Answering Christian apologist Tim Barnett on the doctrine of Hell

This is my reply to an article about hell by Tim Barnett entitled

"Hell: a solution not a problem"

When it comes to Hell, there are some debated details. Is the fire literal or metaphorical? Is it torture or torment? Is the punishment physical, or psychological, or both? Is the punishment everlasting or annihilation? We become so focused on debating the details that we lose sight of the big picture.

No, more and more conservative Christian scholars are adopting Annihilationism, which means the "endless torture" model of hell can be reasonably rejected.  Since the only problem with hell is the eternal conscious torment model, once that model becomes reasonable to reject, there is no more problem.  I don't really give a fuck if biblical hell is a "shadowy" existence in the afterworld.  I also don't fear being tortured by space aliens.

One strategy I’ve found helpful in talking to unbelievers about Hell is to focus on its significant worldview implications.

Nowhere in the bible is it expressed or implied that Jesus or the apostles found focusing in significant world-view implications helpful in talking to unbelievers about hell.  

Namely, I believe Hell isn’t the problem people think it is. In fact, it’s a solution to two problems.

First, Hell helps answer the philosophical problem of evil.

There is no philosophical problem of evil because evil is completely relative.  Instead, mammals on a damp dustball lost in space we call "earth" compete for limited resources, and when things don't go our way in our inevitable battles with other life-forms, we characterize this as "evil.".  Evil has no real ontological existence.  Its the word we use to express our discontent with some reality about the world (kidnapping, rape, starvation).

The problem of evil is not the problem for Christianity people think it is.

Then it sure is funny how the Holy Spirit did nothing for millions of Christians and allowed them to become bothered by the doctrine of conscious eternal torment. 

It’s a problem for atheism, but not for us. Why? Because our entire story is about the problem of evil. It starts in the third chapter and doesn’t get solved until 66 books later. But it does get solved.

False, the book of Revelation does not express or imply that evil will ever stop existing.  Revelation does not end by saying all the saved people will be in heaven and all the unbelievers will be in hell. It rather ends by giving unbelievers God's specific permission to continue doing wrong, when in fact most Christians don't think hell is a playground for unbelievers, but a place where they regret their wrongful actions forever:

11 "Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and the one who is filthy, still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous, still practice righteousness; and the one who is holy, still keep himself holy."
12 "Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done.
13 "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
14 Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city.
15 Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying.  (Rev. 22:11-15 NAU)

"practices" is in the present tense.  Feel free to come up with some new dogshit doctrine saying the people in hell continue to practice "lying", but that's obviously not consistent with the picture of hell in Luke 16 and not consistent with the typical fundie Christian belief that hell will cause the sinners to realize how terrible their sins were and to thus grieve over this for all eternity.  Have fun trying to figure out how God can give people allegedly in hell his specific permission to "continue doing wrong".  These people are not in hell, they are instead outside the holy city.

Christianity has a lot to say in response to evil.

Just like the car salesman has a lot to say about how unreliable your current car is.  Do you know any preachers or apologists who DON'T ask for money? 

We won’t get into all of that here. But one part of our larger response is that, in the end, evil is defeated. All wrongs will be made right. There will be a day of reckoning.

But according to the last chapter of Revelation, those who do wrong are told to continue doing wrong, which is impossible under the popular Christian view of conscious eternal torment in "hell". Indeed, how could sinners in hell do wrong when they exist there in spiritual form, which the tricotomists say is the part of the human that never sins?  Or should I ask God how much time he wants me to devote to Christianity's dichotomist/tricotomist bullshit before he will demand that i start drawing ultimate conclusions? 3 minutes?  8 years.  Indeed, how long DO you think I can justify delaying the day of my repentance?

An eighteenth-century hymn sums it up:

This is my Father’s world:

O let me ne’er forget

That though the wrong seems oft so strong,

God is the Ruler yet.

This is my Father’s world:

The battle is not done:

Jesus who died shall be satisfied,

And earth and Heav’n be one.

