Here is a most distressing example of the blind folly that grips many regarding what is a true Christian and the requirements of God for entrance to heaven.
I was grieved at the report of the death of a notorious ‘singer’ and the most awful and empty hope entertained by his family as to where he will be throughout eternity. Th person in question is Shane MacGowan, someone I really knew nothing of until his death.
MacGowan was a Roman Catholic, calling himself ‘a free-thinking religious fanatic’ who also prayed to the Buddha. As an adolescent, he considered the priesthood.
Having grown up in an Irish republican family, MacGowan said in 2015 that he regretted not joining the IRA. In a filmed interview he said, ‘I was ashamed I didn’t have the guts to join the IRA . . .’
MacGowan began drinking alcohol at age five, when his family gave him Guinness to help him sleep. His father frequently took him to the local pub while he drank with his friends. He suffered physically from years of binge drinking. He often performed onstage and gave interviews while drunk. In 2004, on the BBC TV political magazine programme This Week, he gave incoherent and slurred answers to questions from Janet Street-Porter about the public smoking ban in Ireland.
With a ‘religious and chaotic pedigree’ as this and given his widely publicised ‘hell-raising’ lifestyle, his foul mouth, his prolific consumption of alcohol, it is illustrative of the dreadful ignorance of God’s truth that dominates the mind of the Irish Roman Catholic, that his wife is widely reported as saying after he died: ‘I don’t know how to say this so I am just going to say it. Shane… has gone to be with Jesus and Mary and his beautiful mother Therese.’
The notion that a life of blatant degeneracy can be instantly followed by an entrance into the presence of ‘Jesus of Nazareth . . . . the Holy One of God,’ (Mark 1:24); the very One whose name was repeatedly used in a most blasphemous manner, is utterly repulsive to a God-fearing, Bible-believer.
How evil is the system that promotes such a perverted notion of what the religion of Jesus Christ entails! That religion blights, among other places, the island of Ireland!