Perhaps the most disturbing idea in Christian dogma is the notion of hell — a place of unending torment for the detestable souls who don’t qualify for a blissful eternity with God and the angels in heaven. Who are these horrible people who are condemned to agonizing, eternal punishment? Those who don’t believe in Jesus. That’s it. Merely failing to believe in Jesus means you are one of the loathsome vermin who must suffer forever, with no possibility of a respite, and not even the prospect of a welcome oblivion.
The Bible’s most famous verse is John 3:16, which in context lays out the bleak picture in Jesus’s own words:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
[John 3:16-18, NIV]
This idea is, or should be, repugnant to any decent person. Indeed, there are many Christians who deny the doctrine or seek to soften it somehow. This is difficult, though, because Jesus himself refers to hell repeatedly and in graphic terms. An example:
If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where
‘the worms that eat them do not die,
and the fire is not quenched.’
Far from hoping to soften the doctrine, some Christians actually seem to delight in it. Tertullian and Thomas Aquinas wrote of the pleasure the saved would take in viewing the sufferings of the damned. Jonathan Edwards notoriously exulted in the prospect of the gruesome spectacle, writing “the sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever.” You can also sense the relish when he writes
The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are ten thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours.
[From his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 1741]
Such creepy people aside, there are many Christians who are uncomfortable with the idea of hell but feel forced to accept it, given that Jesus himself mentions it again and again. C.S. Lewis wrote
There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than the doctrine of hell, if it lay in my power. But it has the support of Scripture and, especially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by the Christian Church, and it has the support of reason.
[From The Problem of Pain]
In the comments, I’d like to discuss the attempts of Lewis and others to rationalize this odious aspect of Christian doctrine. I’m hoping that our Christian readers will weigh in and describe how they, personally, deal with this difficult subject.
If I remember correctly, Dante had a place (limbo?) for souls who lived and died before Jesus was born, so couldn’t have believed in him. I don’t think those folks were actually suffering or being punished, but they couldn’t ever get to heaven either.
Right. Limbo was actually a prominent part of Catholic eschatology, because they needed some way to avoid the unfairness of sending everyone to hell who had the misfortune of dying before Jesus came along.
Limbo was also the place where unbaptized infants were sent, since it clearly wasn’t their fault that they hadn’t been baptized before death. It was obvious that they shouldn’t be punished for something their parents failed to do. Or couldn’t do, if the child died too soon after birth.
It’s another of those weird ideas that Christians felt compelled to adopt because of things Jesus said. He didn’t refer to Limbo specifically, but he did say this:
Christians didn’t want to believe that Jesus was condemning unbaptized infants to hell, though he was evidently ruling out heaven as their destination. They needed Limbo as a place to deposit the poor little kids so that they wouldn’t suffer.
My own guess is that if Jesus actually said that, it was because he hadn’t thought things through and didn’t realize he was throwing unbaptized kids under the bus.
I just learned that the word ‘limbo’ derives from the Latin limbus, meaning edge, border, or hem. The idea was that you weren’t really in hell, you were just sort of straddling the border.
Hell exists on earth, too:
Earthquake death toll tops 33,000
I guess God works in mysterious ways.
According to the great internetz, “The Quran states that God will judge each individual by his or her deeds and that heaven awaits those who have lived righteously and hell those who have not.” Jesus is not involved. We can only hope those earthquake victims lived righteous lives, since most of them do believe in an afterlife.
Richard Swinburne, whose arguments for the soul I dissected in another thread, attempts to rationalize hell in a book chapter called “A Theodicy of Heaven and Hell” (PDF available here).
He draws the line at the idea of hell as a place of eternal physical pain:
It’s good that he recognizes the barbarity of that, but I wonder what he makes of the words of Jesus I quoted in the OP?
I know Swinburne is a member of the Orthodox Church, but I don’t know his position on the veracity of the gospels, so I don’t know whether Jesus’s words are problematic for him.
Swinburne really struggles to explain why some people end up in hell. Here’s a remarkable passage:
What Swinburne fails to explain is why such a person should be made to suffer at all. What has he done wrong? Does Swinburne really see no other options than 1) admittance to heaven or 2) consignment to hell? Why isn’t there a separate paradise for people like the Buddhist, who might not fit into heaven (which is questionable in itself) but aren’t deserving of eternal punishment?
There’s also Swinburne’s stupid statement that “the Buddhist does not want to be doing anything”, which is simply ridiculous.
