Limbo

Pope Benedict’s removal of limbo from the Catholic Church’s doctrines raises an important and interesting point. It is reasonably safe to assume that there exists a specific way that reality actually is. There are different models that people subscribe to that attempt to explain the way things are. The current most popular scientific theory states that approximately 13,703,987,124 years, three months, and fifteen days ago, the universe exploded into existence from an infinitely dense, infinitely small singularity. The matter that we see all around us condensed out of a soup of energy into quarks, leptons, protons, neutrons, electrons, x-tons, and hundreds of other different particles; ever since that world creating explosion the universe has been expanding outwards faster and faster. The scientific explanation has a simplicity that theological ones lack. The Catholic Church’s model includes a heaven, hell, purgatory, and until recently, a limbo for the unbaptized children to go into. Those kids wouldn’t be let into heaven, because of something stupid the first man did 6,000, 50,000, or two million years ago. (hardly seems fair, doesn’t it?) Two thousand years ago, they believe God screwed a virgin, who gave birth to a person named Jesus, who was actually God, and who was tortured 33 years later and killed so that someone would be punished for our sins, because apparently God can’t forgive someone without somebody getting hurt. Their model of reality also includes a slew of saints that can help you out when God has his hands full. The excision of limbo was made in order to make the Church more appealing in places with high infant mortality rates, because apparently people don’t like the idea of their children not getting into heaven. Whether or not we can ever know for sure the true nature of reality, we can rest with the assurances with the knowledge that there was actually one specific way that things happened. Nobody knows for sure the identity of Jack the Ripper, and at this point, we can probably never know for sure. There are many different theories, one of them might be right, or none of them, but not more than one of them can be. We can be sure that there was one specific person, a man who had a name, and maybe a job, that was responsible for that string of dead and mutilated prostitutes over a hundred years ago in England. That is why it is interesting that the model of reality that up to a billion people believe in can be changed by executive fiat, ostensibly for marketing reasons. Either there is a limbo, or there isn’t one, and it is supremely odd to think that any humanly decision can in any way affect its existence or non-existence. If they say it doesn’t exist now, then it has never existed, and they were wrong for hundreds, over a thousand years, but if they were wrong once for all that time, what gives that institution any credibility now?