Index
THE SAINTS DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THE
SUFFERING OR REMEMBER THAT THEY EVER HEARD OF HELL.
THE SAINTS SUFFER TO SEE THE
DAMNED SUFFER.
GOD FORCES THE SAINTS TO HATE THE DAMNED AND ENJOY SEEING THEM SUFFER.
GOD ALLOWS THE SAINTS TO FREELY HATE THE DAMNED AND GLOAT.
THE SAINTS DON’T CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO THE DAMNED BE IT BAD OR GOOD.
THE DAMNED ARE NOT PEOPLE ANYMORE
SO THEIR DAMNATION DOESN’T TROUBLE THE SAINTS
THERE WOULD BE NO HELL IF THERE NO
GOD
Many Christians have always being bothered as to how people can be happy
in Heaven while their relatives and friends scream for relief while none comes,
in the tortuous flames of the Pit of Hell forever. Many sceptics see a contradiction here.
Christians propose 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 think 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."
The Church says that whoever rejects God or his Church is in fact rejecting a caricature for they are so wonderful and attractive. It follows then that the damned don't make a choice against God at all but against a caricature of him. Whatever a Christian can say, they cannot say that Hell exists because God respects free will and the freedom of a person to reject him. Christians don't believe that Hell is a doctrine that respects free will at all for they are the ones saying that God is never rejected but only a mockery of him is. They use an excuse to justify Hell that they don't believe in - they are a lot more vindictive than they pretend. If they have to lie to justify the doctrine then the saints must do this as well!
The apostles were brought before the Jewish courts and charged with slandering the Jewish leaders. The apostles were saying that the Jews had crucified Jesus. Acts 5 says that the apostles were delighted and pleased to have had the honour of suffering humiliation in the name of Jesus. Note that they did not say they were glad because the maltreatment would have some good results but it was the humiliation and the suffering they enjoyed. If people are allowed to enjoy their own pain, then they can enjoy seeing others suffer too! And especially if the other people are in Hell forever!
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.
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 view that the saints are happy and that this doesn’t mean they don’t also
suffer at the same time to think of the suffering of the damned is advanced by
JP Moreland in the notorious The Case for
Faith page 259 (Lee Strobel, HarperCollins, Zondervan, Grand Rapids,
Michigan, 2000). There it is said that
maturity enables the saints to hold the two feelings at the same time.
He says that they are able to handle the grief because they know that the
damned chose Hell and because God had to respect their dignity and their choice
they had to go there. So they understand
and this eases their pain.
This assumes several things. JP
Moreland holds that the Bible alone is the supreme doctrinal authority and the
only sure voice of God so his theory is unacceptable if it undermines it or
adds to it.
The Bible never says that God lets people go to Hell to respect their
dignity. It may be that he has to
degrade them for one of his mysterious purposes and the Bible continually
declares the mystery of God’s providence and his ways.
Moreland says that Hell is not a torture chamber (page 241). People who go there reject God and this
rejection is so awful that it affects their bodies so they suffer physically
but they are the cause of their suffering not God (page 243). So people torture themselves there willingly
out of rejection of God but it is not a divine torture chamber. So in short, the damned reject the source of
happiness, God, and the result is a loneliness and a sense of failure that is
more than they can bear but which they have to face forever.
He argues that it is not a torture chamber because everything that
happens to the damned in Hell is their own creation. He says that the fire of hell spoken of in
the Bible was never meant to be taken literally because Hell is described in it
as utter darkness and you can’t have such darkness where you have such great
flames (page 245).
First of all, how does he know it is the utter darkness that is literal
and not the fire? Why doesn’t he say
that the utter darkness is what is not literal because flames give light? When Jesus described Hell most often as a
fire it would follow that the fire had the best chance of being meant
literally. And the vast majority of
Christians since Jesus’ time did take hellfire literally so why couldn’t Jesus
have meant it literally?
Jesus described Hell as fire but God can make a fire that doesn’t give
off light or maybe he just cloaks the light so nobody can see it.
Jesus described the damned as being sent into the fire or everlasting
fire as eternal punishment.
God respecting the choice of the damned to freely suffer and reject him
forever is not punishing them but honoring them in the Moreland theology though
he doesn’t see that. He says Hell is
punishment only in the sense that God can’t make them happy when they refuse
his kindness which is absurd. And they
are not punishing themselves – you don’t punish yourself for drinking by
getting a hangover. They hate God and
are not intending to punish themselves.
