Demolishing Triablogue: Steve Hays helps unbelievers stop worrying about hell

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays entitled

Scandinavian hell
I'd like to make a brief observation about hell. There are Christians, apostates, and atheists who get carried away with the poetic imagery.

And the more even spiritually alive people get hell wrong, the more justification spiritually dead people have to toss the entire business out the window, knowing they can only do worse if they try.

If, however, the Bible was originally revealed in, say, Iceland, the Yukon, or Scandinavia, rather than a hot dry climate like Palestine, the hellish imagery might instead draw on snow and ice, arctic temperatures, a polar vortex, and a continuous polar night.

So if the bible was originally revealed in, say, Sacramento California, 1986, the hellish imagery might instead draw on constant traffic, ceaseless urban growth and non-stop crime.  

The "geography" of hell is based on the Middle East. The "geography" of hell would vary if originally revealed in regions with different landscape and climate. The metaphors are to some degree culturebound. A tropical depiction of hell might be characterized by an abundance of nasty reptiles and stinging insects.

The problem being that your alleged God refuses to specify exactly what hell is.  Yet under Calvinism, despite God predestining me to fault him for such ambiguity, I'm still "without excuse" for doing what God forced me to do.

Calvinism makes me feel better about rejecting the gospel...there was no way I could have contradicted God's reprobative decree.  It's out of my hands, so any sense of personal responsibility on my part can only be a misleading illusion.