A life without God?
People choosing to move away from God let darkness rule their world. As sin becomes common in daily life, we slowly increase our tolerance for it, finding new ways to increase bodily pleasure and disregarding others' needs, as there is no personal benefit in charity. The byproduct is to start hating God and searching for excuses to distance us from Him, such as limiting our freedom, archaic thinking in this modern world, etc.
A life without God eventually leads to spiritual hell. Sister Josefa Menendez noticed while in hell (where God is completely absent) for reparation and conversion of sinners, that human souls swore against God (demons in hell know God, thus they do not swear against Him). Similarly, wars occur when God is absent from people's lives; love for neighbour turns to hatred.
Then, who can be saved in a world of hate? The answer is to look carefully at the past for clues. For example, the Nagasaki atomic bomb killed 50,000 people in 9 seconds, and another 80,000 died of radiation sickness. The same in Hiroshima, with 30% higher casualties. A single photo becomes more personal,
Hope is to know who was miraculously saved at Nagasaki; protection by the One True God who cares about His elect in a man-made disaster, and to follow them,
Jesuit Fathers were living in a presbytery near the parish church, which was situated less than a mile away from detonation point, well within the radius of total devastation... all eight members of this community escaped virtually unscathed from the effects of the bomb. Their presbytery remained standing, while the buildings all around, virtually as far as the eye could see, were flattened.
Another reason to obey the Roman Catholic Church's teachings, without distrust, for our own personal benefit in this life and the next. In all, Pope Gregory I (540-604) revealed, in his dialogues alone, an additional thirty-plus miracles to our count.
Book: Dialogues by St Gregory the Great
In 1250, Saint Thomas Aquinas explained the consequence of original sin; since then, the soul is in constant conflict with the body,
God bestowed this favor on man, in his primitive state, that as long as his mind was subject to God, the lower powers of his soul would be subject to his rational mind, and his body to his soul. But inasmuch as through sin man's mind withdrew from subjection to God, the result was that neither were his lower powers wholly subject to his reason, whence there followed so great a rebellion of the carnal appetite against the reason: nor was the body wholly subject to the soul; whence arose death and other bodily defects. For life and soundness of body depend on the body being subject to the soul, as the perfectible is subject to its perfection. Consequently, on the other hand, death, sickness, and all defects of the body are due to the lack of the body's subjection to the soul.
Thus, since the original sin, man is inclined to evil, exacerbated by personal sin and desensitised by cruelty and suffering. It is wishful thinking to believe that through meditation and self-control, a person can efface these spiritual shortcomings (malice, anger, conscupience and ignorance) from their soul on their own. Evil is just temporarily restrained; only God can fix and erase these defects systematically. Through prayer and sacraments, it takes effort to return to a state of innocence. As Jesus clarified, "Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3). If we don't make any effort to change, we have already given up. Even 100 years before Jesus' birth, Israel knew about this pride,
Men are vain, in whom there is not the knowledge of God...neither by attending to the works have acknowledged who was the workman: But have imagined either the fire, or the wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars, or the great water, or the sun and moon, to be the gods that rule the world. With whose beauty, if they, being delighted, took them to be gods: let them know how much the Lord of them is more beautiful than they: for the first author of beauty made all those things... For they perhaps err, seeking God, and desirous to find him. For being conversant among his works, they search: and they are persuaded that the things are good which are seen. But then again they are not to be pardoned. For if they were able to know so much as to make a judgement of the world: how did they not more easily find out the Lord thereof? (Book of Wisdom, Chapter 13)
Book: The Holy Bible: Old Testament: Douay-Rheims Version by Catholic Way Publishing
Choosing to distance ourselves from God in this life has negative consequences after we die. Let Jesus Himself explain its significance to a Benedict Monk on Monday, March 16, 2009:
For those who have closed their hearts to Me, rejected My intimate friendship, and withdrawn into the comfortable life they have organized for themselves-but that sort of life apart from Me is the beginning of damnation, the beginning of that hell that is not something I inflict on souls but, rather, the state in which they put themselves by withdrawing little by little from Me until, in the end, the separation is complete and there is no return.
Book: In Sinu Jesu: When Heart Speaks to Heart - The Journal of a Priest at Prayer by A Benedictine Monk