DID JESUS HAVE A DARK MOTIVE FOR PROMOTING THE IDEA OF EVERLASTING LOSS IN HELL?
Hypocrites try to distort Jesus and the Bible to avoid saying that he taught that if a person dies in great enough sin they will never see the presence of God. Ever.
They do not deny that he taught something awful happens that he compared to Gehenna, a place of tears and terror and degradation.
Why then we are supposed to want to get rid of the eternal in the eternal exclusion doctrine? It makes as much sense as saying that we should be okay with being tortured in prison for the next ten years for at least it is not eleven.
Anyway we are told that Jesus only sought to warn us and offered to help us go to God forever. Should Jesus have taught the doctrine of everlasting punishing even if it exists?
If Jesus was indeed just a man and not God
or his Son then we would be right to read passive-aggression into
this. Bullies always do that. If that is not-passive
aggressive nothing is. He would have got pleasure out of
seeing the fear in others.
The Christian, the believer in the sinlessness and infallibility of Jesus, will
say that he was right to preach Hell even if he wasn’t. He or she would preach, “It was good of
Jesus to warn us about the existence of everlasting punishment. It reminds us
about how bad sin is and how unwise it is to commit it. If there was no such
thing as Hell or if we walked through life oblivious of it we would sin more. We
need it to put us off sinning”.
Some Christians say they cannot assert that we need to be warned about Hell in
case we find ourselves in it for that seems like denying the power of God to
save a person from Hell even if that person does have free will. They say God
works mainly through people and secondly through other things. Thus God is
powerful enough to melt a hardened heart.
Jesus said we must have disinterested love for our neighbour. Love of neighbour
is really love of God. Jesus wanted us to practice disinterested love. He made
sure we wouldn’t when he revealed Hell for it is psychologically impossible to
sincerely avoid sin that leads to Hell for a selfless reason. You cannot really
reject a sin because you love God and not because you are afraid of Hell. You
would be abnormal and deranged if you could. When Jesus made Hell a part of the
faith he taught he was destroying the very selflessness he commanded. Nobody can
really love God for to have a selfish motive mixed with unselfish is impossible
because if you were really unselfish you would drop the selfish motive. If God
did not tell us about Hell but limited our intelligence so that we could not
even think it might exist that would prevent us from doing good to avoid the
suffering of Hell. The fact that we can think of Hell proves there is no God and
that the Bible is just human writings and that Christianity is incapable of
selflessness and only wears a mask of altruism.
The argument that Hell is a good deterrent for sinners is an insult to God
because it denies what he said about love and goodness. He says they are
selfless acts of goodness, forgetting about yourself and thinking only of what
is best for himself. If we were here to please ourselves there would be no need
for suffering and we would not be here but in Heaven. A good and almighty God
would only make us suffer if it could make us selfless. If a person turns away
from sin because of Hell that is no use for it is punishment he hates not sin.
This person only acts repentant but is not really. If a person stops sinning
because of the selfless love of God and because of the dread of Hell then this
repentance is not genuine either. If the person truly loves God she or he will
not have the selfish motive. She or he can repent for love alone. She or he can
stop having the other motive. Jesus said we must selflessly love God with all
our strength so if he preached the existence of everlasting torture it was not
because he wanted it to help to make a better world.
If you love God for his sake and not your own then you would endure everlasting
torment for him. It is psychologically impossible to tell God that you love him
for his own sake and not to avoid the everlasting pains of Hell and mean it.
That is really saying that if the love of God required you to undergo this
unnecessary pain you would. You can’t really love a God who does not even need
your love and who is perfectly happy to freedom from everlasting pain. The Hell
doctrine then prevents the very love for which God allegedly made us. It means
that if God made us he made us for suffering and pain. It makes God into the
epitome of malignancy and a very dangerous idea. Acceptance of the Hell doctrine
forces you to be selfish and when you believe that selfishness is always wrong
as the God doctrine says many of your morals will soon be abandoned. When Jesus
commanded us to love God for God’s own sake he was commanding mental illness.
Even if these considerations draw you to the idea that there is a God but that
there cannot be a Hell the problem is not solved. Even if Hell does not exist
the pure love of God still demands that you must love God and prefer to suffer
forever for him if need be even if there is no such suffering.
Religion says that free will implies the
right to finally turn away from God. Jesus never said he saw
it that way. If that is the bottom line then we needed to be
told. He never said, "God has given you free will and it is a
dangerous gift but necessary for your dignity. God will never
force his love on you." It needed to be laid out in clear
times. Saying that Jesus did say we abuse free will does not
mean he made the link. Plus the language of Gehenna implies
God is exacting hatred and revenge on the people who die without
him.