The OT will not support the notion that God "needs" to exact justice upon sin.  God can get rid of sin with nothing more than a wave of his magic wand.  David had committed two capital offenses (acts calling for the mandatory death penalty), adultery and murder, but God exempted David from the divinely required penalty regardless with the same ease that a child pours sugar on cereal:

 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die. (2 Sam. 12:13 NAU)

Tim continues:

Christians shouldn’t be surprised by evil. It’s part of our Story.

That's right.   Genesis 3 is a mere etiology.  And therein, sin is not a degradation like a disease, it is nothing but god's own curse.  So the only way to say God is not responsible for sin is to say God never cursed the world at the Fall. 

And our Story isn’t over yet. There is a day coming when all evil and suffering will finally be defeated.

Not according to the last chapter of Revelation.  See above.  Sinners remain living sinful lives on earth outside the holy city, and that's the end of that bullshit story.  The typical Christian view of judgment day forever allocating people into heaven or hell cannot be reasonably reconciled with Revelation 22. 

So, first, Hell helps answer a philosophical problem—the problem of evil.

There is a no problem of evil.  It is only created by people who are conditioned by their culture to expect a certain degree of ease in life, so when other mammals inevitably come along and make life difficult for us, we use the word 'evil' to describe it.  The notion of evil is relative no less than morality is.  It can only exist due to efforts on the part of confused non-scholars.

Second, Hell satisfies our existential longing for justice.

And atheism satisfies the atheist's existential longing to remain unaccountable to a god.  If "feel good" justifies your argument, you must allow skeptics to benefit from the same epistemological luxury.

Many people have no problem with a God who forgives. The problem is a God who punishes.

Because the NT statements about God's love cannot be reconciled with the OT fact that God is worse than Hitler.  See God "delighting" to cause rape, kidnapping and parental cannibalism in Deuteronomy 28:15-63.  ...unless you're so brainwashed as to think that there was once a time when burning a preteen girl to death for prostitution was the "best" possible solution (Leviticus 21:9)?

I think this might be a secular Western phenomenon, though. Most of us in the Western world live protected lives. We have “rights.” And when those rights are violated, we look to the government for justice. When injustice takes place, we go to the police, or lawyers, or government officials to make things right.

Which is precisely why we characterize the opposite of democratic government as "evil".

It’s easy for us to scoff at divine justice when we’re used to counting on human justice.

Blame it on god for taking responsibility for creating the justice institutions humans use, Romans 13.

The ease of scoffing at any "need" to burn little girls to death is a necessary component of all persons who are not clinically insane.  Unless you stupidly wish to trifle that under the right circumstances, burning preteen girls to death might be "best"?  Gee, if the ancient Hebrews never burned a pre-teen prostitute to death, that nation would surely perish from history, eh?  Oh yeah, burning little girls to death was the "best" that the eternal Jehovah could possibly do. YEAH RIGHT.

But in places where there is no human justice, they don’t scoff at divine justice; they cry out for it.

Not those who recognize the truth of atheism and are consistent about what it implies. But yes, if you are talking about your average fool who thinks god's existence is as obvious as the existence of trees.

But a cry for divine justice is merely the hope of the hopeless, that's all.  Faith that bad guys will be judged by a "god" one day in the future is often the only way a person can maintain sanity in a world that treats them as expendable.

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf—who saw thousands killed and millions displaced in his homeland of Yugoslavia—has us imagine delivering a lecture in a war zone on how God’s retribution is incompatible with His love. He says,

Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit….

[I]f God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make the final end to violence, God would not be worthy of our worship.

Strawman, God in Leviticus 21:9 is demanding that preteen girls guilty of premarital fornication in their priest-father's houses be burned to death.  Those girls were not guilty of the atrocities inflicted by Hitler on the Jews, yet God is allegedly demanding those girls suffer a fate worse than what Hitler imposed on the Jews.   How stupid was your god to create a race of ancient Hebrews whose society would collapse unless they acted contrary to NT ethics?  Why couldn't god have given the OT Hebrews the Sermon on the Mount?  If the Hebrews would have disappeared from history because they refused to fight, that could be explained away as God being glorified when they suffered persecution for righteousness' sake.  Living out eternal morals is more important than making up religious excuses to steal land from pagan, right?