God is punishing and torturing them.
If Moreland is right that Hell is just a metaphor for the loneliness of
having given up God forever then what did Jesus need a metaphor for? Why didn’t he restrict himself to saying it
was endless loneliness? The answer is
that the fire even if it is symbolic makes it clear that Hell is indeed a torture
chamber. The fire if symbolic pictures
the pain of burning.
Moreland’s attempts to deny that Hell is a torture chamber in the sense
that God tortures people there. What we
must remember is that is only his interpretation – and we can disagree if we
want. He believes that it is a state
which there is no escape but which is rather a state of unending loneliness
which God doesn’t want to happen even to the damned but which they choose for
themselves. This is what a Christian is
obligated to believe. He would tell you
that you must believe that when you die rebellious to God you have to go to
Hell to suffer forever and there is no hope for the Bible says that but you
don’t have to believe his interpretation. So we are free then to accept or
reject the torture chamber interpretation.
To make people free to believe such an evil and vindictive doctrine
proves that Hell is an evil and vindictive doctrine!
In summary, Hell is a torture chamber and there is no way the saints
could bear to see the suffering of the damned.
The only option is for them to gloat and wish they could make a trip to
Hell just to increase the torments of the damned.
Moreland argues that if a child goes to Hell at death that child would be
before God on the same level as an adult (page 249). So the child made a decision against God as
final as that an adult would have made for if the child could have made a
different decision had he or she lived longer God wouldn’t or shouldn’t have
taken her or him so early! As if even God
could know a future that will never happen?
The Bible says God knows the future or what will happen but God knowing
a future that won’t exist is impossible.
God cannot know if Diana would have married Dodi had she lived to 1999
instead of dying in 1997. Looking back
into the past, God can’t tell exactly what happened in 1950 if Hitler hadn’t
died in 1945. He can’t look into a past
that didn’t exist.
To say that a child of say eight years old should go to Hell like a
profligate who lived to his nineties and is as much an adult as the profligate
as far as the decision making process is concerned is just plain silly and
pro-child-abuse. The Hell doctrine
always forces theologians into silliness of this level. That men who claim to be intelligent
examiners of the faith would tell us things they must know to be absurd is
distressing and shows that they put a vicious doctrine before their obligation
to give rational teaching. To them it
doesn’t matter if the doctrine is evil and insulting to decency as long as
Christian dogma is presented in a way that can fool lazy or stupid people.
The first 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.
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 hate.
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.
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.
You never love anybody. What you
love is the image you have of them and their attractiveness in your mind. If the saints are not pained by the suffering
of the damned then there is no attractiveness in the damned at all in which
case Hell must be not an iota less horrible than God could possibly make it. It must be extreme torment. The damned are wholly
evil for they have to deserve all that.
This cannot be for no matter how evil we are there has to be something
attractive in us for evil is nothing more than warped good. God cannot make the saints happy at all. What makes them happy is their own power of
perception. It is how they perceive God
that makes them happy. And yet
Christianity insults the human race by saying that Hell is caused by not
wanting God and not loving him.
So God puts people in Hell for not loving him though it is only our
perception of him that we can love. God
has to accuse us falsely then to get an excuse for casting us into the infernal
depths of Hell! Hell is unnecessary. One
then would be intellectually handicapped for denying that the saints think the
screams of the damned are music to their ears.
Eternal punishment is a doctrine of hate and it commands hate and
legitimises it on earth as it does in Heaven.
When you love your perception of a person and not the person it follows that
you should not approve when anything too terrible happens to the person, like
death or eternal damnation. Why? Because if your perception is that they
deserve it the danger is that you could be wrong for it is just your perception
and you must stay on the safe side.
We know that you
cannot love the sinner and hate the sin for the sin reveals the sinner. The two cannot be treated as separate.
The Catholic book, Ecumenical Jihad says that gay people
usually are the ones who reject this love sinner but hate sin stuff. It says they are identifying their sin with
all of their personality. In other
words, they are saying there is no distinction between their sin and their entire
selves (page 45). There is real rancour
in the book’s assertion that this is what Hell is, sinners admitting they are
their sin and preferring to suffer in Hell forever rather than turn to the God
who loves them and hates their sin for they see his hatred of sin as hatred for
them. This puts the gays in the same
boat as the damned. And Christians can’t
care much about the damned for they would go out of their minds if they
did. Terrifying! If it were not for the sanctimonious hate the
sinner but love sin doctrine this classification of those who reject it as
extreme sinners would not exist. If they
are extreme sinners then any good they do is false for they equate themselves
and all their being with sin. Humanists
will not have attitudes like that towards people who do that for they reject
free will and see evil as sickness.
