HOW CAN YOUR ETERNAL LIFE IN HEAVEN BE PLEASANT WHEN PEOPLE SUFFER IN HELL FOREVER?

Many Christians have always being bothered as to how people, including Jesus, can be happy in Heaven while their relatives, young children and friends scream for relief while none comes, in the tortuous flames of the Pit of Hell forever. A decent person would not like it happening even to a stranger.  Yet the Church says the saint has the highest level of human development and is full of empathy and compassion and selfless love.

Many sceptics see a contradiction here.  Sadly the Christian leaders are never bothered enough to abandon their faith as man-man made nonsense.

Christians contrive a number of "solutions". The Church believes that hell is a madhouse (see the chapter on Hell in the Handbook of Christian Apologetics). The quick answer to them all is: "Church doctrine says that sin is insanity for we sinners think our sin is good. We are wrong for we cannot chose what is evil in itself. We are only attracted by the good we see in the evil thing. So sin is insanity therefore they and we should weep and feel for the damned. So if there is a Hell there is no Heaven or at least no Heaven that is any better than Hell. If the saints are happy they are evil."

How can you be a saint and be happy in spite of knowing what the damned endure? And what if you realise - which you will - that being happy in spite of their agony is abnormal and twisted.
 
 * THE SAINTS DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THE SUFFERING OR REMEMBER THAT THEY EVER HEARD OF HELL.

God cannot remove the awareness of the saints that there are people who are in Hell for that would involve deleting any remembrance of life on earth. If God takes it away then there was no point in them having a life on earth. He would be extremely vicious and uncaring if he put people in this vale of tears only to make it as if they weren’t here at all, later. To draw them to forget how they got their virtues is to make them lose the virtues. The Book of Revelation represents the saints as being aware of the suffering of others (19). If the saints know nothing of the damned now then there is no purpose for damnation. You only talk about mysterious purposes when you talk about people.

God is a God of truth we are told and truth is needed for justice to happen.  Then justice allows love to happen.  So God cannot hide the truth.
 
* THE SAINTS SUFFER TO SEE THE DAMNED SUFFER.

Then Heaven is as much perpetual torment as Hell is. When the saints are so good they must suffer as much as the damned suffer at the thought of them suffering. Why go to Heaven in that case?
 
* THE SAINTS WILL THAT THE DAMNED BE FREE FROM SUFFERING AND RELEASED BUT THEY HAVE NO FEELINGS FOR GOD PROTECTS THEM FROM BEING SAD. THEY LOVE THEM BUT THEY DO NOT SUFFER AT THEIR SUFFERING.

The obvious error in this is the assumption that you can will something without feeling. You cannot. The will is a kind of feeling. It is a feeling itself and just works in a different way from the way your emotions work. The world defines the will as, “I will is equal to I want to choose.” Want means desire.
 
The saints will the salvation of the damned and that must be a bit painful. Even if they don’t care about the damned now but wish the damned had done better when they had the chance when they were alive on earth before it was too late that is still painful for the saints. The saints have a penalty of eternal punishment too at its mildest. But if they really don’t care then they are evil and Heaven is a den of vice.

The Christians say that “the saints approve of the damned getting their just deserts and no more and that they miraculously cannot feel distressed about what is happening to them. The saints do not will the damned to sin but they are supernaturally prevented from feeling hatred for sin for that would take away their happiness and is no good to them. The Christians preach that it is not a sin for God to make the saints so unemotional and cold in the face of sin and suffering because he needs to make them happy. Jesus said that people become like angels in Heaven (Mark 12:25). They don’t feel the way they did on earth. There is no contradiction between the saints knowing that there is a Hell and being happy and loving the damned.”
 
God must be doing something to the damned to make sure they don’t decide one day they have had enough and leave and go to Heaven. Why else would they all stay there? The saints cannot will that the damned repent and be free of Hell for God holds them captive in Hell and to make such a wish is to impugn his perfection. It is a sin.

The saints cannot love the damned as if they never sinned. That would be blessing the sins by pretending that they never did them. Or that the sin was something alien that attached itself to them and not caused by them. This would be pretending that the sin is not part of the sinner. That would not be loving them at all for it is willing the encouragement of the evil of sin and sin is bad for the sinner when it is to be hated.  To love the sinner and not the sin is to pretend that the sinner has had nothing to do with the sin which is hardly loving or sincere. Even if you separate the sinner from the sin and fight the sin the attitude is not right and you are still not off the hook for being a hypocrite.
 