In his book Free of Charge, Volf says,

Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love. [Emphasis in original]

Wow, so it is because of god's "love" that he requires preteen girls guilty of pre-martial fornication to be burned to death?  Would most Christians find that absurd because they aren't schooled in ancient Semitic ways of thinking?  Or would they find it absurd because God put his laws on their hearts, and the Holy Spirit is trying to tell them the "divine atrocities" of the bible are not accurate depictions of God? 

There is no incompatibility between love and final justice.

Then there is no incompatibility between a father loving his preteen daughter, and a father burning her to death for pre-marital sex.  may I assume you can tell when you are trapped in a trash compactor and the walls won't stop closing in?

As Volf points out, a god who is indifferent towards injustice would not be good.

That's philosophically false.  If God is the highest moral authority, then his choice to let evil reign without consequence must be "good" solely by definition. The highest moral authority, by definition, cannot be judged, end of discussion.  While that sounds good to theists, the truth is that the entire concept of a "highest moral authority" is stupid and unsupported.  Especially with al those Christian scholars who adopt open-theism and admit God often learns from his mistakes, and therefore, people like Frank Turek are fools to put forth so much effort and sophistry trying to pretend they can reoncile the divine atrocities of the OT with the love of Jesus in the NT.  There was never a prima facie case for the moral consistency of the bible in the first place, so skeptics who perceive contradictions therein cannot possibly be intellectually compelled to trifle with idiots who think "God's ways are mysterious" is a get-out-of-jail-free card.

In fact, it is precisely because God is good that he punishes the guilty.

Then God was "good" in demanding that men burn a pre-teen girl to death for pre-marital fornication.  Leviticus 21:9 (the text says she committed unlawful sex in her priest father's house, which implies she isn't married yet, further implying she hasn't reached the marriageable age of 13 yet  since if she was married, she'd be living in her husband's house and having no earthly reason to turn tricks inside her father's own house, when in fact she'd know as a married woman that giving blowjobs in her priest father's house would simply cause her sins to become more likely to be exposed.  The girl in Leviticus 21:9 is not a shockingly retarded married women intent on suicide, but a naïve girl at or below the age of marriage). 

The goodness of God requires final judgment. It is a manifestation of the perfect justice of God.

Except for 2nd Samuel 12:13, where God gets rid of David's adultery and murder sins with a wave of his magic wand.  God should therefore have no problems getting rid of Hitler's sins with a wave of his magic wand.  or maybe the theology in Samuel is complete bullshit, and all we are reading is how stupid religious fanatics in OT days did political favors for each other in the name of their false gods?  What more did Nathan actually do there, except promise not to nark David off to the priests?

Even within the current cultural moment, we long for justice.

we are spoiled children living in a happy bubble called America.  Of course we will perceive injustice if other people make our lives unnecessarily more difficult. 

This is why people say, “No justice; no peace.”   This is the mantra of many who are marching in the streets in response to what they see as injustice. Our hearts cry out for perfect justice, but that’s something no earthly justice system will ever satisfy. Only God can provide that.

But "perfect justice" is an incoherent proposition, as there is no standard of perfection in the first place.

We cry out, “No Justice; no peace.” But if there is no God, there can be no final justice. The truth is, “No final judgment; no ultimate justice.”

Why do you assume our longing for justice implies a god?  We simply don't like it when other mammals make our lives more difficult. 

With this argument, I’m appealing to what Francis Schaeffer called the “mannishness of man.” In the book Tactics, Greg Koukl says, “Because we all live in God’s world and are all made in God’s image, there are things all people know that are embedded deep within their hearts—profound things about our world and about ourselves—even though we deny them or worldviews disqualify them.”

