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DaBears
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What is this place that unbelievers like myself are destined for, that Christians are trying (or supposed to be trying) so desperately to save me from? Whatever it is, a god died so I wouldn’t have to go there. At least, that’s the story. I once read another story about some Christian monks who baptized infants and immediately dashed their brains out upon the rocks. The reason? So they would not go to hell. So horrendous was this place, that any cost–even their lives–was not too high a price to ensure that they did not go there. Hell, God's eternal torture chamber, where the greater part of all humanity will spend eternity. What is the purpose of this place? Well, punishment, Christians tell us. But punishment for what purpose? Since there is no remedial value to hell, no chance of learning your lesson and getting let out, what good does the punishment do? Even the most cruel human torturers usually have a reason for their torture. Make the appropriate confessions, tell them what they want to know, and the torture will usually stop. Or at the very least, you can eventually die. But Christians make God out to be the very worst kind of torturer–one that tortures for no other reason than to torture, and one that lets you stay alive forever, with no possible release from the pain.
As a Christian, I was always uncomfortable with this. In an attempt to explain hell while leaving God's reputation for fairness intact, I deferred to a more C.S. Lewis-type explanation. Rather than having God create a place like Hell and sending people there, I saw Hell more as a result of rejecting God. It was the ultimate "you got what you asked for." God was saying, "You really don't want me around? Fine. I'll leave." And the result was hell, the absence of everything good, which vanished when God did. Once you chose to leave God's presence, you chose to live in a Godless universe where the only thing left was pain and suffering, and everything else that was bad about life, or in a word, hell. But aside from making God out to be very petty, like a kid who throws down his marbles and folds his arms because you don’t let him win, this whole idea puts some very strange limitations on God. We'll examine it more later.
The lure of Christianity is that it offers such an easy way out of hell. All you have to do is believe. There are generally no rituals (except baptism in some denominations), and there are no good deeds to perform. A popular Christian bumper sticker sums it up well: "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven." And the utter horrific nature of hell provides a very compelling reason to convert. Who would not do anything to escape this fate, or to make sure that others avoid it as well? One can begin to understand the rationale of the baby-killing monks. Hell provides the ultimate motive to become a Christian.
Hell is also the strongest case against the Christian faith, for it is nothing less than the most sadistic torture ever devised. In America we pride ourselves in prohibiting something called "cruel and unusual punishment." We look aghast at dictatorial regimes that torture its prisoners and dissidents. Yet even the worst atrocities committed under the cruelest tyrants of this world are nothing when compared to what Christians say God has in store for us. A poignant way to illustrate this is to look at what Christians believe about Jews, especially Jews that were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. Although Christians generally do not discuss this, it is what they must believe, for it is built into their system of "divine justice."
Christians define as hell-bound anyone who does not accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. This includes just about all practicing Jews. So imagine this scenario: as the millions of Jews slaughtered in Hitler's death camps passed into the afterlife, they awoke to find themselves burning in hell. Not only was there a lack of food there, there was no food. Not only was there poor drinking water, there was no water. Not only was there pain, there was the most intense pain imaginable, and it was unrelenting. Sort of like being tossed into the ovens of Auschwitz alive. And not only did this suffering just seem like it would never end, it really never would.
It's been over half a century since Hitler's death camps were dismantled. So for more than 50 years, millions of Jews, who were former prisoners of the Nazis, have been suffering to an extent not even imagined by the SS, and for a much longer time. In fact, we can imagine that many Jews are longing to return to the vermin-infested barracks, the moldy bread, the thin gruel, the backbreaking work and brutal treatment–if only to escape the agony of hell for a moment.
This is sick. Yet this is what I had to believe when I was a Christian. This is what the largest Protestant denomination in the world still teaches its followers (although usually indirectly), confident that God condones, and even created, a universe in which this occurs. And to what end? There is no point to Hell, so it becomes merely a cruel instrument of sadism. Sadistic torture of any person by another person is unacceptable. Why do Christians think it's okay when God does this?
And now back to the idea that hell might be a place of our own making, the consequence of rejecting God. If hell occurs when people don't want God around, and He leaves, what does that say about God? If all good things really come from God, isn't God big enough to fill the whole universe? Isn't He already doing it now? Why, in the future, must He parcel His presence to only those who appreciate it? Is the sun not big enough to give light to all the flowers, whether or not they are smart enough to realize from where those life-giving rays emanate?
And even if people really thought they didn't want God around, should God be such a poor sport as to leave just because of that? Christians describe God as a heavenly parent. What sort of parents would abandon a child just because it threw a tantrum and said that it didn't want them anymore? As parents, we are wise enough to realize that kids don't always mean what they say, or even if they do, that they are often merely acting as kids. And besides, we would never abandon them. Now the gulf of understanding that lies between adults and kids is not nearly as big as that which separates God from humans. So why can’t God be at least as decent and understanding to His own kids as we are to ours? Jesus said in Matthew 7: 9-11, "What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" I would like to add to that: "or what parent is there of you, whom if their child disobeys, will douse him in kerosene and set him alight? And what manner of parent who did this would call himself good?"
It is a sad day when people condone the abuse of one human being by another. It is also a sad day when people believe their god does the same.
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