hey, if that's all true then you had better alert some of those other Christians who are gibbering incoherently about being 'taken up' into the sky literally any minute before people start thinking you all are a bunch of confused loonies.
1. The sky is just symbolism. It does not indicate the actual location of Heaven or God. Its just metaphor in a way, though I think it will actually happen that way, but not because it has to because God is there.
2. Most Christians simply do not have a deep grasp of their religion. What can I say? Faith doesn't require this and so most never bother.
And I agree that much of what is refuted by unbelievers about scripture is not what scripture is about.
Interesting. You sound like you are worth discussing this with. I am thinking of starting a thread in the nice discussion Care Bear forum; would you be interested in participating?
So, what exactly is it that your 'we' believes about God?
Roman Catholic... actually just catholic as I agree more with Eastern catholics that the Roman variety any more.
Do you believe that Jesus is God? Do you believe in a trinity?
Yes Jesus is a part of the Godhead. He is an eternal extension of the Father, and the Holy Ghost is the personification of their relationship. All three have their own persons, and all three are eternal.
The ancient Greeks had a philosophy called Emanationism that kind of laid the ground work for the idea of the Trinity.
Define the God you worship and how you worship that God.
God is an eternal Being who has no flow of consciousness. Every thought He has ever had He is having in the immediate 'moment'. I say moment, but as He exists outside the flow of time, all is the present to Him. When you read of God making a decision, it is something already previously decided, like the turns you know you will take on the route to work.
He is Holy and Omnipotent, but desires the free worship of mankind, so He gave us free will. At first He placed mankind in an environment of innocence but man wanted to understand morality and so became responsible for being moral.
God will eventually welcome all into Heaven and He does not reject True repentance and He does not allow any place to exist outside of His knowledge so I believe that He will bring repentant souls from Gehena to Purgatory as they truly repent.
Hell is simply the place of the dead and has a gray scale of existence but a gulf separates the punishments of Gehena from the pleasures of Paradise or the bosom of Abraham.
When Jesus died on the cross He went to Hell and opened the way for the righteous dead to go into Heaven which is the divine presence of God. When we are judged after death we meet God in a form we relate to holiness and experience a love, peace and pleasure that Paradise cannot compare to. At first the pleasures of Paradise are fulfilling, but eventually we grow inured to these pleasures and we remember what we felt in Gods presence and the contrast brings us to love Him. The separation from Him becomes a pain of longing for a lost love. This is why Paradise is now called Purgatory because there we are gently purged of all our love of everything else but God Himself. We fulfill our purpose when we are finally there. Over the eons everyone will come to repentance and stand in the presence of God worshipping Him, even the Satan himself will kneel before God in love and joy one day.
When God created time/space, there was no 'before', except for Heaven which may have existed prior to this universe; maybe from prior universes, maybe it is an eternal manifestation of Gods for those who love Him. I have no idea; one is as plausible as the other. With String Theory and trans-dimensional theory, Heaven should no longer be considered an irrational concept.
God made everything in our universe in one event. All that exists exists as it is because of how God made that initial creation. He may have tweaked some thing here and there, a miracle occasionally, but the vast majority of Gods interaction is in the form of providence and less the miraculous. God has used the processes being discovered by science to create this material universe. The book of Revelations seems to imply, from its descriptions of a wild variety of being worshipping God, that there have been or maybe are still now other universes besides this one.
That answer your question? It isn't orthodox, but it does not contradict scripture or catholic dogma either.