Cold Case Christianity: God is unloving for sending people to a traditional hell of eternal torture

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

A loving God wouldn't send people to hell, would He?

Thu, Feb 7, 8:27 AM

On Thu, Feb 7, 2019 at 8:27 AM J. Warner Wallace

<jim@coldcasechristianity.com> wrote:

How would you respond? 

Wikipedia describes the idea of hell as "an ethical problem in religion in which the existence of Hell for the punishment of souls is regarded as inconsistent with the notion of a just, moral, and omnibenevolent God." Is that true?

 Yes.  When you have to redefine love so that it can also correctly describe the person who allows his "loved ones" to suffer torture by fire forever, you have a serious problem.

Does the notion of hell contradict the existence of a loving God?

 When you define love by normative convention? Obviously yes.  When you toy with the definition of love so that even sadistic pedophiles could be said to be "loving"?  No.  Standard thesauruses correct the fools who trifle that only apathy is the opposite of love.  No, "hate" is also an opposite of love.  See standard thesaurus here.  And your god "hates" the workers, not just the works, of iniquity.  See Psalm 5:5 and 11:5.

How would you respond to someone who makes such a claim?

 Hopefully the Christian would respond with  "yes, I can understand why you'd automatically suppose the person who causes mindless torture to children in hell is unloving by any reasonable definition of love."

You will say "we never said God sends children to hell!"

Well Jehovah's Witnesses never call themselves heretics, so is that option off the table?  Obviously not.  You might be teaching or believing things that logically necessitate your belief that your god sends kids to hell, even if you don't actually pursue your own teaching to its furthest logical implication.

Ok...when does a child reach the age of accountability?

You can escape this dilemma by insisting the age is 18, that way, if they die as atheists at age 17 or before, your loving god forgives them by fiat and lets them into heaven.  And correspondingly, the 18 year old person who dies and goes to hell seems to be less sadistic to us than if the 11 year old child died and went to hell. 

But the cost of doing this is very high:  I cannot find any Christian that puts the age of accountability as high as age 18.  Any full-time parent, teacher, or other person who routinely works with kids and teens is quite aware that kids learn right and wrong very early. How many parents punish the 8 year old boy for throwing food at his brother?

How many times does law enforcement reasonably seek to have preteen kids charged as adults when they commit crimes?.

If you leave the age of accountability where it normally resides, that is, somewhere between 7 and 10, then that logically requires that if the 11 year old girl is an atheist, rejects the gospel invitation, then dies in a car accident on the way home from church, then she went to hell forever, because she was at or past the age of accountability and had already positively rejected the gospel, leaving her no other biblical option.

So if you don't like the mental image conjured up in your mind of an 11 year old girl being tortured in the flames of hell forever, remember two things:  it's perfectly biblical, and your sense of outage is something you attribute to God putting his laws into your heart...so there's a chance that if you have any disgust toward the traditional concept of hell, this is for the same reason you have disgust toward pedophila...God has put it into your heart to hate all such things.

So when I say your god torments children in hell, you are stuck with this unless you make the age of accountability higher than any Christian in history has ever made it.  There is also biblical precedent that God tortures children in hell even when they die before the age of accountability.  Paul said the children born to unbelieving parents are "unclean",

  14 For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy. (1 Cor. 7:14 NAU)

He'd hardly have a point unless "unclean" was something very urgent and important to correct.  What's so bad about "unclean" here?  Read the context...it is the opposite of "holy". 

By the way, Paul's Greek word for unclean is ἀκάθαρτος/akathartos, the same Greek work Jesus used to describe demons (Matthew 12:43) as well as the same Greek word Paul uses in admonishing his followers to avoid touching any "unclean" thing (2nd Corinthians 6:17).  Clearly, Paul's description of the children of unbelievers was horrific and in no wise merely ritualistic or ceremonial.

Let's just say it's obvious that I'm so ignorant of the grammatical and contextual realities of this issue that I'm really scared to mount any skeptical attack on hell.  Hell, I probably couldn't even find any Christian authors who attack the tradition concept of hell.  I tried and all I got was links to the Giant Spider Invasion dvd.

 Yet as pointed out in Christianity Today, the attack on hell is coming from within evangelical ranks (see here and here...apparently one's being genuinely born-again and sincere toward God and walking in the light doesn't necessarily motivate the Holy Spirit in the slightest to make you believe the truth, the way he apparently is easily capable of doing in the case of unrepentant idolatrous pagans (Ezra 1:1).

For a good laugh, read about Sampson (Judges 16:1). Immediately after getting a blow-job he apparently had sufficient supernatural strength to not only remove a 2 ton city gate door off its hinges without waking the guards, but he also carried that door to a higher hill about 40 miles away (Judges 16:3).

And you "expect" people to take your bible seriously?  FUCK YOU.

 A "quick shot" response:

Only because "quick shot" sells well in this age of unavoidable attention-deficit disorder.  You don't close the sale in 5 seconds, you don't close the sale at all.  Probably has something to do with the infallible work of the Holy Spirit on people's hearts.  No wonder you need all these marketing gimmicks to make Jesus sound more plausible to non-Christians...you have the most powerful force in the cosmos working to help you sell this shit.

There are a number of ways to answer this objection.

 And all of them fail.  Bring it on.

Here is just one suggestion (of three) from the Quick Shot section of our phone app:

“What do you mean by ‘loving?’

