christianityChristianity specifically: Since god is infinitely loving and forgiving (so long as you repent prior to death), how can one justify his tendency to send his own creations off to eternal torment. On top of that, give god’s omniscience he would be knowingly creating countless souls knowing they will be simply damned for eternity after living. Is there an argument for how this is not a sick thing for an all-powerful being to do?
Blame the victim. God has nothing to do with anything evil, it’s either Satan or our own wickedness. Hence, God does not (as you say) send his creations to hell… they CHOOSE it through their actions. Easy. :-)
This is known as "The Problem of Hell".
I don't know of any convincing arguments, but I believe that the standard response is that free will makes hell a choice rather than a punishment.
You’re in luck, I’m a theist!
One explanation is that souls choose hell, not just in an “oops, they didn’t accept Christ” sense but even to the extent that they would rather be there than in heaven. So in some places of Dante’s Inferno and C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce (*), you find souls that have rejected God so totally that they would rather be in hell than in heaven.
I think this has some merit. Imagine that PZ Myers dies and discovers, to his horror, that Jeebus really does exist. Is he going to want to spend eternity with him??? And on a psychological note: If you know some angry, bitter people (or are self-reflective about your own anger), you might notice that people can actual choose to be miserable, can wallow in it and let it consume them and not want it any other way. Maybe the souls in hell are in that condition.
A word about the torments of hell: there is language in the Bible about fire and brimstone (although less than you might think), and it’s unclear (to me at least) to what extent the language is literal and to what extent it is figurative. But I think it’s fairly common in Christian theology to view the primary source of the torments of hell to be the simple fact of God’s complete absence. So God does not construct a place specifically to cause pain(**), but separation from the source of all good just is inherently painful. In other words, Hell is God saying to people who have rejected him “Ok, I will give you what you asked for”.
() and interestingly enough, even in Sarte’s *No Exit (though that is obviously not a Christian account of hell)
(**) and, in fact, Hell was created not for man but for Satan (Matt. 25:41)
The best answer I’ve heard to this question is this, even though it works by going around the standard definition:
Hell is basically not what most people think it is. No fire, no torment, no demons, none of that. God wants everyone to be happy and loved, even those that don’t want His love. But God is everywhere and everything, so if you wanted to be rid of God, you couldn’t! To answer this, God created a place where he would not go, a place free of God. Since most people want and need the love of God, they would consider this place a torment, without love or mercy or joy. But for those who want to be free of God, that place is there for them.
Christianity also asserts that God is infinitely Holy and infinitely Just. As a result, he cannot allow crimes to go unpunished, which is why God cheated and transfered the crimes of anyone of faith to Jesus and punished him instead.
In my experience, the most common answer among theists with a strong belief in eternal punishment is “We Deserve It.” This is usually connected to some concept of Original Sin. The basic idea is whatever crime(s) humanity at large is guilty of, they are deserving of eternal torment as a punishment. The corollary is that no one “deserves” heaven, but that belief in their (particular form of) religion is a sort of metaphysical hack that gets you in anyways.
I’m not sure why there isn’t some sort of middle ground between “deserves eternal pleasure” and “deserves eternal torture”, but hey, not my religion, not my problem..
Generally they answer that we did it to ourselves when Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. They also say that God is only allowing us to have free will which would require that we suffer the consequences of our actions. So the general rationalization is that God never wanted us to go to hell, but that he had left it up to us and we chose hell. This suggests that God is either not all-knowing in that he had no idea that Eve would disobey, or is not all-powerful in that he cannot change the rules of the game, which would later require sacrificing Jesus. In my experience, when you ask, “Why couldn’t God just change the rules so that we did not have to go through all this?” They dodge the question with “God is mysterious and we cannot understand his motivations.” However, different denominations rationalize this differently.
Takes a lot of mental gymnastics and not asking any questions. I believe that wearing mixed textiles is a hell bound sin in the Bible. If I were a Christian I would want to ask a lot of questions because I am sure most of them dont follow that rule.
I can’t believe we left off Purgatory! Purgatory is a sort of temporary hell where you work off your sins based on their severity. This is the more modern form of hell. It gets around the eternity issue. (I am being fast and loose with terms here, like “modern”).
I have had no success in having reasonable discussions with people who believe in the old fashioned eternity in fire and brimstone. So the answer to your question is that they aren’t reasonable. However, people alive today have reasoned it away to varying degrees, and “the church” has realized that they needed to do some fixing of it throughout history.
John Shelby Spong went through this history on a recent interview at evolutionarychristianity.com. First there was just hell and all non-believers went there, then they quoted Aristotle so they had to create limbo for him, then they realized unbaptized babies should get into it too, finally they started thinking that Genghis Khan was a worse sinner than the guy who eats meat on Friday, so purgatory was needed to address that. Once they started allowing you to pay to reduce your purgatory time, a lot of people finally figured out how corrupt the system is, so we get Protestants and thousands of definitions of hell.
Innocent children starving to death. Is it because of their free will. What kind of God is that?
Hell is where all the best bands are.
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