In our modern understanding of justice, the punishment should fit the crime. Putting a child in a torture chamber and burning them alive for stealing a piece of candy, would be considered immoral and rightly so, when considering the impact on human well-being as the standard against measuring right and wrong. (For those of you that put God’s well being as a higher priority than that of human’s, please read this post which demonstrates how we can know that the concept of sin is total bullshit, then come back and finish this post.) The concept of hell is that of infinite punishment for a finite crime, and it is therefore immoral for the same reasons as exampled above with a child stealing candy. In the case where we are ignorant as to the impact of our actions, it is even worse.
Any being who is all-knowing and all-loving, would by definition understand this, and not create a place to torture people forever simply because they exercised the critical thinking skills they supposedly got from this god in the first place.
For Christians who believe in hell and that non-believers or those who don’t accept the unsupported claim that a god exists are sent there, you are saying that you are okay with notion that non-believers should burn forever simply because your God had his feelings hurt.
I would seem that the most popular Christian argument for this is, “God doesn’t send people to hell, they send themselves there by choosing not to belief the claims about god on faith.” Nobody sends themselves to hell, and here is how we know that.
The idea that people go to hell because they choose not to accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior is predicated on the mistaken concept that belief is a choice. It is not. Belief is a matter of being convinced. You can be convinced of something for good or bad reasons and it is usually on a scale where we can be more convinced of the truth of certain things than others.
A simple demonstration is you catch your husband or wife cheating on you, perhaps you walk in on them, or maybe you set up a video camera which documents their infidelity, or perhaps they even confess to you that they have been cheating on you. It is not possible to think you can just choose to believe instead that they have actually been faithful in light of your new-found knowledge that they weren’t.
Another example is the belief that if you jump off a building you will fall. After you have come to an understanding of the effects of gravity in this world, you can no longer just believe that you won’t fall. This belief is not a choice, it is the result of your learning experiences in life. Believing you won’t fall after failing over and over, and learning exactly why you can’t fly, is not a choice you can possibly make. The only real choice you have here is to deny realty, lying to yourself, and if you do so, you will still have to deal with the consequences of being wrong.
If a god exists, but provides no good evidence for his existence, one cannot be expected to be convinced he is real.
Good evidence would be anything that points exclusively to one conclusion over any other. As Faith provides a path to conclude any of the world’s religions are true, it fails to live up to the standard of good evidence. An ancient book that makes claims about the existence of a god, yet is in direct conflict with other ancient books that also make claims for the existence of a god, or gods, is equally poor evidence as long as we can’t show any of these books are true and no god shows up to clarify which religion has the correct account.
If an all loving, all knowing, and all-powerful god exists, then he should have no problem giving us good evidence for his existence. Clearly that can only mean he doesn’t want us to have that evidence, and believers who claim you must take his existence on faith, are admitting that fact.
Those who claim that if god reveals himself to us such that we don’t need faith to believe in him, often also claim that it would be a violation of free will for him to do so, ignoring the stories from their own holy books that tell us god did in fact reveal himself to many members of the story. Abraham knew god existed as he was reported to have had many direct interactions with him. Even the accounts of the devil tell us he is well aware of God’s existence, according to the story, still had the free-will to oppose him. Saul of tarsus according to his story, became a Christian and became known as the apostle Paul, only after Jesus revealed himself to him on the road to Damascus, and The doubting Thomas only believed after Jesus proved himself directly to him. These accounts show us that according to the bible being a non-believer right up to the time God revealed himself is actually quite reasonable and revelation has no effect on free-will, nor on keeping one from going to heaven. Last, knowing you will fall from a building, doesn’t keep you from exercising your free will to jump off the roof anyway.
Examining the doctrine of hell with the understanding that belief is not a choice clearly destroys that whole argument. If as most Christians believe, the only non-redeemable sin, is that of disbelief, all that would be required for a God’s wishes to be fulfilled would be for him to just show up.
If you simply think this is a good time to say “God works in mysterious ways” which is an admission you can’t understand him, please see this post which demonstrates why you can’t possibly believe something you can’t understand.
