Last night I caught a few minutes of a religious show where the topic was "How can a Loving God Send People to Hell". It is a thorny problem for any Christians who believe in hell as a cornerstone of their faith, but they have well prepared answers.The essential answer the fundamentalists give is "God doesn't send anyone to Hell. You send yourself there. God has done everything He possibly can to keep you out of Hell and still leave you as a person with free will and not just a robot."
Using the argument about not "sending people" is a simple debating trick. Whether or not God "sends" people to hell is not the issue. The question is about the creation and the purpose of Hell.
If the Christian fundamentalists say that nothing existed before God's creation, then why did God create Hell in the first place? Was He expecting something? And if God got mad and created Hell after the fact, then it's just a technicality whether or not he "sent" people to hell. As far as I'm concerned, it's just splitting hairs to say "God is trying to keep you out of Hell" when He created hell for the sole purpose of burning anyone He deemed a sinner.
In some ways, hell is such an overpowering concept that it casts a shadow over the rest of God's creation. Was the entire universe created only as a laboratory to sort out good souls from bad and sent the bad to Hell? If so, this brings up two issues. Did these souls exist before creation, and God needed to set something up for them? Or did God create the souls to see how many would end up in the fire of eternal damnation? Neither issue is addressed by fundamentalists, who manage to pick away at every tiny hole in the theory of evolution, but can't see these truck-sized holes in their own story of creation.
Later on in this article, this argument is made:
"You may love your little child, but if he puts his finger up on that hot burner on the gas stove or the electric stove, he's going to get burned!"
The weak point of this argument is that God did not create Hell to roast weenies, and then people accidentally fell in. Hell was made to roast people, which is not the entire function of an electric stove.
A more apt analogy for hell would be the Nazi gas chambers. If the Nazis had won WW2, the question we would be debating today would be "Why would a loving Hitler send the Jews to death camps"? Hitler never personally sent anyone there, and was desperate to keep the Jews out of the death camps, but because they were Jewish of their own free wills, he couldn't help them. This is false Nazi logic, of course Hitler could stop the death camps if he wanted to.
Picture credit: http://www.nintendoraw.com/?tag=gamers-hell-comic
Your post raises the age-old problem of theodicy ... if God is so loving and good, why does he allow (let alone cause) terrible things to happen to good people?
ReplyDeleteAnswer: There is no satisfactory or convincing answer.
And Hell is an invention of the Christians (subsequently adopted by the Muslims); Hell, as such, is never described in the Old Testament.
There is considerable controversy as to whether Christ himself ever specifically discussed Hell; the frequency with which it is mentioned in the New Testament is likely more a reflection of the attitudes of the authors of the scriptures than Christ himself. Even the translation of the Hebrew Gehenna and the Greek Tartarus and Hades is contentious.
This form of religion, of course, is a mechanism for controlling (or attempting to control) the behaviour of the masses, with Hell as the 'stick' contrasting with the 'carrot' of Heaven. This form of religion has always capitalized on peoples' fear of the unknown and unexplained, granting power to the 'insiders' who are privy to the 'secrets' or have a hot line to God.
In modern times, of course, it largely plays on peoples' fear of death and their difficulties in dealing with a complex and often confusing world, offering the reassurance of dogma.
It is perplexing, though, that anybody would look to a psychopathic old man in the sky for relief from their insecurities.
Up to this year I had always thought hell was only in the old testament, because it sounded in keeping with the violent vengeful tone. But I was informed a few months ago that Hell is indeed a New Testament thing. Either way, it does not make sense, but even less in the New Testament.
ReplyDeleteI'm too lazy to check my bookshelves, or even search around on the Web, but my understanding is that there's a considerable body of scriptural analysis that maintains that the current 'Christian' model of Hell is, in fact, based on yet another Pauline corruption.
ReplyDeletePaul, of course, was the great 'marketer' of Christianity, and to whom the Epistles, which have had such a dismal impact on Christian doctrine (misogyny and antisemitism), are attributed.
Not to do Paul too much of a disservice, it should be borne in mind that the current concept of Hell developed over the centuries, with the medieval (i.e. Roman Catholic) church providing much of the detail (along with such peculiar accretions such as Purgatory).
Most modern fundamentalist Christian flavours include a pretty heavy dose of residual Calvinism (with its 'total depravity' premise, which all too often translates into 'anything that's fun must be a sin' ... LOL!) which maintains that only by 'salvation' through faith can you be spared those 'eternal torments' of Hell.
Get good with God or you're going to Hell!