Hell is not Just a Town In Norway Any More

Last night I caught a few minutes of a religious show where the topic was "How can a Loving God Send People to Hell". It is a thorny problem for any Christians who believe in hell as a cornerstone of their faith, but they have well prepared answers.

The essential answer the fundamentalists give is "God doesn't send anyone to Hell. You send yourself there. God has done everything He possibly can to keep you out of Hell and still leave you as a person with free will and not just a robot."

Using the argument about not "sending people" is a simple debating trick. Whether or not God "sends" people to hell is not the issue. The question is about the creation and the purpose of Hell.

If the Christian fundamentalists say that nothing existed before God's creation, then why did God create Hell in the first place? Was He expecting something? And if God got mad and created Hell after the fact, then it's just a technicality whether or not he "sent" people to hell. As far as I'm concerned, it's just splitting hairs to say "God is trying to keep you out of Hell" when He created hell for the sole purpose of burning anyone He deemed a sinner.

In some ways, hell is such an overpowering concept that it casts a shadow over the rest of God's creation. Was the entire universe created only as a laboratory to sort out good souls from bad and sent the bad to Hell? If so, this brings up two issues. Did these souls exist before creation, and God needed to set something up for them? Or did God create the souls to see how many would end up in the fire of eternal damnation? Neither issue is addressed by fundamentalists, who manage to pick away at every tiny hole in the theory of evolution, but can't see these truck-sized holes in their own story of creation.


Later on in this article, this argument is made:

"You may love your little child, but if he puts his finger up on that hot burner on the gas stove or the electric stove, he's going to get burned!"

The weak point of this argument is that God did not create Hell to roast weenies, and then people accidentally fell in. Hell was made to roast people, which is not the entire function of an electric stove.

A more apt analogy for hell would be the Nazi gas chambers. If the Nazis had won WW2, the question we would be debating today would be "Why would a loving Hitler send the Jews to death camps"? Hitler never personally sent anyone there, and was desperate to keep the Jews out of the death camps, but because they were Jewish of their own free wills, he couldn't help them. This is false Nazi logic, of course Hitler could stop the death camps if he wanted to.

Picture credit: http://www.nintendoraw.com/?tag=gamers-hell-comic