People who believe in Hell try to absolve their construct of God from that monstrosity by talking as if he had nothing to do with it. They talk as if the existence of such a “place” were somehow beyond his ability to control. “God doesn’t send people to Hell,” they assure themselves, “people choose to go there; they send themselves.” Uh huh. I have two main responses to that. The first is to point out that their desire to absolve God from this atrocity doesn’t come from the Bible, in case they thought it did. The second thing has to do with the impossibility of that task.
It’s very intriguing to me that modern beliefs around the Bible’s God as a divine parent completely disregards Solomon’s test to evaluate a true parent vs a false one.
Sitting in the middle of the Bible is a story about how the wisest guy puts forward a test to distinguish the two.
The false parent is the one that only cares about recognition and is willing to see the child harmed to achieve that.
And the true parent was the one who cared more about their child continuing to live as their unadulterated complete self even if that meant never being known to the child.
Yet the popular religion based on all this takes the surrounding material and emphasizes a divine parent that sounds remarkably similar to that false parent there, and broadly dismisses the idea of universalism.
Similar to the quote “don’t expect a man to understand a thing his salary depends on not understanding” I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that clergy see it this way when their livelihood depends on convincing people that their salvation depends on employing said clergy in effectively handing over one’s salvation to be lent back to themselves at interest.
But the part that’s always baffled me is the depressing self-harm inherent to deciding to believe in the version where you are inherently undeserving of salvation such that it makes sense a divine parent would only make it accessible by way of layers of preconditions and hoops to jump through. Why are we so broken that given multiple options from as early as antiquity we’ve collectively gravitated generation after generation towards increased belief in our own inherent damnation?
That’s an amazingly good point. Thank you!
My favorite way people try to do it is to insist that hell isn’t infinite. “It’s not an eternity of torture, it’s just 5,000,000 years of it.”
Or better yet, “It’s not constant torture. You get breaks!”
How is it that humans are capable of recognizing that any amount of torture is immoral, but the alleged Source of all morality isn’t?
They say you get breaks? I’ve never heard that one lol
Yeah, I forget which apologist argues that one, but they usually couple it with the “people choose to go there/stay there” argument.
Christians have yet to present to me a single person that has willingly chosen to go to hell. I have asked many times, and for some reason they refuse. Weird huh.
If god made himself known in an undeniable way tomorrow, and if he confirmed the heaven/hell thing, I’d still choose hell. An eternity with a being that arbitrarily sends people to eternal torment, singing his praises, is my personal hell.
Also, I fear no gods I know how to kill.
