Questions I Wished I Asked When I Was In Parochial School

 1. Every person in hell has parents. How can a parent in heaven be eternally happy if their child is in hell?

2. We humans are homo sapiens, one of twenty one species of humans, 20 of which existed before us and who had intelligence, including some wearing clothes and using fire to cook. Do those other extinct human species have an after life or just homo sapiens?

3. God knows everything each of us are doing every moment that we exist so that he can judge us worthy or not of heaven when we die. So that's 7 billion people today, speaking and thinking in hundreds of languages, plus 60 to 100 billion people that have already died and like one third of the Angels could still fall into sin, plus who knows how many other intelligent life species throughout the Universe exist. How does God handle those billions of deeds and thoughts every second of the day in hundreds of different languages, and also how does God have any time to have fun himself?

4. God knows everything that has ever happened in the past. So God would remember his very first thought ever. He then could date when that first thought occurred. Since God has always existed, that means for hundreds of trillions of years prior to his first thought, he had no thoughts. Must have been very endlessly boring.

5. When the 10 Commandments were given to Moses, the Sabbath Day was Saturday and one of the Commandments told us to keep it Holy. So since God never changed the Sabbath Day after the 10 Commandments were given to Moses, why do Christians use Sunday as the Sabbath Day?

6. How can a loving and merciful God allow people to be eternally punished to suffer very painfully in a horrible hell? Think about how long eternity is – hundreds of trillions of years repeated hundreds of trillion times is nowhere near as long as eternity. Doesn't sound very loving or merciful. Perhaps eternal hell was a Pope's idea to make people afraid of defying him or the Church and thus subservient to his wishes.

7. Even if a person ascends to heaven, after trillions of years in heaven, won't he/she run out of interesting things to do and become eternally bored?

8. No person is perfect. Only God is perfect. Therefore every person will commit sins. It is the teaching of the Catholic Church that the determination of whether a person spends their afterlife in heaven or hell depends on whether they had unforgiven sin at the moment of their death. So a person who has been extremely holy all of their life commits a sin and coincidentally dies instantly after sinning goes to hell while a person who has been very sinful all their life has a heart attack and just before dying sincerely asks forgiveness goes to heaven. Hardly seems fair!!

9. The Church believes in the 10 Commandments. Why did the Catholic Church ignore the Sixth Commandment – Thou Shall Not Kill – for hundreds of years, cruelly murdering millions of people? Why are some of the Popes who led this effort canonized as saints? Shouldn't they be in hell?

10. In nearly 12 years in parochial school, We never read nor discussed the Bible. Why?

11. There were actually 50 gospels, not 4. So how did these 4 get chosen. About 300 years after the death of Jesus, the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine, just before a battle that he won, saw a comet explode in the shape of the Cross. He did not understand that it was a comet and took it as a sign from God to convert to Christianity which he did. Since there were so many different essentially unorganized sects of Christianity, Constantine wanted to have one organized religion and use it to support and unite his empire. So he convened a meeting with different religious leaders to determine which gospels best supported his goals of empire. That's how those 4 gospels were chosen and the rest ruled as heresy, punishable by death to believers. He made Christianity the official religion of his empire to more firmly control his empire.

12. Why are there so few saints in the Catholic Church compared to the Earth's population? Shouldn't the overwhelming majority of us be going to heaven? If not, then why were we created? So that the majority or very substantial percentage of us would burn in hell forever?!! Would be better to never have been born then to involuntarily assume the risk of eternal hell.

13. Did the Virgin Mary, being married to Joseph, have children after Jesus was born?

14. The Virgin Mary never died, but instead Jesus came down from heaven later in her life, and carried her alive physical body into heaven. That raises a lot of questions:

a. As a human body, wouldn't Mary have froze to death in the upper atmosphere which is over 200 degrees below zero, and in space where it is roughly 400 degrees below zero.

b. For her body to survive in heaven, it must reside in a physical space with warmth and oxygen to facilitate breathing. Theoretically then, heaven must be a physical place and thus possibly could be found through exploration. Correct?

c. If Heaven is a physical place, then how do the dead, whose bodies remain on Earth, navigate it?