If Hell is for those who hold they are their sin it follows that to
believe that love the sinner and hate the sin is to guarantee your
damnation. This is pure vindictive
hatred on the part of the Church. They
want us to rot in Hell forever for the truth and for seeing through their
pretence. It must be an extremely grave
sin.
The Christians say they don’t judge people but sins. They say that if you sin seriously then you
are identifying yourself with your sin and making a complete choice for evil and
against God. They say that everybody is
Hell is there because they believe the sinner cannot be separated from the sin
and that sin reveals the sinner so to hate sin is to hate the sinner. But if we are that bad if we commit serious
sin then some interesting conclusions arise.
The damned must really become that evil when they identify themselves
with their sin. They close themselves off from God forever and
irrevocably. There is nothing left that
God can work on to change them so all good is gone from them. That is why they must stay in Hell forever. Even if they are baptised they are no longer
Catholics though they carry the mark that they were baptised. The Church claims to be a communion between the
Catholics in Heaven, Purgatory and Earth but Hell isn’t part of the equation. They are totally rejected by the Church and
God. It is nonsense to say they reject
us but we don’t reject them. If an
employee behaves badly at work and you show him the door, you don’t say he
sacked himself.
If so those who would be damned if they died now and those who are damned
must be seen as having no genuine good in them.
To hate their sin would be to hate them for they identify themselves
with their sin. If Christians believe
the reason for eternal damnation is that a totally evil choice is made then
they cannot look for anything to praise in mortal sinners, that is, sinners who
deserve Hell. The sinners then must be
hated. When somebody is totally evil and
is sin that person would have to be hated to avoid loving the sin. The doctrine of Hell certainly urges
Christians to hate sinners. The saints
must hate them too.
“The saints…not only do not pity
the damned, but they even rejoice in the vengeance inflicted on the injuries
offered to their God. Neither can the
divine mother pity them, because they hate her Son” (page 95, Sermon X, The
Sermons of St Alphonsus Ligouri). If
the damned hate God so much that they destroy their own happiness to spite him
and do this endlessly then they would
want to kill God. But to kill God would
be to kill themselves too and they are supposed to be selfish beings who want
power and pleasure. Its all
contradiction.
Many theologians allege that the saints are able to be happy in Heaven
because they don’t give a damn about the people in Hell and neither love them
or hate them. They are said to be
indifferent. Supporters talk as if it is
a grand thing that the saints are apathetic and as if callousness is better
than hatred. Indifference is worse than
hate for it is the opposite of love not hate.
There is some concern in hate but there is none in indifference.
They say that the saints see what happens to the damned as good and are
neither happy or distressed about it for that reason. St Augustine stated that the objection
against eternal punishment that it means that evil will last forever and never
be overcome would be valid and correct but for one fact, the damned freely
choose evil and to punish freely chosen evil is good so Hell expresses the
triumph of good over evil under the circumstances (page 71, The Enigma of
Evil). He said Hell being entirely
their own fault was the reason God and the saints could have unsullied
happiness despite the suffering of those lost in Hell forever. Aquinas went a step further and said that the
suffering of Hell increases the happiness of the saints for they are so
relieved that they are in Heaven and not going through all that the damned are
that it compounds their happiness (page 72, The Enigma of Evil). But good does not triumph over evil by
punishing it for suffering and sin are still there and haven’t been
eradicated. Punishment is not good but a
necessary evil in this world being the way it is. But it cannot be necessary in the
supernatural and magical afterlife.
Some say the saints don’t give a toss about the damned because the damned
are punishing themselves and are not punished by God. When a person does wrong that person asks for
punishment whether they want the punishment or not. But it is not true that a person punishes
themselves. A murderer has to go to
prison to be punished by the state. It
is not enough if the murderer voluntarily goes into seclusion at a hermitage
and wears a hair shirt for life. So you
cannot punish yourself. Punishing has to
take away your freedom first of all. If
freedom is there it is not punishment.
We speak of people punishing themselves but we should say they are
torturing themselves not punishing themselves.
