WHAT KIND OF PERSON FINDS IT EASY TO BELIEVE IN HELL?

Christianity and Islam teach that at death, if we are estranged from God by sin, we will go to Hell to suffer forever and once we go there it is impossible for us to leave.  Catholics call such sin mortal sin.

Hell is hard to believe. Some people say it is easy. Others say it is no harder to believe than the other doctrines the Church has such as Jesus being God, rising from the dead and giving salvation through baptism and the pope being infallible and so on. It is hard to warm to the other doctrines if they make it easier for people to believe in Hell when they believe in them. It is as if they encourage or smooth the way to dangerous or disturbing beliefs. Besides, to say those other doctrines make it just as easy to add the doctrine of Hell to your belief system is to deny how disturbing the doctrine is. The doctrine only appeals to malicious people or those who have been desensitised to such an evil claim as that a sinner should suffer forever in Hell if he doesn't repent. Those who say it is easy or not too difficult are certainly betraying their own smug feeling that they won't go there but that other people will. Their vindictiveness simmers below the surface.

What is easy about believing people die and rise again go there to burn and suffer forever for a sin or two? The belief demands quite a few miracles such as bodies rising from the dead, becoming immortal and miracle beings to inflict everlasting torment. If it is easy to believe in it, then the reason surely has to be because the victims of Hell are thought to deserve it more than anything else. That would suggest that the believer is not a good piece of work. If it is easy to believe people would deserve hell then they deserve it even if there is no God. If it is hard to believe in Hell then that is telling us that our natural instincts revolt against the idea. By silencing them we silence our conscience and become evil. We are doing what the child abuser does. Hell is a vicious vindictive doctrine. Commonsense says that Jesus rising from the dead is very unlikely for everybody stays dead and that even if he rose we cannot be expected to believe he did. Believers answer that we don’t know what is likely. They don’t believe that argument themselves for life cannot go on if we don’t make assumptions about what is likely. They are just being bigots. So the doctrine of Hell is very unlikely for all the miracles it involves. They have to be bigots to defend it so it is a doctrine of hate.

If a Christian says that it is good to believe in Hell, they may also admit that the doctrine is horrible and they recoil from it. If they are okay people then they will say they try to believe in the doctrine but cannot. That would be acceptable for a Christian for it is only wilful doubt or denial that is a sin. Clearly those who profess the doctrine are showing that they have an evil side.

Christians say sin not harm is the worst of all evils. They say harm is not necessarily sin but harm is the result of sin. So Hell is useless when it fails to stop sin. Why bother refraining from harm then when you are a sinner already? If you would commit adultery if there were no Hell then you are as much of an adulterer as the one who actually has adulterous sex (Matthew 5).

If the teaching means harm is only a symptom of sin and otherwise has no effect on making something a sin then clearly we have, "Murder is only bad because God says so and not because of the victim."

If we are good people we will do good for its own sake. We won’t need belief in Hell. It will have nothing to do with making us good. It actually may make us act good but not be good. Jesus said that people who do that are the worst before God though man may like them a lot.

Hell then has nothing to do with making us genuinely good so it is clearly a vindictive doctrine. What would you think of somebody who believed that the tooth fairy will torment you forever if you don’t brush your teeth every morning? You would believe that person is indulging in vindictive wishful thinking for the doctrine is useless and the person could believe something nicer.

The apostle Paul said he spoke for Jesus and Jesus spoke in him (1 Thessalonians 2:13, 4:2/ 2 Corinthians 13:3). He declared that if it were possible he would consent to be lost, that is damned and separated and rejected by God, if it could mean Israel could be saved in his stead (Romans 9:1-5). He stated that this was the truth and that the Holy Spirit revealed it to his conscience that it was true, "It is the truth that I have tremendous anguish over my people Israel and wish I could be lost and cut off from God to save them and I say this in union with Christ. My conscience assures me that it is the truth as does the Holy Spirit." This clearly indicates that the modern Christian notion that we make our own Hell and that God doesn't punish us there is false. If we make our own Hell it would be a sin to wish that you would sin and curse him and be lost forever even to save others. God sends people to Hell of his own free will. God went to the trouble of revealing to Paul that Paul would go to Hell for Israel to indicate his approval of Paul's feelings and anguish. The Church cannot say that the wish came when Paul was overcome by weakness and so his wish that would normally be a sin couldn't be for he didn't fully consent to it.

To send someone to Hell means they are forced to stay in sin forever and sin is what God says he wants rid of. A God who hates sin should hate it for what it does to us but and try to save us all from it and leave the possibility of salvation open to us during the entire eternal span of our existence. We conclude that the doctrine is malicious.

It is terrible to suggest that anyone who dies even might go there. What kind of compassion is that for them or the bereaved?

The teaching of Hell makes sin very serious indeed. It implies that you would turn your back on all the people you love and God and on love itself for all eternity. That is a very harmful and heavy burden of guilt the doctrine seeks to impose. Severe psychological damage could be done to children and the impressionable. Christianity should be discouraged by the state not by persecution but by making sure everybody has access to reasonings that answer and refute the faith.

If you have a baby and abandon it and it dies as a result of exposure and goes to Heaven it could be better off. It would be worse off if you let it live and it went to Hell. In principle, not in practice, the Church has to agree that this logic is correct. Christianity is evil and twisted and if it lets you spare the child it does it without real love. The principle makes sure of that. The love it has is for its faith not the child.