Agnostic aphorisms

Does the state of one's soul matter at the moment of one's death? Catholic tradition certainly suggests so. Being in a state of grace or in a state of mortal sin may make the difference between one of two eternal destinies.

Scott Hahn tells the story of Mafia mobsters who would give a victim (if they liked him) the chance to confess his sins to a priest in a car before sending him to swim with the fishes, or (if they didn't like him), arranging to have him machine gunned in bed with a prostitute to ensure his infernal destiny in the next life. How twisted is that!

I was recently in conversation with a lapsed Catholic about the significance of a person's moral state before God at the moment of death. It was interesting, because the reaction was immediate and visceral. Here are some of the responses I received:

• Excising the notion of God is a good thing. He's just dead. Life is precious because it ends.
• People are precious because they are fragile, brief, and beautiful.
• Christians labor within mind-forged manacles.
• I wish that everyone were mature enough to know that they don't need to be supernaturally policed to do unto each other correctly.
• If I kept my thought in a cage, it would throw itself from a bridge.

While such sentiments are highly vulnerable to richly-deserved ridicule, my purpose here is not to discuss the obvious sorts of replies one may make. Many of the really good, hard-core responses are so devastating, they aren't really effective anyway, since they leave the other person resenting you.

Rather, I'm simply intrigued to be exposed again to individuals who say such things. When I taught at Lenoir-Rhyne University, this sort of thing was the regular fare of classroom discussion. Now that I'm teaching in a diocesan seminary, it's become virtually nonexistent. Perhaps it's helpful, if a trifle depressing, to be reminded occasionally of what people actually say they believe and think they actually believe. Even those who were once practicing Catholics. I offer the qualifiers ("... think they actually believe") since I'm convinced that I have yet to meet a person who would qualify as a bona fide atheist or unconditional agnostic. (Romans 1:18-24)