SOAPBOX:
I always wonder if it is really worth it to be nice to someone. I try to be nice to everyone, even if I can't stand them. I also try not to judge people. I think that the meanest thing that a person can do is to form an opinion on someone else before they really know that person. I hate it when people automatically assume something about me prior to speaking to me. Quo jure does one have to judge a person without actually speaking to them? I hate gossip and I hate gossipers. They are just insecure people that think that for some odd reason they are better than the person they are talking about. I guess the whole reason they gossip is to prove to theirself that everyone is not perfect. I don't think that gossiping is the best way to learn that lesson. Read a book to find out lessons like that. I bet if people read more they wouldn't go out and do stupid things. They could learn about the consequences without having to live them out. I don't know. This is just my opinion. My soapbox. I should start a link with soapboxes. -M
RELIGION:
"It is no wonder, then, that professional anti-Catholics spend little time on the history of the belief. (Who can blame them for avoiding an unpleasant subject?) They prefer to claim, instead, that the Bible speaks only of heaven and hell. Wrong again. It speaks quite plainly of a third place, where Christ went after his death, the place commonly called the Limbo of the Fathers, where the just who had died before the Redemption were waiting for heaven to be opened to them (1 Pet. 3:19). This place was neither heaven nor hell.
Even if the Limbo of the Fathers was not purgatory, its existence shows that a temporary, intermediate state is not contrary to Scripture. Look at it this way. If the Limbo of the Fathers was purgatory, then this one verse directly teaches the existence of purgatory. If the Limbo of the Fathers was a different temporary state, then the Bible at least says such a state can exist. It at least proves there can be more than just heaven and hell.
Sometimes Protestants object that Jesus told the thief on the cross that on the very day the two of them died, they would be together in paradise (Luke 23:43), which they read as a denial of purgatory. In actuality, this argument boomerangs on the Fundamentalist and it supports purgatory by proving the existence of at least some state other than heaven and hell, since Jesus did not go to heaven on the day he died. Peter tells us that he "went and preached to the spirits in prison" (1 Peter 3:19), and after his resurrection, Christ himself declared: "I have not yet ascended to the Father" (John 20:17). Thus at that time paradise was located in some third state besides heaven and besides hell.
Purgatory has just been a convenient battle ground. The ultimate disagreement concerns the doctrine of sola scriptura. If Fundamentalists understood why that doctrine won't wash--why, in fact, it's contrary to Scripture--they would have little difficulty in accepting purgatory and other Catholic beliefs which are not explicitly set forth in the Bible." taken from: http://www.catholic.com/ANSWERS/tracts/purgator.htm
