This is a great post. And I really like the idea of getting a book out there about the betrayals of the Canadian Bishops. Boy, we could have one helluva best seller. I could even contribute a couple of pages to it, based on my own experiences with the Winnipeg Statement and the fight for Marriage. God Bless your courage Lea. May it inspire more insiders to spill those beans. http://www.catholic-legate.com/catholic-bishops-c...

Good idea, let's define some terms :) .
1) For the purposes of the discussion I'm assuming the Catholic God exists, therefore we can leave any non-Catholic worldviews out of it.

Well, I would not put exactly like that. There is no "Catholic" God. There is a God whose identity is protected by the Church's teaching authority. God is found outside of the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church, as there are elements of truth outside her formal boundaries as well. However, these teachings must be in conformity with the Church's understanding of God to be true.

2) I'm assuming some sort of generic morality, ours, Gods or a universal one (and we can discuss which of those is most applicable here).

Yes, all morality is binding on everyone....although the consequences of disobeying a moral truth would be different for you than it would be for me. If I practiced contraception, for instance, I would be going to hell. You? Probably not....at least not for that :)

3) God is temporally (and, if you like, spatially, though that's not relevant) infinite, he created the wordl and he created each of us.

I'm not sure what "temporally infinite" means. God is not subject to time so I hesitate in assenting to this proposition.

4) Our existence in this world is both spatially and temporally finite, it is confined within the boundaries of the universe and starts out creation and ends with out death.

Well, most of what you say I think is correct. However, you do know that what you understand as death is very different from a Catholic understanding. While we don't deny the biological point of death, for us the very definition of death is not "the end of existence" as the evolutionist claims, but rather the separation of the soul from the body. In the beginning, it was not meant to be that way. That is the reason Christ died on the Cross is to reunite matter and spirit through the Resurrection.

5) Our souls persist beyond death, for eternity.

Indeed they do...and so do our bodies....either to everlasting glory...or....not.

Well, that is unfortunate. It was not a gratuitous comment but a very relevant one in today's culture and the eschewing of moral consequences. Most people enjoy a colourful comment once in awhile. Keeps the blood pumping and the conversation entertaining. Still, if you're not into colour. I can go exclusively black and white too. I did not mean to offend.

I'll offer one more response to your challenge above and then you can take it or leave it.

If you leave it, I'll be held accountable to God and will spend many years in purgatory. You wouldn't want to do that to me, wudja?

But even if that weren't the case, if our deeds were somehow infinite, we, as finite creatures, couldn't comprehend them. We would therefore be judged by standards that we cannot comprehend, for crimes that we cannot comprehend. That, too, is immoral (we don't punish the mentally deficient and criminally insane). As a bonus, the standards are not only incomprehensible but also unachievable, and the crimes are not only incomprehensible, but unavoidable (since we have no control over the "infinite" consequences of our actions).

Once again, I draw you back to your first comment. "our deeds are infinite but we as finite creates...". This is false, so everything else that you say is non sequitur. Even your comment above is not only false but it makes no sense at all. How could there be "infinite deeds" but we ourselves are "finite"? Does that make any sense whatsoever? For WHAT PURPOSE would there be infinite deeds and not infinite agents of those deeds?

Whichever way you look at it, hell and the system of judgement constructed around it are monstrously evil, and so is the creature responsible for them.

Define evil. :) and explain to me what FINITE and FALLIBLE authority you are appealing to, to form your ideas of evil. According to the religion of evolution, there is no evil. There's just nature....just ask the Nazis who were big time believers in eugenics...the application of evolution personified. You keep wanting to mix up quaint non-evolutionary ideas like "evil" with Christianity and ancient philosophy. I think you need to stop that :)

Further points against God's goodness (since we've touched on them anyway): There is a lot of nasty stuff in this creation of his, but, pars pro toto, let me just point out that God deliberately created Naegleria fowleri. That is incredibly cruel. And, for the death blow to any delusions about his greatness, he (again, pars pro toto) allows rape to happen.

Well, again, there's lots of assumptions in your belief. This world is FALLEN. It's DISORDERED. It's WOUNDED. The Fall did not just impact man, it also impacted all of creation. You can point to a lot of evil and disorder in the world, but that, in itself, proves nothing at all.

It only proves that God permits our free choices to have real consequences. Just like a father says to his daughter (understanding the reality of original sin on sex), "don't dress like a slut". And the daughter insists that she has a right to dress like a slut and ends up getting raped and then blames the father for being such a misogynist.

Two objections are immediately obvious. One, the consequences of our actions may reverberate through time, but they remain finite.
They could only potentially be infinite if our world is both infinite in time and deterministic, both of which conflict with Christian teaching.

I'm sorry, but you are not conceding the necessary point before we can discuss Hell. A Christian believes in a kingdom that will have no end. That is what the Nicene Creed says. If you don't believe in this, that's fine, we can debate THAT. However, it is not logical for you to claim the dogma of Hell does not follow from an infinite world view because it necessarily does. A liberal mentality has a hard enough time accepting natural moral consequences in THIS world, but if our existence is infinite, the consequences become infinitely unbearable to such a soul.