Christians believe that God loves his children — all of his children — so they have to tie themselves in knots explaining why God sends some (and even most) of his children to eternal torment. That is the antithesis of love.
One of the uncharitable aspects of this is that there are no second chances. You get judged upon death, and that’s it. Your fate is sealed. You either go to heaven or you go to hell.
This makes no sense. Why should death be the point beyond which no reconciliation is possible? And why is God so unloving that he refuses to offer second chances?
The irony is that Jesus himself told the parable of The Prodigal Son, in which a rebellious and sinful son is welcomed home by his father with open arms. It seems that God can’t even live up to the standard set by the father in Jesus’s own parable.
Regarding this “no second chances” business, Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland writes the following in his book The Soul:
That’s preposterous. He is seriously claiming that no one — no one — who dies and is condemned to hell would want to embrace Jesus and leave that eternal torment. And that no one who dies in a state of unbelief would change their mind after discovering that they were wrong.
Say you’re a woman in Tibet who knows a little bit about Christianity but thinks it’s bunk. You die, and in the process of being judged and condemned, you learn that Christianity is true after all. Does Moreland seriously think you wouldn’t change your mind at that point? And that no one in your position would do so?
It’s pure rationalization. He’s looking for excuses for why his God sends people to hell who don’t belong there, and why he offers no second chances.
Here’s C.S. Lewis, offering a similar rationalization:
It’s just as preposterous as the Moreland rationalization, and for the same reason. Does Lewis really think that if the Tibetan woman of my previous comment dies in unbelief, it’s only because she has stubbornly refused to accept Christ despite being given every opportunity? That’s ridiculous.
And what about a tribesman in the central highlands of New Guinea who hasn’t even heard of Jesus before he dies? Has he been given every opportunity to accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior?
That tribesman is SOL, according to Jesus:
That’s an immoral stance, but it is in Jesus’s own words (at least according to those who believe the gospel accounts), so Christians like Lewis and Moreland feel compelled to rationalize.
Nonetheless, and ironically enough, there ARE people who cannot change their mind. The more they are shown their error, the more fervently they cling to it.
Here’s a memorable rationalization of hell from C.S. Lewis:
We don’t choose to play the game. The game is forced upon us by God. And then, when he doesn’t get his way, he declares that we’ve lost and sends us to eternal torment.
I don’t know about Clive, but when I lost a game as a child, my parents didn’t torture me at all, much less for eternity. Love meant something to them. They could teach the Christian God a thing or two.
Whoever believes in him is not condemned
Thats one of the problems I have with the whole business. I may sincerely want to believe but try as I may, I just cant ‘turn on’ belief at will.
My guess at how the brain works is that belief comes from some deep place that is not subject to conscious control.
The outlook for me is not looking good.
Another J.P. Moreland rationalization:
What Moreland doesn’t seem to realize is that earthly life already is superfluous. If God is omniscient, he already knows who’s going to end up in heaven or hell. Why not just create each person in their final destination? Why bother with this “earthly life” charade?
graham2:
That caused me a lot of anxiety as a kid. I wanted to believe, and mostly I did, but doubts would inevitably arise. I feared that I might end up in hell simply because I wasn’t able to suppress those doubts.
Hell is a nasty doctrine to teach to a kid.
Haha. Nor for me. Look me up when you get down there. We can have a beer, at least before it boils away.
Here’s an interesting question for those Christians who think that belief is required in order to gain entrance into heaven:
You presumably would agree that there are more believing Christians as a percentage of the population in Alabama than in Tibet. The reasons for that are obvious. It’s also obvious that many of those Alabamian Christians would not be Christians had they been born in Tibet, and that many of those non-Christian Tibetans would be Christians had they been born in Alabama.
Would you seriously argue that it’s fair for those Alabamians to gain admittance to heaven, but for those Tibetans to be condemned to hell, merely because the former were lucky enough to have been born in Alabama while the latter were unlucky enough to have been born in Tibet?
Moreland:
This should go without saying, but if Jesus actually thought that people should be tortured for eternity merely for failing to believe the gospel, then he was definitely not the kindest, most virtuous person who ever lived.
Moreland, to his credit, understands that it would be ridiculously unfair and immoral for God to send someone to hell merely because they’d never been exposed to the gospel. However, he’s taking an uncomfortable stance, because Jesus’s own words make his position clear:
That New Guinea tribesman who has never heard the gospel or been baptized has not been “born of water and the Spirit”. The poor guy is out of luck, according to Jesus, even though every decent person, apparently including Moreland himself, knows that this is immoral and inexcusable.
