Stephen Hawking

[Geremia]

Requiescat in pace.
Retraction: It appears he died an atheist, so, like Aristotle, Dante would place him in...

Atheism/unbelief the greatest sin:
S.T. II-II q. 10 a. 3 c.

the more a sin severs man from God, the graver it is. Now man is more than ever separated from God by unbelief, because he has not even true knowledge of God: and by false knowledge of God, man does not approach Him, but is severed from Him.

Nor is it possible for one who has a false opinion of God, to know Him in any way at all, because the object of his opinion is not God.* Therefore it is clear that the sin of unbelief is greater than any sin that occurs in the perversion of morals.

*thus Protestants do not know God

[martin88nyc]

Requiescat in pace.

The guy was an atheist. I hope he had a change of heart at the very end but otherwise how can we say RIP if he'd rejected God?

[LausTibiChriste]

I'm sick of this pandering to 'celebrities' when they die

An avowed atheist died. Whoop di f'ing doo.

[OCLittleFlower]

He was also terribly RUDE about his atheism. 

I can understand sorrow when a non-Catholic celeb who, say, made good movies dies.  This guy called Heaven a "fairy story" rudely.

[Chestertonian]

He did a lot of work in the assistive technology community which I benefit from.. but his particular judgment maybe a shocker for him

[Gardener]

There are no handicapped ramps to get out of the lake of fire. May we all be stunned by the mercy of God.

[Matto]

Perhaps he once gave a beggar an onion.

[dymphna17]

May we all be stunned by the mercy of God.

This has to be my favorite line ever read on SD.  Prayers never go to waste, so even if we say one for Mr Hawking and it bounces off Hell's SDI shields, God will find someone to stick them to.  Like my Dad.  You can never go wrong sending a prayer.

[martin88nyc]

May we all be stunned by the mercy of God.

This has to be my favorite line ever read on SD.  Prayers never go to waste, so even if we say one for Mr Hawking and it bounces off Hell's SDI shields, God will find someone to stick them to.  Like my Dad.  You can never go wrong sending a prayer.

Yes there are instances where God intervenes and saves a soul from Hell. St.Padre Pio or St. Vianney relayed a story about a guy who wanted to commit a suicide by jumping into a river. He did but God saved him before he drowned. He was given a chance to repent in that brief moment before he hit the water.

[Geremia]

Hawkwing collected an excellent anthology entitled God Created the Integers of mathematical papers prefaced by short biographies of the mathematicians, and he discussed some of the mathematicians' Catholicism. Has he anywhere directly disparaged Catholicism?

"Hawking" and Mlodinow's atheist book The Grand Design might have been written entirely by Mlodinow, a Jewish atheist, and the publisher just slapped "Hawking" on it for publicity.

[Kaesekopf]

May we all be stunned by the mercy of God.

This has to be my favorite line ever read on SD.  Prayers never go to waste, so even if we say one for Mr Hawking and it bounces off Hell's SDI shields, God will find someone to stick them to.  Like my Dad.  You can never go wrong sending a prayer.

  That phrasing, oh my.

[Greg]

If he is in Heaven, I hope he doesn't still have that bloody annoying computer generated voice.

If he is in Hell, then the screams coming from it are going to sound like an Al-Qaeda discotheque.

[red solo cup]

[Aquila]

There is nothing wrong with praying for any of the dead, even if there doesn't appear to be any hope of final penitence.

I'm reminded of a story about St. John Vianney. A woman came to him, very distraught. Her husband had jumped off a bridge and committed suicide. St. John told the woman he would still pray for him. Later, he told the woman that her husband had appeared to him in a dream, and told him that he was in purgatory and desperately needed prayers to get out; between jumping off the bridge and hitting the water below, he had made an act of contrition and his soul had been saved.

The bottom line is that only God knows the state of a person's soul at their final moments, and only He is allowed to determine their final destination. Hawking was, of course, an atheist, yet even so we should pray for him. In fact, given that he was born Anglican and their baptisms are valid, he was a member of the Church, which should make someone want to pray more for him (and others like him) since the punishments in hell for members of the True Faith are greater than for those who were never baptized (all other things being equal).

[martin88nyc]

Aquila I mentioned this story in my previous post but wasn't sure whether it was St. Pade Pio's or St. Vianney's. In any case this only shows us that that God's love for us is inexhaustible.