If people punish themselves then this cannot be good. Real punishment comes from outside. You may ask for it but you don’t want it and
have to endure it against your will. If
people punish themselves they are in control and are indulging their own will
so it is not really punishment. The
doctrine that Hell is self-inflicted from the start and that makes it good so
God didn’t fail though better could have happened as taught by Augustine and
Aquinas is nonsensical.
These two theologians were condoning and blessing and glossing over evil
and calling it good. Since they admitted
that God wants to eradicate all evil they had to claim that the damned freely
stay in Hell which is a complete contradiction for God must have done something
to the damned to keep them in Hell. When
Aquinas who followed most of the lies of St Augustine was and is Roman
Catholicism which could be called the religion of Thomism it follows that
doctrines seriously defective from the point of view of right and wrong and
lacking in sensitivity have been fused into Roman Catholicism for most of its
history. If you believe in eternal
punishing you have to believe that this useless punishment is a good thing like
the two cruel saints said. So death must
be good too for Christianity says it is punishment for sin. If so we should not mourn the dead but carry
on the same way as the saints do in relation to the damned. These attitudes are unkind and since they
follow from belief in God it follows that theism is a crime against humanity.
Religion says that if we are forced to kill somebody perhaps to stop that
person killing people we should not rejoice in it but in the courage that led
us to do this necessary thing. It
follows then that the saints should rejoice in their indifference if it is the
only attitude possible for them. It is
clear that there must be indirect hatred for the damned in their
rejoicing. It is like rejoicing over
your cleverness in robbing the bank but not in your avarice. It would be hypocrisy for one was as much
behind the crime as the other.
Indifference is willing evil just like hate is when it lets evil
happen. Indifference is willing both bad
and good. Love is willing good and hate
is ill will. If hating the damned is bad
so is having no concern for them. In
fact, the latter would be worse.
An indifferent attitude among the saints would mean they approve if the
damned are kept in Hell or released. But
if they should be in Hell it is a sin to be ready to let them be freed. Indifferentism, then, is opposition to God
who wills that they remain in Hell. Real
saints don’t turn against God.
Hatred is bad for it is a denial of the value of the person. The same goes for indifference for it is too
but it goes further. It is wicked
superstition to say that hate is bad and the other is good for if looking upon
a person as nothing is evil then it is always evil.
When the saints choose not to care they are choosing to do something
evil. Indifference is indifference but
choosing to be apathetic is an act of hate for it is evil. Thus, it is sheer nonsense to claim that it
is better to be indifferent than to hate.
The indifference is not hate but hates puts it in you. Hate is better for it has its limits while
indifferentism approves if a person suffers extremely forever. Hate is better because it is one declaration
that the person is considered worthless while indifference is this one and
another.
Can one argue that the saints must not care if the damned get unjustly
treated and that it is possible for them to be against this and not care about
the suffering the damned deserve. So
they do not care if the damned suffer their due but more than that they do
care. The Church says that demons and
the denizens of Hell torment and abuse one another too. So it is clear that people must get worse
than they deserve in Hell. This cannot
be reconciled with the happiness of Heaven.
You are supposed to punish or
approve punishment reluctantly or because there is no better way. People suffering for a purpose is to be seen
as a necessary evil to be despised.
People suffering unnecessarily is to be more despised. To say that the saints don’t give a monkies
is to say that they are evil and despicable.
It is evil to be glad about or indifferent to deserved suffering too though it is worse to be like that with regard to undeserved. It would be wrong to forbid one and allow the other.
Question 1011, Radio Replies 1 (Fathers Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul Minnesota, 1938) states that if a mother is in Heaven and her son in Hell she will be so wrapped up and absorbed in loving God that her natural feelings for her son will vanish is really advocating indifferentism. It says that Christ loves the son more than she ever did and he is not upset so there must be a solution to the seeming contradiction. Answers such as that are just an insulting cop-out. It is like saying that John is the most honest person alive and yet there is strong evidence that he stole. Its totally contradictory and dressed up to look like it makes sense when it doesn't.
Apologists for the indifference theory claim that the damned are not
persons anymore but kind of shadows and so are not entitled to be cared
about. “The damned are like ashes, not
like wood. They have lost their true
reality. The blessed in Heaven, like God,
do not mourn over what the damned once were – real wood, real men and women -
because they do not live in the past” (Handbook of Christian Apologetics,
page 272). This is a terrible and
deceptive answer. The damned are either
real or not. There are no in-betweens. If they are not real then instead of people
being punished in Hell we have something preposterous like corpses being
flogged for some crime that they committed when they were alive. But this is not punishment. Whipping corpses is not hurting the persons
they used to be. If everlasting
punishment is true then the damned are persons and there is no excuse for
saying that they ought to be treated as non-persons or may be. Perhaps the damned have no memory which is
one way in which they might be like corpses.
