to elaborate on each point;

1. The nature of Hell:  It is not eternal torture at the hands of a vengeful God.

I think that because so many people learn about the faith when they are children, they retain childish images of faith principals that are actually exceedingly profound.  They presume that their childish notions are correct, and so they reject the faith rather than rejecting their notions!  The devil is a fine example of this.  He gets portrayed in Bugs Bunny as a guy who lives underground and carries a pitch fork, or invisibly sits on your shoulder trying to persuade you to do Evil-  this imagery is laughable, but the theology behind it is not!

So people have this impression that God and the Devil have some sort of a pact, and that if you do not please God he will send you to Hell, the Devils domain, to be tortured for ever.  But it's much more like a marriage proposal.  It's like God says "I want you to live with me in perfect love forever".  Reject God, and you reject Heaven.  Hell is being without God forever.  So God never tortures you, nor commissions the devil to torture you.  If you think of Hell more as a state of being than as a physical location, you will go a long ways towards understanding what the actual teaching is!

2. You don't go to Hell for being wrong-  this idea is the confused interpretation by non Christians of the confused oversimplification of the Gospel by Evangelicals based on the confused theology of Martin Luther who was responding to the confusing writings of saint Paul who was trying to dispel the confusion of the Pharisees.  I'll elaborate, but as you can probably guess, it might get confusing!

Pope Francis warned us against being limited to simplistic formulaic expressions of the Gospel, but these are very popular ways of communicating the Gospel.  The trouble is if you limit yourself to it, the analogy is always lacking and raises more questions.  People have to come to basically understand that the Gospel message is that we can be saved from Hell simply by believing in Jesus, and that not believing in Jesus means we will go to Hell.  But guess what?  That idea is not expressly scriptural, neither is it found in Church history!  It's essentially promoted by modern, American Evangelicals with a modern, American world view.  So how did we get there?

Start with Luther.  Luther was the founder of Protestantism, and he introduced the idea "Sola Fide"-  that we are saved  by faith alone.  Luther was a monk, who feared that he would go to Hell because he could not get his vices under control, and he was reading Romans and Galatians, and he noticed how St Paul always talked about the effects of salvific faith and not works.  From this he concluded that all that is required is to believe in Jesus, and you will be saved, no matter what you do. Never mind the fact that James said "Faith without works is dead."  But Luther misunderstood Paul on a number of points.  What Paul was talking about were the legalistic works, like circumcision or not working on Saturday, upon which pharisees based their merit. He was also not talking about being saved from Hell!

The Early Christians and the Jews did not emphasize much the afterlife.  The word 'saved' in greek can also be translated "healed" or "freed".  The word kingdom used by Jesus and Paul most likely refers to the kingdom anticipated by the Jews, which would be here on earth, and not to Heaven or the afterlife.  The word faith does not mean intellectual assent, but trust-  kind of like if I say to my wife "I have faith in you" it does not mean "I beleive that you exist" but "I believe that you can and will do what you have said you would do."Read in light of this, Paul could have been saying "You are not healed by a lot of legalism, but by grace from Jesus.  Trust Him" This changes everything! 

So the primary point of the gospel is not that you are saved from Hell if you give intellectual assent to the teachings about Jesus.  The point of the gospel is that you are healed of your brokenness and sin if you trust Jesus and rely on the grace won for you.

3. If you ask Jesus why people go to Hell, it's because of a failure to love.

In fact, read the gospel of Matthew and nothing could be more evident.  When separating the sheep from the goats (people going to Heaven from people going to Hell) Jesus asks these questions-  when I was hungry, did you feed me?  When I was thirsty did you give me drink?.... Just as you have done it to one of the least of these, you have done it to me."  

We were created in God's image and likeness.  But due to sin, we are no longer in His likeness-  we are no longer perfectly loving.  The point of Christianity is to be restored to his likeness-  deified or sanctified- through the grace won for us by Christ on the cross.  That's why the Catholics that we look to the most as examples of this are people like Mother Teresa or Pope John Paul II or Pope Francis-  people who were transformed by love.

If this is the case, I think the people who should really be concerned about their salvation are the Rich Christians who believe in Jesus and in all of this, but legalistically give 10% of their wealth to the poor, while not really being loving, and spend their days judging those who sin sexually.  It was people like that that Jesus could not abide.  

4. Jesus 'saves' us by making it possible for us to love through His Grace.

I don't really understand how Jesus' death on the cross buys us graces- but I think the simplified formulas presented as a means to evangelize are sometimes misleading.  Every time we try to explain it, we only do so by allegory-  do not confuse the allegory for the truth!

5. People can always reject love, which means rejecting God, but they cannot reject their own existence, so they will continue to exist eternally without love or God, and would in effect torture themselves for this choice.

Love isn't love unless it can be rejected.  

6. Rejecting Christianity does not make you free.

I don't think anyone who thinks about it in light of what I said really thinks the non Christian is more free than the Christian.  Free to what?  Sleep around?  Look at porn?  Drink yourself silly?  Lie?  Cheat?  Spend your money selfishly?  All the things Christians call sins are limiting on our freedom, because they enslave us and make us function at a lower level.  The idea of Christianity is that we would be so transformed that these sins would hold no appeal to us, and we could function at the highest level-  always able to love without reservation.  It only feels like a restriction in the early stages.  Like the alcoholic, who sees that he is trapped and being destroyed by alcohol.  At first cutting out alcohol is a restriction, but once he is truly free-  at least in an ideal world- he can eventually enjoy a drink again without it enslaving him. The whole point of Christianity is to free you!  People who see it otherwise need to read Romans and Galatians again, because it was to people like that that Paul was really writing.

One last point.  The writer of the question acts as though he really sought the truth, but he 'found the ontological argument wanting.'  Frankly, if that's your excuse for rejecting Christianity, I would suggest that you have not really looked!  No one I know bases their faith on the ontological argument-  most people reading this have no idea what it is.  Don't think for a moment that you can come before the throne room of the almighty, all knowing God, and lay an argument that weak against Him.  If you want a stronger argument for Christianity, start with the historicity of Christ and the case for his resurrection... after all, that's what all of Christianity hinges on.  I dare you to read, say, the Gospel of Luke, and ask the question-  was this document written by a genuine witness, or was it a fabricated myth?  People who come to the myth conclusion as a general rule have not done the research.