For the curious, here’s what the top half of that Jan Van Eyck panel looks like, from the skeleton on up:
It’s a diptych, and the first panel depicts the crucifixion:
I guess I should include this, because there’s more nastiness going on here than in the snip I included at the top of the OP.
ETA: I like how he pointedly included a few guys in clerical hats. Hell won’t be empty of the clergy.
I’m disappointed at you keiths. The only reason why we have bad people claiming to be religious, like DNA_joke, is because they figured out there is no hell… They know it or they are willing to take a chance it is fake…
Any thoughts?
J-Mac:
Yes, I think we should promote falsehoods in order to manipulate people. Especially children. Sit your kids down and tell them stories about hell. Describe the screams of agony and the smell of burning flesh. Emphasize that it’s eternal and that the suffering never ends. Keep them awake at night, afraid that if they die during the night they are doomed.
It will make them better people.
Are you angry? If yes, why?
J-Mac:
Yes and no. If someone truly believes in hell, then warning children about it can be an act of love. But I do feel some anger toward people who buy into that stuff uncritically and end up frightening their kids for no good reason.
Does someone’s belief make it true? Come on, keiths!
J-Mac:
See this.
I know the belief in hell is wrong. Want me to prove it? More so, are you ready or willing to accept it as recent converted atheist?
J-Mac:
This could provide some entertainment while I wait for Flint and Jock to show up again in the ChatGPT thread.
OK, J-Mac. Tell us how you concluded that I am a “recent converted atheist” who needs to be shown that “belief in hell is wrong.” And then, by all means, share your proof with us.
You can only prove it or deny it. I don’t really care what you say on this blog about your beliefs.. If I sense something, I believe it. It is not proof.
Hell is wrong in many ways starting with justice. You are smart enough to figure out that human courts do not punish the worst criminals to the burning hell not matter what the offence. Why would God?
J-Mac:
J-Mac, you asked me if I wanted you to prove it:
The answer is yes. I want you to prove it. I think your “proof” might be entertaining.
Then I’d like you to explain how you concluded that I am a “recent converted atheist” who needs to be shown that “belief in hell is wrong.”
Yet another interesting thread from keiths.
This thread lays out an interpretation of Hell that is widespread among orthodox Christians and I think keiths is mostly justified in his criticism. I found similar faults in the way I saw Christianity being portrayed. But my path has diverged from keiths’ in that instead of rejecting Christianity outright I found a more esoteric form of it that made much more sense to me than the orthodox portrayal.
In my opinion Hell should be considered as a state of being rather than a place. And creative souls such as Dante and Jan Van Eyck who had witnessed this state in visions had the ability to portray it in ways that suited their talents. Hell should not be thought of as a place where souls are punished for ever. Rather it is an experience within the eternal realm which transcends the temporal physical realm. Dante’s, ‘Inferno’ being the first part of the ‘Divine Comedy’, is an account of entering Hell and passing through it, eventually reaching the highest sphere of paradise to gain an understanding of the ultimate love of God.
The only thing stopping anyone from getting beyond Hell is their own self.
CharlieM:
I wondered how (and if) hell fit into your worldview.
Is that because they are refusing to try, or is it because they’re unable? If the latter, can’t God help them?
As I see it Hell is a stage that everyone goes through. Dante, Giotto, Jan van Eyck, Bosch, Michelangelo and Blake have all given us their interpretations of their inner visions of this journey. The suffering beings they depict in their works are manifestations of their own unfulfilled base desires, feelings of animosity, and the like, which they need to take responsibility for before they enter the next stage which Dante depicts as Purgatory. We must descend into the depths of Hell and climb back out through our own efforts. It’s depicted as an Inferno as it is a trial by fire which will cleanse the soul. Obviously the more someone lives a life full of vice, the worse this experience will be for them. On the other hand, living a good life in order to make it easier for oneself in what is to come, is an act of selfishness, which would be counterproductive. Our motives need to be genuine.
I’m sure you will agree with Blake when he writes:
From an anthroposophical perspective, it is not only the Spirits of Darkness that we must be wary of (Ahrimanic spirits). We are also led astray by Spirits of Light (Luciferic spirits). Through unconditional love, Christ leads the way between these two extremes.
You have inspired me to study more deeply the likes of Dante and Blake. I will be paying more attention to the messages they bring.