Such as the absolute immorality of burning girls to death, i.e., how obvious it is that God did not inspire Leviticus 21:9 (when there was no prima facie case for such inspiration in the first place, so skeptics are not placed under any intellectual obligation merely because inerrantists can, like lawyers, make up halfway plausible excuses for that verse.  If the bible god directly commanded a man to rape a baby, today's apologists would simply scream their excuse "we cannot judge God!" just a little louder than they normally do, and presto, the problem of the divine atrocities of the bible is solved.  What idiot doesn't know that excuses can be made for anything?  Christian apologists, that's who.

There is something within us that demands that those responsible for injustice stand before a judge and pay for their crimes.

And that something came from being born and raised in a civilization somewhat more democratic than a gang of gorillas.

and we will all give an account for the wrongs we’ve done. The books will be opened containing a complete list of every crime we’ve ever committed. God misses nothing.

No need for skeptics to respond substantively to this, as it is nothing but preaching to the choir.

“Will that be fire? Will that be forever?” That’s not our concern right now.

That's funny, the Christians who choose to get involved in the nature-of-hell debate sure think it is their concern right now.  Which one of you isn't listening to the Holy Spirit?  Or does God have different strokes for different folks?

Whatever the judgment looks like, it’s going to be worse than your worst nightmare, and you do not want to be there. That is the bad news.

Annihilationism isn't much different than the extinction of consciousness the atheist already realizes is inevitable at death.

Here is the good news. There is another book, the Book of Life. In The Story of Reality, Greg Koukl says, “It also contains a record, the names of those who, though guilty, have received mercy, at their request: ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’ All those who have accepted their pardon in Christ will be absolved.”

Except that because Paul cursed his own church for apostatizing from him toward another gospel  (Gal. 1:8, making skeptics wonder why today's fundies think Paul's viewpoint is infallible), it would appear that what the true gospel was, wasn't even clear during the lifetime of the apostles, making you a fool to pretend it was made any clearer with the passing of 2,000 years and little more than church splits and endless cries of "heresy!"  Since it can be sinful to pick the wrong religion, apparently it is somewhat safer to just remain an atheist and refuse to take a chance on adding "picked the wrong form of Christianity" to your list of sins.

And your god is rather stupid for demanding radical commitment without giving sinners radically authenticated evidence.  What fool woman radically commits as a wife to a man whose history she only knows by means of third-party hearsay of questionable authenticity?  The historical reliability of the gospels does NOT constitute "radical" authentication.  

And if God can pretend that those who heard the original Christian testimony from the original eyewitnesses can still be sufficiently ignorant as to justify God extending them mercy anyway (1st Timothy 1:13), it follows most reasonably that God would be far less angry toward today's atheist bible critics, who persecute Christians far less, and who have no access to the original eyewitness testimony the way Paul did.  In short, if somebody like Paul could plausibly link God's mercy on him to Paul's "ignorance", then today's atheist bible critics and unbelievers, having far less knowledge of the real gospel, have even greater excuse.

So, in the final judgment, there are two options. Either Jesus pays, or you pay. Perfect mercy or perfect justice.

No, the third option is found in 2nd Samuel 12:13, God can just exempt you from your sins' consequences with a wave of his magic wand.  Of course the theology in that verse is complete bullshit, but YOU the Christian bible-believer do not have that option, you are required to believe the representation of God in that verse is true to actual reality.

In the final analysis, Hell is a solution, not a problem.

Then because hell has been deemed a "problem" but the vast majority of Christian scholars in history, it would appear that becoming a Christian can blind us so much that we end up misconstruing solutions as problems...another reasonable justification for skeptics to fear that becoming a Christian inhibits a person from thinking honestly and clearly.

It helps make sense of something in the world and something in our hearts.

So does atheism.  When somebody hurts us, we shall have justice against them by means of the justice system we have set up.   

First, it helps answer the problem of evil in our world. Second, it satisfies the longing for justice in our hearts by explaining how that longing will be satisfied.

But final justice on the wicked is contradicted in Revelation 22, see above.