Then their pain would be experientially the same as a person just having
it for a moment and forgetting. That is
what it would be like to them. But what
use is punishing or retribution unless the memory is clear? And besides memory or not they are still
suffering as they would if they had memory.
The claim that the damned are not really people anymore is supposed to be inferred from the words of Christ to the damned, “I never knew you” (page 271). It is denied that these words prove that Christ was not God and not all-knowing like God so they say instead that Jesus never knew the damned for they were just shadows and so unreal so he means he did not know them as real people but only as unreal things. But a sinner is as real as a saint and Jesus is not talking to damned people here but to people who were about to be damned.
I never knew you means you were never friends of mine. The word you shows that Christ was addressing persons not shadows of persons.
The Church has always taught that the worst loss in Hell is the loss of God. Only persons can experience that utter loneliness. The loss being the worst means that it hardly matters if the fire of Hell is not literal for its pain would be nothing compared to the loss of God. Sister Faustina taught that after her visit to Hell she learned that the loss of God is the worst torment and the second is the perpetual remorse of conscience and the third is that one's condition will never cease and the fourth torment is the fire. If the damned regret their sins and have remorse and if they are so annoyed that their condition will never cease then clearly God is making them stay there whether they wish to reform or not. The Church says that God has made us for himself and we suffer without him. Jesus reflected this teaching in his command to love God which he said was the most important commandment of all and even more important than loving yourself or your neighbour. The damned then must desire God far more than us living people do! If the loss of God is their worst torment then that bothers them more than suffering forever! An honest God would make us desire him like that now instead of waiting until we die. If the damned are really so bad, their worst torment will be the thought that they have to suffer forever. Selfish souls will not be mourning the loss of God but worrying about their suffering.
The Handbook is just spouting nonsense to
cover up the malignance of Christians who believe in Hell.
If God did not exist there would be no eternal damnation. It would be certainly be wrong then for
anybody to be damned eternally. Religion
is saying that it is right just because God exists and that shows what a
malevolent doctrine Hell is. If it would
be wrong when God does not exist then it would be wrong if he does for God has
all he wants and the Church says that he is perfectly happy. Its totally unnecessary. The saints are evil if they approve of the
damnations. They should not approve of
God’s existence if God means there has to be eternal punishment.
There is no reason why they should wish God exists. All things could exist without him for there
is no proof for him. One good work is
infinitely good if it is done for a God who is mistakenly thought to exist so
infinite good can exist without God. So
there is no justification for approving of the existence of God. Without proof that it can be justified,
nobody has the right to ask us to believe in Hell and it is a vindictive
doctrine.
Heaven is as much the domain of evil as Hell is supposed to be. When this is true then it is clear that we
should gloat if a person will go to Hell and especially if they are already in
it. Hell logically leads to hatred.
The suggestion based on the idea that Hell is our fault and not God’s
insists that there would be no real free will without Hell (page 94, Arguing
with God) which implies that if there is no God there should still be a
Hell – for since it is best if there is a God and if there is none we should
live as if there was one and maybe even believe in one - and we should set up
one which is crazy. The Hell doctrine is
thoroughly evil and what makes it worse is that everybody agrees that the will
is conditioned so nobody can be fully evil for something is making them
attracted to evil which leads to them committing it.
Why be good to get into Heaven when it is as immoral as Hell? It is worse to sin when you are happy so Heaven must be more immoral than Hell. When Heaven is not nice and holy it is a den of hate-filled beings who just think of poor God when they see the souls in Hell. Christianity says we should only love others for the sake of God so God is all they are supposed to care about. They are just sorry that God never got service from the damned. And God is happy and cannot be hurt and all they care about is him and not the suffering screaming damned. I would not like to say what I think of that.