Two, "God is infinite" does not mean anything. What exactly are we judged against? His infinite goodness? Then our finite goodness is exactly as bad as our finite evil,

The goodness that God works through us transforms us into His image, sharing in the divine nature. Jesus came to give us his very body (in the Eucharist) so we may become LIKE HIM. And when we expire from this life, we go to the place of infinite goodness. God is outside of time, as Nicea also says. We believe in ex nihlo....there are two things in existence: that which was created and that which was not. God is uncreated. Everything else is. If you don't believe in eternity (infinity) then you cannot believe in God. God created time. He is not intrinsically the subject of it...except when He chooses to be, like with the Incarnation.

and everybody goes to hell. Against his evil (which I assume you'd declare to be zero)? Then we're again committing finite crimes but being infinitely punished for it.

Again, you want to have it both ways. You cannot concede eternity exists while maintaining hell does not. We need to figure out what you want to debate. If you want to debate Hell, then you must, for the sake of argument at least, concede eternity exists. Otherwise, this discussion is just a waste of time. Catholicism is a religion of REASON and LOGIC. Its doctrines hold together like a beautiful tapestry. If you are able to pull out one thread, you unravel the whole thing. And vice versa, if you accept a few threads, you end up knitting the whole blanket.

So the point remains, hell is infinite punishment for finite deeds, and therefore immoral. That the punishment takes the form of torture, which is in and of itself immoral is just icing on the cake.

No, the point does not remain. The point has not even been clarified. Our souls are infinite....and so, by the way, are our bodies. We were not created to rot in the earth and not be remembered and loved. That is irrational and stupid if we believe in a God who is the perfection of beauty, goodness, truth and love. So the fact that we DO believe in God's goodness means something horrible has happened between Creation and now. The Catholic Faith has the answers that correspond to experience, science, and common sense. There is NO SUCH THING as finite deeds (or, more particularly, the consequences of them). You keep speaking like the consequences of our deeds are finite, but I am telling you that no Christian can accept this proposition so the rest of your reasoning about Hell is irrelevant. You have to figure out FIRST if you agree that your existence is FINITE OR INFINITE. You have to choose which existence you want to debate in because they are mutually exclusive. You can stay stuck in the evolutionary ghetto (which explains nothing of "why" and offers no meaning to your life) or you can rise above to consider that your life indeed has meaning beyond ego and orgasm....which, of course, brings us back to the existence of God in the first place.

Well, I think we have exhausted this discussion. Thanks for the chat. Time is precious and I have to be moving on. Marginal returns, marginal costs...you understand. I'll leave you with another of my useless non-scientific articles.... :)
http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/meditations/samaha...

I'm sure the Tilma is getting as much scientific attention as the shamanic spell-casting among the Inupiat. With all these religious loonies around, it's a wonder that all these experts get any real work done.

Thank you, that's precisely the document I was commenting on when I referenced " renderings in which imaginative viewers had helpfully colorized and highlighted the splotches that seemed representative to them." Can you find Keith Moon?

Nah. I don't see Keith Moon, but I do bet seeing him is like the billion tossed coins turning up heads though. I will grant you that.

Indeed it can. That's quite a distance from your initial suggestion that this - umm - interesting evidence "confirmed the religious doctrines that the Church teaches" . I'm glad to see you moving your claims in the right direction, at least.

Confirmation is in the eye of the beholder. Isn't that what your religion teaches? There is no absolute truth, so why bother appealing to it?

What exactly would you be looking for? Certainly not another scientist's opinion on what he sees because we both know full well that what he sees will not be what you see. Truth be told, there is no validation whatsoever that a skeptic would accept. Because, as you know, it is possible that you can flip a billion coins and they can all come out heads at the same time. Or, as in the case of some documented Exorcisms, levitation sometimes occurs. The reason for this, of course, is because a pocket of air suddenly developed around that person causing her to levitate at just the moment when the Exorcism was taking place. These remarkable coincidences are something to put one's faith in, fa' sure.

Ah. I truly did think you were kidding. Then I'll simply point out that "science" has not endorsed the claim of supernatural origin,

Of course not. "Science" does not endorse anything. But people certainly do. But what science CAN do is show uncomfortable evidence and inconvenient probabilities in support of religious or theistic claims. People then compare and weigh the merits of the the various religious beliefs, including those of the evolutionist who believes that you can get the same result flipping one billion coins in the air and expecting them all to come out as heads eventually, as you can with someone who rigged it from the beginning.

Here is another site which has some better pics at what the ophthalmologists see (page 4):
http://www.jeaf.com/help/SCIENCE_GUADALUPE_VIRGIN...

and that I will gladly review and comment on any other instance where you feel, as you suggested, that "science" has done so.

No need to that. Let's give the art teacher a rest.

Well, like I said, physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers are typically associated with science.

Professional skeptics, art teachers and portrait artists normally aren't.

I suppose we're back into the dark ages when only the consummate skeptic is permitted to use the scientific disciplines. Makes things much neater and cleaner.