THE DOCTRINE THAT HELL IS A TERRIBLE FINAL FATE ROUSES HATE

Jesus preached a lot about divine judgement and warned that we must do all we can to avoid Gehenna or the state of being eternally lost.  This was useful for encouraging Christians to hate other groups that they saw as immoral or as leading to damnation.  Jesus expressed hate for the person who leads a child into sin saying they are better off drowned in the sea with a millstone around the neck.  The hate is masked in, "I love you and don't want you to lose your eternal life with God."  In an age where people were stoned to death for non-crimes such as adultery he meant it literally.  He was implying it is unloving not to destroy them for they are better off becoming corpses.  The idea is that if they die in sin at least they are not dying in worse sin to suffer for all eternity.

The Church says that hate is only a sin if you can’t help it. If gay people are leading your son or daughter to Hell then there would be something wrong with you if you didn’t persecute them, if you didn’t send somebody to beat them to an inch of their life and cover up for that person.

The Church says Hell is a worse evil than death for death is really just going to another place. Miley Cyrus's sexy performances are putting people in danger of Hell for she is putting sinful urges in them. So it follows that it is better to kill her than let her endanger souls. Jesus taught that Hell was true. Jesus then showed his true colours. The Catholic Church murdered many over the doctrine of Hell. Jesus must be condemned with it.
If you thought that some girl was leading your precious little Johnny into sin that deserves everlasting suffering in Hell such as sex outside marriage, hating her would be inevitable. You would hate her far more than you would hate her if she murdered him for better dead and even out of existence than rotting in Hell in everlasting agony. If you were in the habit of sinning and repenting you would reason that maybe you should kill her for you will repent anyway and get to Heaven in the end. You would believe that it is better to commit a once-off sin of murder if it saves your son from getting into habitual sin which will linger on and on. His risk of going to Hell would be bigger than yours.

Can you wish that somebody will be going to Hell? You can if it is out of respect for their free will. The Church says God respects our free will if we choose Hell. You might say that it is wrong to wish Hell on a person for it denies they should be happy. If it is wrong because it makes them unhappy then you are implying unhappiness is worse than not having God. It’s a sin for you to worry more about the suffering than God.

Belief in Hell takes away choice. If you believe in Hell you can’t do good except to avoid it. Hell-dodging will be your motivation in life. If you say you do good because you want to do good and not because of Hell, that is saying that you are not trying to avoid it. That is ridiculous and a lie. Nobody would be that heroic. You can’t mean what you say but if you do then clearly you are being smug or you are being delusional.

The doctrine of Hell makes believers smug. They feel superior to the people in Hell. Jesus continually berated the Pharisees and the scribes for looking down on people they thought were not as holy as they were. These people did not believe in Hell. If you are confident you are going to Heaven, there is no way you can avoid believing you are acceptable to God while those in Hell are not acceptable at all through their own fault. The Pharisees and scribes would not have been smug enough to think that those who they considered unholy were that bad. Christianity then is the raw material for manufacturing super-Pharisees and super-scribes. Jesus said to the Pharisees and scribes that he didn't know how they could escape the damnation of Hell. Does that not prove how dangerous Christianity is?

Christians will answer that they are humble because they realise that though they are happy with God now that they were sinners themselves and so cannot look down on others. This answer proves how smug they actually are for it does not work. Who do they think they are fooling? Smug people are smug precisely because they made mistakes in the past and are new people now.

Society says that a good person is one who does not condemn anybody as wholly bad but who sees much good in every bad person. Christianity say that if you die estranged from God, you choose to be entirely bad and irredeemable for all eternity. This marks the damned as hateful. It proves that the Christian would hate a person if they knew that person was ready for Hell. If it is acceptable to adopt a doctrine that justifies hate then why not have one that tells you to go out and kill homosexuals and heretics and other people God condemns? Christians must hate the damned in Hell. If they love sinners on earth, it is only because they assume that somehow the sinners may not be condemned by God.

To say you love somebody when you say you would hate them if you knew they were fit for Hell is to lie. It is conditional love. Conditional love masquerades as love of the person when it is really about not loving persons but what the person has (say wealth) or does.

Christians want you to love others for the pleasing of God. So you love pleasing him and not them. Which is worse? Loving a person because of God or because of something they have achieved such as wealth? Loving because of God of course. At least loving the wealth is loving that part of them that gained the wealth.

To accuse somebody of being bad enough for Hell is programming your tendency to think and feel bad of them. You would need to experience the power to choose to that extent yourself before you could accuse somebody else of having the power. And Christians accuse for they say that all people need the good news of salvation. If they are going to Heaven anyway, then they do not need it.

It is very simplistic to argue that we choose being good in Heaven or being bad in Hell. Our choices are not that simple. A choice is really making a pile of choices at the one time. You cannot be bad enough to refuse God forever. We are only drawn to the benefits we see in the choices we make. Even our bad choices are really about these benefits.

The Christians who say that we exclude ourselves from God’s presence if we go to Hell are lying. They know from their Bibles how Jesus said that God and the bridegroom meaning himself would have them locked out and excluded. It is not a matter of poor God wanting to be with them and being unable to influence them to re-consider their rejection of him.

Catholic tradition tends to assume that anybody who commits suicide goes to Hell forever. Suicides were denied burial in consecrated ground. Today, some Catholics say that if somebody commits suicide we should not greet the news with horror and fear that the person has gone to Hell. They want us to hope that the person may have been mentally ill so that they could not sin by committing suicide. Their suicide will not take them to Hell if they are not guilty. It is evil to wish the evil of mental illness on a person in the name of religion. Such a view is a repudiation of the Catholic faith. Jesus asserted the possibility that anybody could go to Hell. He said that the respected Jewish leaders were going there - even the humanitarian ones – unless they changed (Luke 18). When they could go to Hell how much more likely is it is for anybody else to go and especially if they have committed suicide?

Psychologists say, "We are a mixture of altruism and egoism. It is possible that no matter how altruistic we are, we are far more egoistic at the same time." If so then Hell makes egoism worse because nobody wants to suffer forever. They will develop the self-centred motivation to dodge Hell. People's self interest will be behind the good they do. The urge to help others just to make a good impression is going to be stronger in a believer in a God who sends people to Hell than in a non-believer.

Few Catholics know the Church's "explanations" about how Hell is such a healthy doctrine. That warns us how dangerous religion is. That people would follow a God when they have a dangerous or unhealthy view of hell is worrying. Those people should feel extreme horror at the thought of God. The thought of going to Mass to worship him should make them ill.

The doctrine of everlasting Hell has led consistent Christians to refuse to take morphine on their deathbeds which hastens their death. God gives life for us to choose him or reject him and the last moment of life is the most important moment of all. At that point ones destiny, Heaven or an eternity in Hell is fixed. So one cannot be under the influence of drugs as death approaches. One wants to have the faculties in as good of a state as is possible under the circumstances. Strangely, the Roman Catholic Church allows morphine to be given as long as the intention is to kill pain and not the person. This is only a stunt to avoid a backlash that would expose the Church for the dangerous entity it is. The Church is afraid of mainstream society at times.

Let the Hellfire doctrine be damned.



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