Obviously if you are resurrected to sin forever in a place called Hell
forever and burn in it without being destroyed and if you want to stay there
forever despite the torment then there are several miracles here. God preserves your life after death and
raises your body to suffer forever in a fire and enables you to want to stay
there in that pit when you wouldn’t stay in a semi-hell on earth - these are
the miracles. Miracles demand
extraordinary evidence for they are extraordinary claims. To violate this law in order to believe in
Hell shows that believers are eager to believe it. You wouldn’t convict a killer on weak
evidence and you are asked here to believe in the miracles of Hell for which
there is no evidence so that you can believe that those who hate God will go
there forever. That shows that the
doctrine implicitly commands hatred of sinners and those in Hell. God asks you to believe in Hell so God hates
them too.
The Church will say that though there is no evidence for Hell we have
evidence that the testimony of Christ to its existence is reliable for Christ
did miracles to prove his mission and doctrine.
But bearing in mind that we need very strong evidence the stranger or
more unlikely a claim is this is unacceptable.
If Jesus does ten miracles and you can verify them all but the last then
you can’t believe in the last one. You
must consider him a liar if he asks you to believe in it. If a man commits ten murders and you can only
prove he committed nine of them you are not permitted to believe he committed
the odd one out.
The Church admits that it cannot conclusively prove every miracle
reported of Jesus in the Bible or outside of it when you consider every miracle
by itself. To claim a miracle happened
is such a serious claim that naturally the evidence has to be very serious as
in strong and good and convincing and every individual miracle requires
it. You can’t say the resurrection of
Jesus is provable so the other miracles of Jesus must have happened as well for
Jesus rose to prove his teachings and claims and miracles to be real. Every miracle is so serious so it has to be
checked out on its own. Christians know
that miracles are very serious for they as good as suspend or change natural
law and you need near if not actual impossible evidence to believe in them. Imagine the evidence you would need to justify
believing in the tooth fairy – a miraculous being. A miracle that doesn’t have extraordinary
evidence backing it up isn’t worth talking about.
So if Hell exists and God wants us to believe in it as the Church and
Jesus say then we are to hate the damned.
In the book, The Bible Tells Us So, it is plainly asserted that
the Bible never states that God loves the damned. “Although the Bible tells us that those who
failed to walk in God’s way because they did not know it will be beaten with
fewer stripes than will those who failed to walk in God’s way although they
knew it [Luke 12:47, 48], it nowhere intimates that God loves the damned” (page
62). Small wonder when Hell serves no
good purpose. Hopefully it should be
different with living sinners for they can change unlike the damned but that
would require you to hate them as long as they won’t change and hope they will
change. But God must have done something
to the damned to make them stay in Hell therefore it would be more evil of him
to hate the damned and not living sinners.
Living sinners have to be hated far more than the damned.
Then the book declares, “Paradoxical as it may be, when the unregenerate
blatantly defy the Most High and brazenly give vent to their hatred of him, the
regenerate are constrained by their very love for God to exclaim, “Do I not
hate them, O God, that hate thee? I hate
them with a perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies’ [Ps 139:21, 22]” (page
124). The curses put by Paul on the
wicked though he claimed to be writing God’s word and blessed worse implies his
God is a God of hate. He never cursed
anybody as much as those who disagreed with him. He singled them out for special abuse.
The imprecations of the saints in Heaven upon the incorrigible unsaved (Revelation
6:9, 10) support the notion that God hates those who are in Hell. Their curses were not pronounced so that the
unsaved would suffer and repent through it for the unsaved were in a totally
godless and immoral world. The spells
were woven not because of a desire to help but out of malice.
Remember, if the damned are hated and God approves of this and hates them
himself then there is no reason why he cannot torment them vindictively and
more than they deserve. Nothing
justifies devaluing a person and if it is right to do that then tormenting and
abusing them is acceptable. God cannot
complain if we wish we could abuse them.
The book observes that God told Paul he hated Esau and loved Jacob and
that he did not say he hated Esau’s acts but Esau himself (page 68, The
Bible Tells Us So). This observation
is right for if Paul, who was teaching elementary Christianity to the Romans
when he said that God revealed that to him, had believed that God did not hate
Esau in the literal sense he would have made that clear.
If God hates the damned and won’t help them to repent then this alone
would prove that he hates them enough to keep them in Hell forever and probably
does.
Catholics would try to tell you that God hates the works of the damned but
loves or values them as persons. If that
were true then he has a choice between honouring their personhood and punishing
their works. He cannot do both so he has
to do one or the other.
He can make them as happy as possible despite their sins because they are
persons or he can punish them for their sins.
