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Monday 6 February 2012

More Dead than Alive


OK, honesty time. I have always been a bit geeky. Most of my friends in philosophy and theology class were a bit geeky. All the cool kids were in drama and art. Sociologist and engineers were not on the radar, off at opposite ends of the spectrum. In 1968-1969, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey at least twelve times and no, I did not do drugs. Part of it was that I was dating a lots of guys who said, "Hey, do you want to see Space Odyssey?" Of course, unless the guys were really geeky, I went again and again. (I saw Dr. Zhivago four times in a month because of this pattern. And, I hate that movie now, although the scenery is great!)

The movie does not exactly fit into Catholic ideas of God or humans. In fact, it is a clarion call of the Modernist heresy of "progressivism", condemned by the Church, which states that humans will evolve into some type of superior spiritual and physical creatures. Star Trek is full of this heresy.



In the past few days, the BBC magazine has had an interesting article on whether there are more people living than dead. The author, and here is the link, notes that Kubrick in his book, which I read only once, puts this statistic in his story. "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living."


Wesley Stephenson, the author of the article writes that now, in 2012, there are 19 dead people, or  "ghosts" for every living person. This is astounding. As one who daily prays for the souls in Purgatory, this was a shocker. I assumed the opposite. 


We do not have to believe in private revelations, but here are the three children, two on their way to canonization, who saw Hell. 


This statistic might not mean much to some who read this blog, but it does for me, I need to pray more for the dead. How many souls are in Purgatory? How many in Heaven? How many in Hell? And, yes, contrary to some theologians and priests in America, in seminaries, and elsewhere, there is a Hell and there are souls there, forever. Pray, fast, pray.