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.