Making sinners happy and thereby rewarding them for sins would be better
than punishing them needlessly. And it
is not really rewarding when the alternative is immoral. In practice it is rewarding but intention
wise and motive wise it is not. There is
no alternative. If you act as if you
forgive a person because you are forced then in your heart you have not
forgiven them. This works the same way.
Perhaps punishing them is treating them as persons. But what use is useless suffering? The suffering is useless for if a person is
happy but evil inside but is in a place where they cannot harm others who
cares? We need punishment on earth for
the sake of order but it is pure superstition and anthropomorphism to have a
punishing God unless that God is a tyrant.
So the suffering is treating them as impersonal. The punishing does no good for the damned
will not or cannot repent. They might as
well be happy. It follows that the
punishment of the damned is a needless evil and that its infliction implies
that God hates the damned and treats them as worthless. His attitude to them is that they have no
value. When God hates the damned he must
hate sinners. And so must we.
God
may have to punish in this world to restrain sinners but that is only necessary
because of the kind of world it is – it is needed to stop people going out of
control. He could make another world and
populate it with people in force-fields where nobody can harm anybody
else. Punishment is certainly an
evil. It is not a nice thing even if it
is necessary. It does not change the
evil inside the person unless the person decides to change so it is really only
the person who can change. Punishment
may educate and inspire change but these things can be done without it. Though it is good to try and convert through
punishment on earth - when we have to punish we may as well try to change the
person through it – punishment is adding the evil of suffering to the evil in
somebody’s heart. It doubles the
evil. Though it is good to will the
punishment of the evil in the person on paper it is bad in practice. There is some sense in saying the person
should be punished but there is not enough sense in it to justify
punishing. To make sense of this perhaps
this parable will be of assistance: A woman murdered her lover in cold
blood. She deserves death because she
killed him. That is pure logic. But it does not mean we should kill her. One way it does but because you cannot
destroy a person for a person is valuable even after they take a life you
cannot do it. This implies that the
welfare of the person is more important than punishing them. The person comes before the punishment. It implies that God has no business punishing
anybody once they leave this world for as long as they can’t damage anything
but their own morals let them do what they want. We need to be punished on earth to keep us
under some restraint when we are bad.
This could not be necessary in the afterlife where Christianity says we
will be disembodied beings but at the resurrection we will have magical bodies
that can pass through walls etc.
If
the person is absolutely valuable then it follows that every moment of that
person’s life is as well. Therefore the
person deserves only happiness in this world and in the next no matter what he
or she does. Yes she or he does deserve
to suffer but this deserving is blanked out by the treatment she or he deserves
as a person. The doctrine of Hell shows
a lack of compassion and moral sense and those who teach it have no monopoly on
determining morality. To say people
should suffer in Hell because they deserve it is plainly vindictive – what
would you think of a person who said that a joyrider deserved to get maimed in
a car crash? It might be true in a sense
but its vindictive.
If God valued the sinners as persons he would fight their sin because he
values them and not cast them into a Hell.
Whoever denies this only show their own true colours.
To say that God loves me unconditionally means that God loves me because
I am a person and not because of what I do.
If my personhood were that important then he wouldn’t let me go to Hell
forever but he does. So though my
personhood is important he refuses to acknowledge it and therefore he hates me
for that is the essence of hate.
If God is the only thing that can make us happy as Christianity teaches
then it is clear that losing him is punishment enough. The doctrine of the fire of Hell tells us
that Hell is more than losing God and being lonely. There is pain of a torturing kind there as
well like something exterior to you tormenting you. It could be literal fire and when it can be
literal fire it is. There would be no
need for the word fire to be used by Jesus symbolise agonising loneliness. This additional torment suggests that God
hates the damned because he thinks what they endure in losing him is not bad
enough and puts them in fire to make it worse.
When God does that it shows that the damned are not in Hell against the
will of God as some contend. If they
burn themselves then why does he give them the power to do it?
Hell is a dangerous doctrine and its seeming cruelty needs to be
explained and God has no right asking us to believe until it is explained.
The idea of hate the sin but love the sinner says the sinner should be
treated as if they have not committed the sin which is hardly loving
either. It is evil to condone evil and
is not really caring about the person for it is really indifference which is
worse than hating the sinner. Also,
choosing to be indifferent is an act of hate.
Hate is the act and indifference is the resulting act. Nobody separates good works from the person
which betrays the whole deceit of it all.
