It is useful to picture love and hate on a scale. The earthly organization most totally based on love of God and man is the Roman Catholic Church. It is pro-God and pro-life.
The Communist Party, on the other hand, has Lenin proudly telling us that hatred is its essence. Communists are against God and for abortion. Communism is at one end of a line, The Church is at the other.
Most of us fall somewhere between a holy monk and a Communist Party official. We tend to move between the two extremes. In the same day, in the same hour, a person can both pray to God for help and immediately thereafter think about ways to wipe his enemies off the face of the earth.
In the overview, our temporary transgressions usually have time to be corrected. In the midst of thinking up ways to get rid of enemies, we may suddenly cry, “God, help me to love my neighbor!” Or, we may say, “Jesus said ‘Sell your cloak and buy a sword.’, so I’m following at least part of His teaching.”
Regardless, we must look to God to be our guide. The Communist, on the other hand, thinks only of killing and thinks he’s enlightened if he bothers to look for reasons to do so.
The socialist only thinks of taxing. Killing, to the socialist, is just a way to get people to pay their taxes. Since killing is worse than stealing, those who die as socialists are not in as agonizing a place within the Inferno. Still, they burn.
The trick is this: To avoid eternal pain, we must be on God’s side of the scale when our soul departs from its place in the clay. The Devil hates to lose a soul because it repented at the moment of death. Everything He does is designed to prevent that from happening, usually by making us so inured to sin, and so disrespectful to God and His Church that we don’t think either is important enough to worry about.
If the Devil can make a person say “I’m basically a good person.” often enough, he wins.