My thoughts: To be born of water is to be born into this world. We pass from existing in amniotic fluid to being born into the world. Physical death involves a birth into the Spirit.
In my opinion the ceremony of baptism carried out by orthodox Churches these days are just tokens representing the actual baptisms referred to in the Bible. And no matter what some “born-again” Christians might claim, these token baptisms are not a birth of Spirit.
So revealing that CharlieM finds the god stuff appealing, but only after he has combed through it, chucking out the nasty bits.
I remember an interview about a year ago of Peter Hitchens, Christopher Hitchen’s younger brother, who, similar to his brother, was a militant atheist for much of his younger period, but who, unlike his older brother who died unrepentant, returned to the Anglicanism of his birth. When asked what prompted the change of heart, he said seeing the original of Rogier van der Weyden’s 15th century painting “Altar of the Last Judgment,” scared him back to Christianity. As the Jan Van Eyck at the top also shows, there must have been some type of toxin in the Dutch water system in the 15th century. However, Hitchens was being serious. Kind of a form of Pascal’s Wager. Classic “fake it till you make it.” As if God is really that shallow.
If an erudite person such as Peter Hitchens can be so easily manipulated by a cartoonish promise of eternal torment (in whatever form it is supposed to take) painted in the 1400s, think about its power to scare children and uneducated serfs into compliance with “the Faith.” As a refugee from Catholic grade school taught by nuns, I still carry the scars of this “promise” 60 years later. It still tugs at me from the deeper recesses of my psyche–“what if it is actually true?”
I always thought that conforming one’s behavior out of fear rather than loving spiritual acceptance was the single most odiously cynical thing about Christianity. In a theology rife with paradoxes and contradictions, it is by far the most repugnant of doctrines. The relish that many theologians take in the specter of hell is, in my mind, a clear indicium of a certain type of mental illness that afflicts or afflicted these men…..
I’m guessing that it is really all about the money, and the story he tells is merely what he wants other to believe.
chuckdarwin,
Excellent comment. I missed it when you posted it because I was taking a break from TSZ at the time.
I’ve attached the painting below. It’s relatively mild, actually, but it apparently was enough to spur Hitchens to de-deconvert. The Van Eyck would have given him the vapors!
Or the Bosch:
Detail from the Bosch.
Imagine being eaten by a birdlike creature wearing a cauldron-helmet, while swallows fly out of your butt.
That’s enough to scare me back into Christianity.
I came across another rationalization of hell, which boils down to this:
God loves you, but he hates evil. Since he’s perfectly good, he won’t allow evil into Heaven. He would love to allow you into heaven, but because you have sinned, God consigns you to hell in order to avoid polluting his pristine, picture-perfect Paradise with your sin.
Instead of “love the sinner, hate the sin” it’s “love the sinner, hate the sin, and torment the sinner for eternity in order to keep his dirty footprints off your beautiful white heavenly carpet.”
Some pretty obvious problems with that:
1) We’re all sinners, but some people are allowed into heaven. If so, God must be cleaning up (sanctifying) the ones who get in. If that’s the case, why doesn’t he clean all of us up? If God is loving, and he has the power to sanctify us, why doesn’t he sanctify everyone?
2) Keeping the riffraff out of heaven doesn’t require that they be tortured for eternity. Even supposing God has a legitimate reason to exclude some people, why doesn’t he create a nice alternative paradise for them? A perfectly loving God would at least do that.
3) God refuses to sanctify anyone who doesn’t believe. Why? There are plenty of people (including me) who sincerely disbelieve because the evidence for the Christian God is so poor. They aren’t rejecting God out of spite. They simply aren’t persuaded that Christianity is true. Why would a loving God refuse to sanctify them and allow them into heaven?
As graham2 pointed out earlier in the thread:
We don’t have voluntary control over what we do and don’t believe. Why would a loving God punish us for something over which we have no control?
4) According to standard Christian doctrine, belief on its own wouldn’t get people into heaven were it not for the fact that Jesus came to earth and got himself crucified on our behalf. Christians think that Jesus is God, so God’s entry requirements are like this: “I will sanctify you and allow you into heaven, but only after I send myself to earth and torture myself to death, and only if you believe all of that. If you don’t believe it, then screw you. I’m sending you to hell to be eaten by birdlike creatures while swallows fly out of your butt.”
Why in heaven’s name (so to speak) would God insist on torturing himself to death before agreeing to sanctify us?
