Shooting down J. Warner Wallace's "quick shots": God SENDS people to hell

This is my reply to a "quick shot" argument from J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: Quick Shot: 

“A loving God would not send people to hell”

Posted: 24 Jun 2019 01:05 AM PDT 

In this article, we’re offering “Quick Shot” responses to the objection, Quick Shot: “A loving God would not send people to hell.” Response #1:
“What do you mean by ‘loving?’

We mean the only kind of love you can rationally expect an unbeliever to recognize:  human love...which, if it exists, would never say that it "delights" in inflicting sadistic tortures on people, as God expressed "delight" to do in Deuteronomy 28:63.

A loving God must also be just, or His love is little more than an empty expression.

But in the bible, God's love is also manifested by unexplained apathy toward "justice" for sin, for example, while David's sin of adultery and murder required death under the Law (God's expression of justice) God also apparently was able to conveniently bypass that requirement of justice and merely 'take away' those sins in conveniently unspecified manner, in the sense of refusing to impose the just penalty on David.  God instead tortured a baby to death over a period of several days, not because of David's sin, but because the Lord's enemies were given occasion by that sin to laugh:

 11 "Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.
 12 'Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.'"
 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.
 14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."
 15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.
 16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
 17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
 18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. (2 Sam. 12:11-18 NAU)

Let's see...God finds it this easy to exempt deserving sinners of the "just" penalty God required under law?  Apparently, god's own sense of justice magically becomes malleable whenever such justice might hurt his favorite political candidate.

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?

how "fair" is it that the guilty pedophile makes it into heaven just as easily as you do?  How "fair" is it to threaten women with rape, as God does in Isaiah 13:15-17?  How "fair" is it that sinless Jesus should pay a penalty he didn't deserve?  How "fair" is it that we inherit Adam's sin even though God could just as easily have prevented future generations from inheriting that sin? 

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

Very...God's love apparently sometimes causes him to use his magic fairy dust to change the attitude of pagan idolaters so that they do whatever he wants them to do (Ezra 1:1).

How fair would that be to their victims?

If you can employ "God's ways are mysterious" to get out of a theological jam, will you extend to skeptics the same courtesy?  Or is there some bible verse that says only conservative Protestants are allowed to hide behind that dodge?

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

Yes, God tortured David's infant son for 7 days before killing it.  See above, yet you still think God was "loving" regardless. God can also be "delighted" (Deut. 28:63) to inflict horrific torments on children, including causing parents to eat their own children during prolonged divinely-imposed famine (v. 56 ff).

How loving would God be to reward criminals rather than punish them?

How often does God "allow" criminals to escape justice?  Will you trifle that this is any different than 'rewarding' the criminal for the crime?  What else does such apathy do but embolden the criminal to engage in future criminal conduct.

If a parent "allowed" their older teen son to proceed unhindered in his known plans to shoot up the school, would they be exhibiting the same degree of respect for their son's freewill than God had for Hitler's freewill during WW2?  Is that loving?  Or did you suddenly discover how useful it can be to cry out "God's mysterious ways/God is holy and righteous no matter what" whenever expediency dictates?  Sure is funny that when "heretical" Christians use that excuse to escape their own theological difficulties, you don't find it very convincing.  Apparently, I missed that bible verse that says this excuse is exclusively owned by Protestants.

How fair would that be to their victims?

How "fair" was God in torturing David's baby to death?  How "fair" was God to threaten women with rape (Isaiah 13:15-17)?  How "fair" was God to the fetus whenforcing women to endure abortion-by-sword (Hosea 13:16)?  How "fair" is God when using force described as "put a hook in your jaws and turn you around" (Ezekiel 38:4 ff) to force certain nations to commit the sin of attacking Israel? 

If you wanna blow a mental gasket, ask yourself how god could possibly think it "sinful" for a person to act in the way that he intended (Ezekiel 38-39, forcing them to attack Israel, something he plans to "punish" those nations for doing)?  God is also telling unrepentent sinners to continue committing sin in Revelation 22:11.  Will god then bitch at these sinners when they fulfill this divine desire?

Gee, only in Christianity can God be displeased with you after do everything God wanted you to do the way he wanted you to do it!

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

Yes.  Since it was "just" to demand the death penalty for murder and adultery, it was thus "unjust" to allow David, obviously guilty of both sins, to be exempt from said penalty. 