That's actually YOUR problem, Wallace.  YOU are calling God "loving", but you obviously don't mean it with the same definition the average person on the street has in mind when they say "loving", so right away, your telling them "god is loving" has already started the game of equivoation (using the same term but intending a very different meaning without explicitly saying so).  Regardless, since most people don't think mindlessly painful eternal torture could possibly be "loving", it will always remain reasonable to reject the traditional concept of hell, regardless of whatever semantic gymnastics you can employ in your effort to convince others that night really is day.

A loving God must also be just,

 No, parents can be loving without being "just". They'd be loving to force their 16 year old daughter out of the RAVE party and do nothing more.  "Loving" does not require an element of being "just" or meting out justice.  Otherwise, every Christian who knew his friend stole a candy bar and got away with it, could not be "loving" toward that friend unless he did what "justice" requires, and ratted him out, a bullshit concept in the eyes of most reasonable educated adults.

And "loving" can often be the opposite of justice, such as when the loving parent chooses to forgive their child, when they don't have to, and relax the restriction that they'd normally impose for disobedience.  What fool would say you aren't loving your kids unless you always impose discipline each and every time they disobey?  Gee, the only Christian parents that can be loving are those who run their houses like a drill Sergent?

And you are only pretending a loving god must be "just", solely because you know most of your Christian readers are classical theists, and would automatically applaud any argument that used the presuppositions of classical theism..such as here, where you invoke the  "justice" of your "all-just" god.

or His love is little more than an empty expression.

 Then you must think parents who show their love for their kids without also showing "justice" are just giving empty expression.  Sorry, but it is incoherent to pretend that "love" is empty unless always coupled with "justice".  I "love" my friends, even though I'm aware one of them stole a candy bar last week, and I remain unwilling to report it to the police.  Well gee, if I'm not willing to rat them out, then my "love" for them is nothing but empty expression?  I might be aware that to involve the cops would create more bad than good. FUCK YOU.

If everyone was offered the same experience in the afterlife, how loving (or fair) would it be for Mother Teresa and Hitler to receive the same reward?

Mother Theresa was a scam artist whose concern for the poor had more to do with publicity than with genuine love.  See here.  And a non-authoritative intro to the subject here.

It wasn't loving or fair by our own standards that the innocent Jesus should die for our sins, but that's your God's eccentric idea of love anyway.  So now your problem is that you have a lot of work ahead of you if you wish to pretend that because something doesn't "fair" to us humans, God also wouldn't think it fair.

Most of us can think of someone who should be punished: serial killers, child molesters, rapists. How loving would God be to reward these criminals rather than punish them?

 How loving is God to forgive the sins of the murderer Saul who became Paul?

 12 I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He considered me faithful, putting me into service,
 13 even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor. Yet I was shown mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief;
 14 and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant, with the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus. (1 Tim. 1:12-14 NAU)

If God can be "loving" to forcefully show himself to such a murdering blasphemer as Saul, (and according to Acts 9, 22 and 26, God did so before Paul ever manifested the least bit of repentance or contrition) then your God can also be loving to show himself with equal force to other equally or more violent people who, like Saul are currently not showing the least bit of repentance or contrition. 

So because your God doesn't do that, it is reasonable to call him unloving and arbitrary.  I'm sure Hitler was loving to his own kids, but that hardly argues that therefore "loving" is a correct way to remember Hitler.

How fair would that be to their victims?

 How fair is it that your god allows to be born people whom he infallibly foreknows will end up in hell?  Do you commit the act when you infallibly foreknow the outcome will be disaster (i.e., allowing children to play with matches in a gasoline soaked bedroom, letting go of a baby as you hold it out over the edge of a cliff, etc)?  No.  Then your god is just as unloving to allow circumstances to come together to effect sending a person to hell, as is the drunk mother who knows her kids in the bathtub are playing with the plugged-in hair dryer, yet does nothing about it.

How fair is it that your god just stands by the bed watching, doing nothing, while the pedophile rapes a child to death? 

And you think appealing to the human sense of fairness is a convincing apologetic for your god?  FUCK YOU.

Can a loving God be completely unjust and still considered loving?”

No, because true love requires some degree of justice.  However, it doesn't require full justice because we are reasonable to define love as sometime being the willingness to foregoe justice.  Yes, a coherent definition of love requires a presupposition of some level of "justice", but the biblical information about your god requires a radical redefinition of normative reasonable definitions of love/justice, making it reasonable to be suspicious that it has more to do with ancient theological delusion than actual reality.

Sorry Wallace, you've done precisely nothing to intellectually obligate non-Christians to find the traditional concept of hell the least bit compatible with "love".  In fact, the desperation in your contrived arguments makes it seem that the traditional concept of hell really is contrary to any reasonable definition of love.

And as you hopefully know, we aren't required to be infallibly certain, before we can be reasonable to consider your views to be nonsense.   In our day to day experience, we often call things "unreasonable" before we obtain encyclopedic knowledge of the situation.  Jurors are reasonable to take less then 3 days to reach a verdict, we don't require them to just sit on the fence for 80,000 years merely because it always remains possible that they will put an innocent woman in jail. 

You yourself would have to agree, Wallace...with your "quick-shot" answers wherein you expect your readers to believe you can successfully adjudicate the traditional concept of hell in your favor in less than 5 minutes.