If Jesus preached everlasting perdition for a reason then he certainly did wrong. Either his reason
was a childish one or a bad one. Telling people to believe such a horrible and
distressing doctrine when no good could come of it is very very abusive.
To tell a person that they deserve everlasting punishment if they are sinners is
to say something very serious indeed. You know that you have to have proof
before you can tell anybody they are guilty of murder and should be jailed for
life. Imagine then how strong the evidence has to be to entitle you to say they
deserve INFINITE torment! To believe in a religion that asks you to approve even
of the eternal loss of even one person no matter how satisfactory the evidence
for that religion is, is almost psychopathic. To say that God asks you to
believe in Hell is a blasphemy of diabolical proportions.
The mere fact that Jesus said there is a Hell is enough to prove that he is not
the entirely trustworthy prophet Christians put him up to be. The founders of
the early Church were just as unreliable when they turned such a person into the
supreme manifestation of the divine.
If Jesus preached everlasting punishing for no real reason then he should have
had the decency to realise that it could do untold harm. He just didn’t care.
CONCLUSION
The doctrine of everlasting punishment is harmful and is cruel for those who are
supposedly warned about it. Thinking it is real or possible does
real harm. If you think somebody could lead your beloved to
hell you will suffer a raging hate for that person. A terrorist even
a sincere one who believes what he is doing is right is still a terrorist. The
doctrine makes a terrorist of God. And those serve him and form Churches for him
are accessories to his crimes. We regard people as evil when they accuse another
of wrong without sufficient reason and yet religion demands the right to accuse
others of deserving Hell, for example, they think prostitutes who die will go to
Hell forever unless they repent. It has no evidence for all for hell and its
doctrines being the truth. The evidence is biased and the evidence for Jesus’
resurrection for example is destroyed by the fact that non-religious miracles
are more convincing and more numerous.
BIBLE VERSION
The Amplified Bible
FURTHER READING
APOLOGETICS AND CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Most Rev M Sheehan DD, M H Gill & Son,
Dublin, 1954
APOLOGETICS FOR THE PULPIT, Aloysius Roche, Burns Oates & Washbourne LTD,
London, 1950
ENCHIRIDION SYMBOLORUM ET DEFINITIONUM, Heinrich Joseph Denzinger, Edited by A
Schonmetzer, Barcelona, 1963
GOD IS NOT GREAT, THE CASE AGAINST RELIGION, Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic
Books, London, 2007
‘GOD, THAT’S NOT FAIR!’ Dick Dowsett, [OMF Books, Overseas Missionary
Fellowship, Belmont, The Vine, Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 3TZ] Kent, 1982
HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft & Ronald Tacelli, Monarch, East
Sussex, 1994
HAVE WE TO FEAR A DEVIL? Fred Pearce, The Christadelphian Office, Birmingham
HEAVEN AND HELL Dudley Fifield, Christadelphian Publishing Office, Birmingham
HELL – WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT IT, John R Rice, Sword of the Lord,
Murfreesboro, 1945
JEHOVAH OF THE WATCH-TOWER, Walter Martin and Norman Klann, Bethany House,
Minnesota, 1974
LIFE IN CHRIST, PART 3, Fergal McGrath SJ, MH Gill and Son Ltd, Dublin, 1960
RADIO REPLIES VOL 1, Frs Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul,
Minnesota, 1938
REASON AND BELIEF, Bland Blanschard, George Allen & and Unwin Ltd, London, 1974
THE BIBLE TELLS US SO, R B Kuiper, The Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1978
THE DEVIL, THE GREAT DECEIVER Peter Watkins, The Christadelphian Birmingham,
1992
THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF BIBLE DIFFICULTIES, Gleason W Archer, Zondervan, Grand
Rapids, Michigan, 1982
THE FOUR MAJOR CULTS, AA Hoekema, Paternoster Press, Carlisle, 1992
THE KINDNESS OF GOD, EJ Cuskelly MSC, Mercier Press, Cork, 1965
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING, Fulton J Sheen, Image Books, New York, 1979
THE REAL DEVIL, Alan Hayward, Christadelphian Bible Mission, Birmingham
THE REALITY OF HELL, St Alphonsus Liguori, Augustine Publishing Company, Devon,
1988
THE SERMONS OF ST ALPHONSUS LIGOURI, St Alphonsus Ligouri, TAN, Illinois, 1982
THE TRUTH ABOUT HELL, Dawn Bible Students, East Rutherford, NJ
WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT HELL? Radio Bible Class, Grand Rapids, Michigan,
1986
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HEAVEN?, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1988
WHY DOES GOD? Domenico Grasso SJ, St Paul Publications, Bucks, 1970
