Hell is the
everlasting punishment that people who die without God’s mercy go into at
death. Nobody can get out of Hell. The doctrine is taught by the Book of Mormon,
the Koran and the Bible and of course the infallible decrees of the Roman
Catholic Church!
Somebody said that the worst thing a person can say to another is, “Go to Hell!” The Christians say that since God according to the prophet Paul wants all to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth it is a sin to wish that God would send a person to Hell. It is impossible to wish anything worse on anyone. The Bible says that God wills the salvation of all but for some reason he will not save all so such verses prove nothing.
Paul in Galatians 1 said that anybody who teaches differently from him is to be anathema - utterly accursed. Damned. Jesus said that those Jews who said he was using the Devil to cast out demons were carrying an eternal sin - they were damned he said for blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
The Christians cannot
say they wish there was no Hell for that would be blasphemy against God. It would be wishing that Jesus never came to save us
from it. It would be saying they prefer us to get away
with our sins than honoring God.
The idea of some that there is no free will in the full sense if there is no Hell also makes it sacrilegious and even evil to wish there was no Hell. It is wishing we had less free will than God gave us. They are saying we don’t have much of a free will if we cannot choose everlasting damnation. They have to be glad, in some sense, that Hell exists. God is so evil that he forbids us to wish there was another kind of God that would not send people to Hell.
To respect Jesus you must wish there was a Hell. If that makes you vindictive then its not your fault. You have no choice for respecting God and Jesus come first.
To even let yourself
be sad at the thought of people going to Hell would be evil because if there is
a God then there is no law above him.
The law he has is perfect and to complain about it is to indicate that
you would rather have an imperfect one.
If God breaks the law
there is nothing to punish him so there cannot be a law over him for a law with
no penalty is no law at all. So it
follows that if God is good then he can invent whatever rules he likes and a
God like that can do anything. If
anybody wants to believe in a God who countenances hate and blesses it in us
then what is there to stop them?
Christianity thinks
that as long as it forbids people to wish that others would go to eternal
punishment that it is something to take pride in. The doctrine of eternal punishment implies
the opposite on both counts. The
thinking Christian will make such prayers.
When God
unnecessarily puts people in Hell – when he is all-powerful it has to be
unnecessary - and is perfect then there is no reason why we can’t pray that
people will go to Hell. To say that it
is unethical, is to say that God is imperfect and to deny the Christian
whitewash that each damnation serves a worthy purpose though obviously not for
the damned person. You can make a person
who does not approve of their own suffering suffer for some misdeed but that is
not the same as punishing them even if that is what you are trying to do. Punishing is how the guilty are treated and
it is as much impossible to punish a person who believes they have done nothing
wrong as it is to punish an innocent person.
You can make them suffer but it’s not punishment. Punishing is making a person pay a wage, the
price of crime, and if the person has not earned the wage, it is not a wage.
They need to know what they are paying for and why they are paying it for it to
be a punishment. So by saying that Hell
is eternal punishment you are saying all the damned know they deserve to
suffer. But that is a ridiculous
assertion. What if many of them do not
believe in free will? It follows that
many of the damned must be there unnecessarily.
They are not being punished but God is taking revenge on them. If he can do that then we must approve of his
malice and spite.
It is evil to approve
of people being in Hell and then to wish that living sinners would not go
there, to disapprove if they go there.
It is unfair discrimination. It
is discriminating against the dead.
Christians who think
on their own and believe in Hell might believe that it is right to pray for the
damnation of others. The Hell doctrine
is full of mysteries and shadows so it is only natural that some will believe
they have the right to do that and that is the fault of the doctrine for being
so impossible.
If I do wrong
deliberately then I choose to unnecessarily hurt myself for I had no need to do
wrong in the first place. I am calling
out for punishment. If I commit a mortal
or serious sin then it is a further sin if I do not want to be punished by God
or somebody. It means I have to pay a
price for my sins and I refuse to. Even
if I repent I should still have a price to pay. Also not being repentant would
be another sin too. Anyway, the possibility of punishment actually makes the
sin I commit more malicious. That is of
course if punishment is the rightful reward for my offense.
If I committed murder
and there was no punishment justly due to it, I wouldn’t be as big of a sinner
when I commit murder.
Retribution and
punishment then is really about revenge.
Anything that claims to be for your own good but isn’t and in fact makes
you worse when you sin is an act of hatred.
It might be sugared up but it is still hatred. Retribution, the idea that Hell is based on,
is immoral even if it is right in theory for it cannot work in practice. It serves only to attack the criminal and
make him compound his evil so the result is people making the criminal pay for
evil that they have compounded. It is
people seeking the high moral ground. It
is therefore revenge. That is the
motive. Hell then is extreme in its
vindictiveness and hypocrisy.
It is like it being
right in theory to abort a child to save the mother but practice can make it different
for it is complicated. If I sin, I have
to want the punishment as well in some sense.
So I am looking for the evil of sin and the evil of punishment. Punishment makes evil worse. It will be objected that if I reject the
morality of punishment and replace it with the need for rehabilitation then the
same thing happens: the need for rehabilitation makes my sin worse. True, but you need rehabilitation and not
retribution. It makes no sense to say
that rehabilitation unjustifiably makes sin worse for you have to abandon sin
for it to work and you need help. Sin
would not be sin if you could lawfully keep sinning and rehabilitation could be
neglected. That’s the crucial
difference. So retribution is an
expression of hatred towards the sinner.