Like the more general problem of evil, the problem of hell is a huge one for Christians who claim that their God is perfectly loving.
Another rationalization of hell, courtesy of William Lane Craig:
First, Craig is assuming that God can’t allow you into heaven unless you’ve “given your life to him”, which makes no sense and is not the behavior of a perfectly loving God. If God loves everyone, why not let everyone in? Why demand that people give their lives to him?
Second, he’s assuming that there are only two options: heaven or hell. There’s another option that I laid out in my previous comment. Suppose God has a good reason for excluding some people from heaven — a reason that is somehow compatible with the fact that he is perfectly loving. In that case, why not create an alternative paradise and send people there instead of to heaven?
Craig is smart enough to have thought of these objections on his own. The fact that he didn’t demonstrates the stupefying effect of religious dogma.
Another rationalization from William Lane Craig, coming from that same debate transcript.
Craig acknowledges the conflict between two of God’s purported attributes: perfect justice and perfect love. Being perfectly just, God demands that we be punished eternally for our sins. Being perfectly loving, God doesn’t want us be punished eternally for our sins.
Craig suggests that the dilemma is resolved in the person of Jesus. By taking our punishment upon himself, Jesus satisfies the requirement of perfect justice, and since by doing so he enables us to receive salvation and enter heaven, he has demonstrated his perfect love for us.
Except that it doesn’t work.
First, God’s notion of justice is pretty warped. By the very act of being born, we inherit the sin of Adam and Eve (according to the doctrine of “original sin”) and therefore deserve to burn in hell, as if we were responsible for Adam and Eve’s rebellion.
Next, God inflicts collective punishment throughout the Old Testament, as when he inflicts plagues on the people of Egypt because of what their Pharaoh does. That’s unfair enough, but it gets worse, because the Bible tells us that God deliberately “hardens Pharaoh’s heart” so that he will defy God and draw further punishment upon his people. It’s a grotesque and unjust puppet show.
Then there’s the fact that even the smallest sin deserves eternal punishment. That candy bar you stole when you were 8? May you rot in hell forever for that. Catholics try to soften this a bit by distinguishing between “venial” and “mortal” sins, but in the Lutheran church of my upbringing, eternal punishment for the smallest sin was considered just. The rationale was that our sins are an offense against God, and offending a perfect being is vastly worse than offending anyone else. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. God, being omni-everything, isn’t harmed in the slightest by our sin; if he could be harmed by a mere human, then he would be far from perfect and almighty. So to impose eternal agony in retribution for a stolen candy bar isn’t remotely justified.
Then there’s the fact that hell is eternal. How can any finite sin, no matter how heinous, justify torment that is never-ending, with no hope of reprieve? The punishment is literally infinitely out of proportion to the crime.
The distribution of punishment is also unjust. How is it just for an innocent party — Jesus — to be punished for the sins of others, even if he is willing? Imagine the outcry if criminal courts allowed people to volunteer to be punished for the crimes of others. That would make a mockery of justice. The fact that it’s Jesus doing the volunteering does not make it any more just.
I could go on, but suffice it to say that the Christian God doesn’t give any indication of being perfectly just. The notion that he’s perfectly loving doesn’t stand up any better to scrutiny, though there’s no need to belabor that here.
For the sake of argument, let’s set all of that aside and assume that God is perfectly loving and perfectly just, and that the punishment of Jesus is what satisfies God’s sense of justice, thus making it possible for him to show his love by welcoming us into heaven.
There’s still a problem. Not everyone gets into heaven. Only believers do, but why? If unbelief is a sin, then Jesus has already been punished for it, just as he’s been punished for all of our other sins. That means that God’s sense of justice no longer demands that we be sent to hell. Yet he does so anyway, which is a dead giveaway that his love isn’t perfect.
The whole thing is a tangled mess, and Craig has come nowhere close to making plausible the idea of a perfectly loving Christian God who nevertheless sends people to eternal torment.
A notorious verse in Romans regarding the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart:
Nothing just or loving about that, much less perfectly just or perfectly loving. It depicts God as orchestrating a puppet show in order to massage his own ego.
But if you think that’s unjust, you can shut your trap. The chapter continues:
“I made you, so I can do whatever I want to you.” Perfectly loving it is not.
This presents Christians with a choice: accept that the Bible is wrong about God, or accept that God is not perfectly loving.