Jesus permitted judging fairly and Hell teaches that sin exists so Hell
is a doctrine of hatred and anybody who teaches needs to be firmly told they
should not be doing that. Incidentally,
if we cannot love the sinner without loving the sin it follows that if there is
a God then he is a tyrant then for we are all sinners according to him so how
could we love anybody? He would have
made us for sadistic thrills for the growth of love was not the reason he made
us.
Hell makes loving the sinner but not the sin impossible because it
supports the idea that if the law is cruel and people break the law they
deserve all it gives them. This is the
logic in many Islamic countries. They
think that even if stoning gays to death is wrong it is right when the gays
know what the law is and break the law for they are asking for stoning and so
deserve it. If a sinner wants to be
hated and believes he or she should be what use is the rule about loving
sinners and hating sin?
God must hate the unsaved as he hates the damned for they are like the
living damned.
Suppose the Roman Catholic doctrine of venial sin, sin that doesn’t
deserve hell such as stealing an apple from a shop, is true. Suppose the Roman doctrine that piles and
piles of venial sin cannot add up to a mortal sin though a mortal sin may do
less harm in the world and to people.
Then he sends people to Hell and spares others for doing worse.
It is not God who wants people in Hell. It is the vicious religion
founded by Jesus Christ if he existed and his followers.
It is time Christianity stopped getting praised despite advocating doctrines that can do grave harm when people figure out their dark implications. It is still responsible even if it leaves these people to work it out on their own.
The doctrine that the damned suffer forever in Hell is vindictive as proven by the Christian hope that they will be happy in Heaven despite all this. Only a tiny minority of Christians are aware that there is any proposed solution to the problem of a mother being happy in Heaven while her young son languishes in Hell apart from gloating over the suffering. They assume that she will gloat over her child’s pain. And indeed honest theologians must admit that the doctrine forces them to this conclusion. So the believers are striving to go to a Heaven that makes them vindictive. This makes them vindictive now. They don’t have to wait to die before stooping that low! A Church or religion that teaches such a doctrine needs to be rejected with severity. Even if the Church had a solution for the problem that avoided the vindictiveness the fact that the vast majority of people who believe will assume that Heaven requires you to gloat over the damned to be happy there is enough to charge the Church with gross evildoing and irresponsibility.
BOOKS CONSULTED
APOLOGETICS FOR THE PULPIT, Aloysius Roche, Burns Oates & Washbourne
LTD,
ENCHIRIDION SYMBOLORUM ET DEFINITIONUM, Heinrich Joseph Denzinger, Edited
by A Schonmetzer,
‘GOD, THAT’S NOT FAIR!’ Dick
Dowsett, [OMF Books, Overseas Missionary Fellowship,
HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft & Ronald Tacelli,
Monarch,
HAVE WE TO FEAR A DEVIL? Fred
Pearce, The Christadelphian Office,
HEAVEN AND HELL Dudley Fifield, Christadelphian Publishing Office,
HELL – WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT IT, John R Rice, Sword of the Lord,
JEHOVAH OF THE WATCH-TOWER, Walter Martin and Norman Klann, Bethany
House,
LIFE IN CHRIST, PART 3, Fergal McGrath SJ, MH Gill and Son Ltd,
RADIO REPLIES VOL 1, Frs Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press,
REASON AND BELIEF, Bland Blanschard, George Allen &
and Unwin Ltd,
THE BIBLE TELLS US SO, R B Kuiper, The Banner of Truth
Trust,
THE CASE FOR FAITH,
Lee Strobel, HarperCollins, Zondervan,
THE DEVIL, THE GREAT DECEIVER Peter Watkins, The Christadelphian Birmingham, 1992
THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF BIBLE DIFFICULTIES, Gleason W
Archer, Zondervan,
THE FOUR MAJOR CULTS, AA Hoekema, Paternoster Press,
THE KINDNESS OF GOD, EJ Cuskelly MSC, Mercier Press,
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING,
THE REAL DEVIL, Alan Hayward, Christadelphian Bible
THE REALITY OF HELL, St Alphonsus Liguori, Augustine Publishing Company,
THE SERMONS OF ST ALPHONSUS LIGOURI, St Alphonsus Ligouri, TAN,
THE TRUTH ABOUT HELL, Dawn Bible Students, East
WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT HELL?
Radio Bible Class,
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HEAVEN?, Dave Hunt, Harvest House,
WHY DOES GOD? Domenico Grasso SJ,