A life without God?
Individuals who choose to turn away from God allowed evil to take over their lives. As sin permeates daily life, we gradually get more tolerant of it, indulging in new forms of physical gratification while ignoring the needs of others because charity has no profit for us. As a result, we begin to despise God and look for ways to keep ourselves far from Him by searching for excuses, 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.
What about the recent Lahaina Maui fire of 2023?
Do you notice an unburned building?
Is that intact building a Catholic Church? You bet.
In the same way, the Notre Dame cross and altar were still standing after their fire in 2019; the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe remained intact after the 1921 bombing, and many more. I'll add one more to help the doubters: what didn't burn in the picture below?
Military base fire , Madrid 2015.
Mary always gives us hope in tragedy,
Hurricane Harvey, Texas fire in 2017.
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. The idea that one may overcome these spiritual failings (malice, anger, conscupience and ignorance), from their soul on their own, by practicing self-control and meditation is wishful thinking. 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
[Jesus speaks] See, daughter, how great the effects in the man are not only of the malice of the devil but also of a deformed conscience! And this comes about because he does not struggle against temptation as he ought... I, God, foreseeing the hardness of many hearts, spare my chosen ones the trouble, so that they need not work in vain. And because many, deliberately sinning with full knowledge, decide to persevere in sin rather than to be converted, they are not worthy to hear the messengers of salvation.[Saint Bridget,1360]