Another Craig rationalization:
An eternity in hell isn’t disproportionate punishment for finite sins, because in fact none of our sins actually do incur eternal punishment. The prison sentences are finite, and we could actually be sprung from hell at their conclusion except for one thing: we keep sinning while we are in hell, and so by the time one prison sentence has been fulfilled, we’ve sinned enough to incur another sentence.
On this view, our presence in hell is self-perpetuating, and thus eternal, but that isn’t because God is meting out infinite punishment for finite sins.
Shaking my head.
To his credit, Craig recognizes the rank unfairness of sending people to hell for the “crime” of not having heard the Gospel:
Craig cites the words of Paul to support the idea that the “unreached” can gain entry into heaven:
Unfortunately, this crashes headlong into the words of Jesus:
If you haven’t been baptized, you don’t get in. Ordinarily you would expect Craig to take Jesus’s words over Paul’s, but in this case you can see why he didn’t.
There’s another problem. Craig wants us to take Paul’s words seriously, but Paul doesn’t indicate that his statement applies only to the “unreached”. He doesn’t qualify it, which means that it applies to everyone, and that means that none of us are required to accept Jesus in order to win eternal life. We just have to “by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality,” and God will grant us eternal life.
So much for the faith requirement.
Earlier, I wrote:
Craig addresses this in a video from last year, and his argument has changed from what it used to be. Earlier, he classified unbelief as a special sin that demanded punishment despite the fact that Jesus had otherwise paid the price for all of our sins. Now he says that Jesus’s sacrifice does in fact cover all sins.
Why, then, do unbelievers get sent to hell? Craig likens God to a president or governor who offers to pardon a criminal, and points out that the pardon doesn’t actually take effect unless it is accepted by the criminal. If the criminal declines the pardon, then he must continue to be punished as if the pardon had never been offered.
In Craig’s view, everyone who ends up in hell is there by their own free will, because they have chosen to decline the pardon that is offered by God. God wants to honor our free will, so if we decline the pardon, he will reluctantly allow us to condemn ourselves to hell.
An obvious problem with the analogy is that in the case of an earthly pardon, the criminal simply has to accept. In the case of God’s supposed pardon, merely accepting is not enough. You have to believe the requisite dogma as well and to “give your life to God”, as Craig puts it.
If it were a simple matter of accepting the pardon, who would decline? The reason I’m not a believing Christian isn’t because I’m dead set against accepting God’s pardon. It’s because I don’t think the Christian God exists. I’m happy to say “Hey God, if you actually exist, and you’re offering me a pardon, then I gratefully accept. Just don’t expect me to believe in you or dedicate my life to you, because you haven’t given me any reason to believe that you’re actually there.”
A perfectly loving God would offer the pardon with no strings attached. The Christian God makes additional demands, and if you don’t meet those demands, then off to hell you go. That isn’t perfect love.
Another doozy from Craig. When asked why the concept of hell doesn’t appear until the New Testament, his response is that this is a case of “progressive revelation”.
“God doesn’t dump all his truth on humanity like a dump truck, all at once,” Craig says. “He dribbles it out, little by little, over time, until it’s fully disclosed in Jesus Christ and the Apostles.”
I guess those Old Testament snowflakes weren’t ready for the hard truth about hell.
It’s ridiculous. An eternity in hell is absolutely the worst fate that can befall a person, according to Christians. A perfectly loving God would spare no effort in making sure that every person, from Adam and Eve onward, was fully aware of the danger.
Craig also uses “progressive revelation” as an excuse for why the doctrine of the Trinity doesn’t appear until the New Testament. Which is funny, because the doctrine of the Trinity isn’t actually mentioned explicitly in the Bible at all. At most, it’s implied. Odd that God fails to mention this crucial doctrine in his Holy Word.
“Progressive revelation” is pure rationalization.
This one is off topic, since it isn’t about hell, but it gives an indication of how far Craig will go in order to rationalize an aspect of his faith.
A reader wrote to Craig, asking:
Craig responded that he does believe that Jesus was omniscient during his time on earth and therefore did not believe that the earth was flat.
Here’s how Craig dealt with the obvious tension between that and the view he had expressed earlier:
Craig didn’t elaborate on what he meant by ‘accepted’ and how it differs from ‘believed’. His reluctance is understandable, because if you think about it, Craig is suggesting that Jesus pretended to believe things that he knew were false.
In order to save Jesus’s omniscience, Craig has turned him into a deceiver. Not the smartest move.