The other way it is put, “Love the sinner for see the whole person and not just the hateful sin which is only a small part of them”, denies the obvious fact that once you sin you can’t do real good and all is sin. For example, if I sin I am ungrateful to God. I am saying, “I want to do good if I want to and not because you want it God or because it is good.” So any good you do reflects your attitude and is sinful. It is actually worse to do good in a state of sin than to do harm for the person who pretends to love is worse than the one who brazenly hates for such hate is its own punishment and is less selfish. The only sense in which they can love them is by willing what will make them repent which can be done even if it is known by them that they never will. But since God has put them in Hell this is sinful unless he couldn’t do anything other than that.

The modern Church following Christ says the saints must love the damned for you have to love your enemies but hate their sins instead of hating them. But this love isn’t really love at all as we have seen. If you would reward the sins you are pleased with the punishing that they bring on themselves and are really rejoicing in it. Your sorrow would be just masochism.

Compassion is about suffering with the suffering though you don't have to.  It is feeling for somebody whose suffering even if down to a bad past choice and committing yourself to working with them to help them.  It is about their suffering not how they came to suffer even if that it self-inflicted.  That is why if the damned put themselves in Hell through one final choice they are in fact entitled to more compassion not less.  Their situation is the worst one.

 * GOD FORCES THE SAINTS TO HATE THE DAMNED AND ENJOY SEEING THEM SUFFER.

Christians insist that the saints do not freely hate the damned for the person is absolutely precious and so hatred is always wrong except when it cannot be helped. They would insist that people who think that the saints are sadists who enjoy seeing the damned suffer are forgetting that the saints may be enjoying God but feeling no sorrow over the damned. But many believers insist that God hates the damned and wants the saints to hate them too. Hate is not a pleasant feeling. The believers would answer that the hatred in the saints is enjoyable for they gloat.

If you are forced to hate then it is not a sin. God may be compelled to cause the saints to hate the damned and laugh at their suffering in order to make the saints happy. Therefore, the saints hating the damned would be ineffective as proof against Hell. It would be a necessary evil. But the problem for some is if you are forced to love or hate then the result is just a mime and not real love or hate. But emotionally it is love or hate. Feelings do not follow logic.

If God forces the saints to feel hate then why not force them to feel love which would be a more moral feeling? The thought that the Lord implants by force feelings of hatred and gloating in the saints denies the goodness of God. If forcing the saints gets them off the hook it does not get God off it for he is as bad as hating the damned himself when he freely makes the saints hate.
 
The view that the saints hate the damned fits our knowledge that the doctrine of love the sinner and hate the sin which I have thoroughly exposed as a sickly sweet sham that has nothing to do with love at all.

* GOD ALLOWS THE SAINTS TO FREELY HATE THE DAMNED AND GLOAT.
 
The saints will be happy when they are with God. They will be happier if they revel in the misfortune of the damned. The view that the saints have to choose to delight in the suffering of the damned to be happy is almost universally rejected by theologians (but nearly universally accepted in popular Christianity) for it implies that God is incompetent in bringing happiness to them. If God is good then being with him must produce amazing happiness. The view then that they have to rejoice in the agony of the damned to be happier so they have no choice but to gloat makes no sense. It is no excuse.
 
This is different from the previous because here the saints revel in spite freely and unnecessarily. The happiness of hatred is just an excuse for the saints’ evil.
 
Hell is purposeless and if God sends people there then he expects his friends to gloat and celebrate. The Christian Church speaks of Hell as eternal loss.
 
What business have the Christians wailing about our assertion that there is no justifiable purpose for Hell when they themselves acclaim Hell and its purposeless?

If people need to be damned for the saints' good, God could have worked out his purpose by damning nobody but by setting up an illusionary Hell. The saints would be too wrapped up in God and there would be so many people in Heaven and with family and friendship ties ended (Mark 12:25) that they would not notice if the should-be-damned were in Heaven and they could be put in different departments to keep the secret. So God wants the saints to really hate the real damned if Hell is real for he unnecessarily torments them. This is evil for it is better to hate an illusionary person you think is real than it is to hate a real person. God hates the damned and would make the saints hate them too.

A process of elimination shows that hate and gloating is the only course if people are known by you to be in Hell.  It shows that each excuse is itself a gloat.  A indirect or sideway gloat is still a gloat.



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