Christians say it is necessary to avoid condoning the sin so it is not
hatred. But how can what increases the
guilt of sin be capable of averting condonation? It is not surprising that many orthodox
Christians now realise that punishment and retribution are vindictive and
advance the idea that God only punishes to correct (page 66, The Kindness
of God).
What is called sin is really a mistake for a
distorted insane perception comes in making you think that evil is the right
thing to do when it is not. For anybody
to be sent to Hell is therefore an act of pure infinite spite. We can pray vindictive prayers if God is that
nasty. After all, he sets it up so that
you will be unable to repent and will be punished forever if you die in
sin. Moreover, we do evil meaning it to
be good. If God cares about sincerity he
could tempt you to do evil for his purpose which is for you to purify your soul
by meaning to be good. So you can pray
for your wife to be murdered by an axe-murderer as long as the attraction to
good is advanced. You pray for her to be
damned in Hell and the axe-wielder too for God must need people to go to Hell especially
if he doesn’t want it to happen.
The Church is of the opinion that since those who are in Hell want to be there and stay there that is why we can forget about them and be happy in Heaven. They even say that if a mother is in Heaven and her beloved son in Hell she will be happy for she will take the love she has for her son away from him and give it to God (Question 939, Radio Replies, Volume 1). So if living mortal sinners consent to Hell then though we are to try and change them we do not hope to change them because we care about them but it is just the sin we are worried about. Our opposition is not to what harms them but to what sin they commit. How could we when they consent as much to Hell as the damned? Even God would not allow us to make a difference, to discriminate. The doctrine that our love must be given wholly to God infers that we cannot love the sinner and hate the sin for we just love God and hate the sin. The sin is all we see in the person for we see the good in the person as a manifestation of God and blind our eyes to the person for we cannot love the person at all when we claim to love the person for God’s sake. It is really just God we love, not them. Sinners are rarely impressed by theology like this. But it is official Church theology which the Church only brings out of the broom closet when it suits her. She can be good at PR, I’ll give her that.
Jesus ranted at the Jewish leaders that they could not escape the damnation of Hell and were vipers and hypocrites and bastards (Matthew 23). Christians say he was warning them for he loved them so much that he didn't want them to go to Hell. That is hard to believe when he used expletives when warning them! He knew they hated him and to say things like that would only make them worse and more hardened in sin. They didn't believe in Hell either and would have thought it absurd. Jesus hated those men and was wishing Hell on them. Also they didn't ask for his opinion which proves the point. He was invading their space to tell them they were for Hell.
Conclusion
Hell is a vindictive and poisonous doctrine and any scripture that teaches it should be laughed at.
FURTHER READING
APOLOGETICS FOR THE
PULPIT, Aloysius Roche, Burns Oates & Washbourne LTD, London, 1950
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, East Sussex, 1994
HAVE WE TO FEAR A
DEVIL? Fred Pearce, The Christadelphian
Office,
HEAVEN AND HELL
Dudley Fifield, Christadelphian Publishing Office, Birmingham
HELL – WHAT THE BIBLE
SAYS ABOUT IT, John R Rice, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, 1945
JEHOVAH OF THE
WATCH-TOWER, Walter Martin and Norman Klann, Bethany House, Minnesota,
1974
LIFE IN CHRIST, PART
3, Fergal McGrath SJ, MH Gill and Son Ltd, Dublin, 1960
RADIO REPLIES VOL 1,
Frs Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press,
REASON
AND BELIEF, Bland Blanschard, George Allen & and Unwin Ltd, London,
1974
THE
BIBLE TELLS US SO, R B Kuiper, The Banner of Truth Trust,
THE CASE FOR FAITH,
Lee Strobel, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2000
THE
DEVIL, THE GREAT DECEIVER Peter Watkins, The Christadelphian Birmingham,
1992
THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA
OF BIBLE DIFFICULTIES, Gleason W Archer, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan,
1982
THE FOUR
MAJOR CULTS, AA Hoekema, Paternoster Press, Carlisle, 1992
THE
KINDNESS OF GOD, EJ Cuskelly MSC, Mercier Press, Cork, 1965
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING,
Fulton J Sheen, Image Books, New York, 1979
THE REAL DEVIL, Alan
Hayward, Christadelphian Bible Mission, Birmingham
THE REALITY OF HELL,
St Alphonsus Liguori, Augustine Publishing Company, Devon, 1988
THE SERMONS OF ST
ALPHONSUS LIGOURI, St Alphonsus Ligouri, TAN, Illinois, 1982
THE TRUTH ABOUT HELL,
Dawn Bible Students, East Rutherford, NJ
WHAT DOES THE BIBLE
SAY ABOUT HELL? Radio Bible Class, Grand
Rapids, Michigan, 1986
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
HEAVEN?, Dave Hunt, Harvest House,
WHY DOES GOD?
Domenico Grasso SJ, St Paul Publications, Bucks, 1970