DREADFUL ROMAN CATHOLIC DOCTRINE OF INDULGENCES

ROMAN CATHOLIC DOCTRINE:
 
God is fair and he punishes sin.
 
He forgives sin. But we still owe him some amendment afterwards. It is good for us to do good in place of the evil we did.
 
He demands this amendment and we call it temporal punishment. It is temporary punishment. It is the punishment due to sin even after it is forgiven.
 
The saints did a lot of good works and suffering to atone for sins. There is a surplus. We can draw on this surplus to cancel our debt of temporal punishment.
 
To draw on it we obtain something called an indulgence.
 
INDULGENCES
 
Temporal punishment makes no sense and is a denial of the forgiveness of God. Instead of forgiving, God deems you must still be punished but less. 
 
When John Tetzel was selling Pope Leo X’s indulgence to free the souls in Purgatory to raise money to build St Peter’s, the Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, was so angry that he incited a rebellion that led to the formation of Protestantism.

Today this is the dogma of indulgences.

Merits are the rewards you deserve.

All merits that please God have been won by his grace. Merits gained without grace deserve no reward from the Lord so if any act deserves a reward it is because of God.

The Church says that Jesus and the saints accumulated more merits than they needed for they did so much good. They were so good that they won rewards that they cannot have for they have their fill so they can give them to us or to the souls in Purgatory.

These merits can be used by us to pay our debt of temporal punishment and can be distributed to the living and the souls in Purgatory to cancel out demerits, the punishments deserved. The Church claims that even after sin has been forgiven it ought to be punished. The punishment is called temporal punishment.

This punishment has to be paid for by the sinner or by others in her or his place.

The pope and the Church have the authority to give out these merits any way they like. The Vatican decides how these merits are to be distributed. Partial indulgences are remission of some of the debt of temporal punishment and a plenary indulgence gets rid of the whole lot.

All of them can only be obtained under conditions other than mere desire and repentance. For example, you can get a plenary indulgence if you visit the Holy Land.

The Church used to give indulgences for 300 days and 40 days and so on. This is popularly thought to mean that 300 or 40 days would be knocked off your Purgatory but it just means that if you were doing penance on earth every day all day, you would have to do 300 or 40 days less of it (page 327, The Student’s Catholic Doctrine). Gaining 300 days for a soul in Purgatory might reduce its penance by a day or a week for a day or week in Purgatory might be as terrible as 300 or 40 days torture in this world.

Since the merits of others that we get give us the pleasure of letting another earn our redemption from temporal punishment availing of them is called gaining an indulgence.
 
The Church offers indulgences to make sure sinners get off lightly. The hurt they brought to others is not taken seriously. When did saving one's own skin become a virtue?
 
There is no right and wrong or righteousness or unrighteousness. What you have is good and less good. To accuse people of being capable of evil is just excoriating them. To accuse somebody of sin or to say that sinners deserve Hell is really saying you hate them at some level. The hate is real no matter how much you pretend it's not there. For the Church to condemn sin as very very serious and to make an abomination of it and then to let them off lightly with it shows its good training for somebody that wants to trivialise suicide bombings etc. The intention to trivialise is there in both cases.

BIBLE, TEMPORAL PUNISHMENT AND INDULGENCES
 
The doctrine of indulgences is not in the Bible. Not only that but it is irreconcilable with it.

When Jesus told the apostles and disciples that whatever they bind on earth is bound in Heaven.  Catholicism sees indulgences there.  But he was promising them the infallible inspiration necessary to give the truth to the world. Whatever error they tied up to keep it from spreading on the earth would be tied up in Heaven. In the originals he said whatever they bind shall have been bound in Heaven not whoever.

We can’t get an indulgence unless we have temporal punishment to undergo or unless we are getting the indulgence for somebody else and not ourselves – giving it away in effect. But if I do not get rid of that punishment by penance which is better than doing nothing until I manage to win an indulgence I am committing a sin. It is a debt that must be paid fast. It is a sin to wait for an indulgence. Temporal punishment is supposed to be about healing the person’s preference for things other than God (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1472). It is not needed when an indulgence earned for you by somebody else can get rid of it and simply forces people to sin more. The Church is lying.

Moses was still allegedly still punished by God after he was forgiven for sinning but that could have been because he reversed his repentance or did not fit in with God’s purpose because of what he had done (Deuteronomy 4:21) so this episode does not prove temporal punishment. Moses explained that God could not undo what he decided to do over Moses’ sin on account of the people. It could be that God decided to punish Moses by doing X but when Moses repented he still had to do X but for a different reason. To harm Moses for a different reason would not be punishing him – the motive makes a difference.

1 Kings 21:29 does not prove temporal punishment for God merely promises to ensure that Ahab’s repentance will lessen the evil he will send or more accurately, permit. Ahab did terrible things and would still have to deal with the results of his actions but the results would be lessened when he changed his ways and treated other people better. Nothing in that implies anything about temporal punishment. 2 Samuel 12:14 says even though David has repented and been forgiven by God his child will still die. But that might have been for deterrence or to avert the possibility that the child would grow up and thwart the divine plan.

The Bible insists that salvation is by faith alone. Indulgences are no good.