No, you cannot argue that David was repentant and this somehow justified lifting the harsh OT restriction. The law of Moses neither expresses nor implies that one's repentance can secure them immunity from the consequences the law imposes on their capitol crimes.  Otherwise, when adults commit adultery 70 times per day and then seek forgiveness from the ruling priests and elders for each of those 70 times, the priests would be obligated to forgive them and exempt them from the legal penalty of death.  Such a possibility is neither expressed nor implied in the OT, and is implicitly denied in the NT statement that mercy was not even available for those who transgressed the law (Hebrews 10:28).

Response #2:
“What do you mean by ‘send’?

See the word "depart" in Matthew 7:23 and 25:41:

 23 "And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.' (Matt. 7:23 NAU)

 41 "Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; (Matt. 25:41 NAU)

In 7:21 "depart" in the Greek is ἀποχωρέω, a verb that is imperative present active 2nd person plural from ἀποχωρέω.

In 25:41, πορεύομαι is a verb, the imperative present middle 2nd person plural from πορεύομαι.  It means to "go".

As you know, an "imperative" is a command to do something.

Finally, that your stupid meandering "god doesn't send people to hell" is nothing but apostate liberalism is clear from how the NT presents the judgment of God as his sending people into eternal torment:

 15 And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. (Rev. 20:15 NAU)

Now what?  Maybe you'll trifle that "we throw ourselves into the lake of fire by rejecting the gospel?"

Then read the context, the 'throwing' occurs in the context of God's final judgment on the wicked as the world appears before him in his heavenly court (v. 12), and it is therefore showing an outside force imposing itself on unwilling sinners no less than one observes when unrepentant criminals are convicted in courts of law.

By the way, "thrown" is the Greek verb βάλλω,  it is indicative aorist passive 3rd person singular from βάλλω.  No, that "passive" doesn't mean "self-throwing" is clear from the way most English bibles translate it:

KJV  Revelation 20:15 And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.
NAS  Revelation 20:15 And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
NAU  Revelation 20:15 And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
NET  Revelation 20:15 If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, that person was thrown into the lake of fire.
NIV  Revelation 20:15 Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.
NKJ  Revelation 20:15 And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.
NRS  Revelation 20:15 and anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.
RSV  Revelation 20:15 and if any one's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
YLT  Revelation 20:15 and if any one was not found written in the scroll of the life, he was cast to the lake of the fire.

Conservative evangelical Christian scholars agree that the heavenly justice here is reminiscent of the earthly justice of kings:

The final judgment is depicted in vv 11–15 in the traditional eschatological imagery derived from the role of kings as dispensers of justice.

Aune, D. E. (2002). Vol. 52C: Word Biblical Commentary :
Revelation 17-22. Word Biblical Commentary (Page 1104). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.

Then there are other NT passages that make it clear that the guilty criminals are not accepting their punishment, they are trying to avoid it out of fear of pain and misery, even if fruitlessly:

 15 Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains;
 16 and they said to the mountains and to the rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb;
 17 for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?" (Rev. 6:15-17 NAU)

Wallace fruitlessly continues:

Our eternal destination is predicated by our choice, not His.

You apparently are more interested in collecting Facebook friends in modern democratic America, than you are in reading your bible.

God wants us to join Him in heaven,

5-Point Calvinism, a legitimate form of Christianity that accepts the Trinity, Jesus' full deity, his physical resurrection,  salvation by grace, justification by faith, and bible inerrancy, teaches that God does NOT love everybody, and intended from all eternity to damn certain sinners, by refusing to change their heart, to make sure they'd never "choose" god.

So your answer is merely begging for the reader to automatically construe Calvinism as false, when in fact Calvinism and Arminianism have split the church since the 17th century, and before that, Augustine and Pelagius disagreed similarly.   If Calvinism were "obviously" unbiblical, we wouldn't expect it to have divided the church anymore than we expect the question of Jesus' gender to divide the church.

but He won’t force people into his presence who don’t want to be there.

But your God is "wrathful" in doling out his justice, and his forcing people to endure his fearful judgments is also clear from the bible:

 10 he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. (Rev. 14:10 NAU) 

In a context describing divine "wrath" and "anger" that brims at "full strength", it is perfectly reasonable to credit the "tormented with fire" to a torment that god is inflicting on sinners unwilling to endure it by choice.

 26 For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,
 27 but a terrifying expectation of judgment and THE FURY OF A FIRE WHICH WILL CONSUME THE ADVERSARIES.
 28 Anyone who has set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
 29 How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace?
 30 For we know Him who said, "VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY." And again, "THE LORD WILL JUDGE HIS PEOPLE."
 31 It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Heb. 10:26-31 NAU)

 What a shame!  A Christian apologist, in all of his allegedly sincere "walking with Christ" and prayerful bible study, is more ignorant of the bible than an atheist!

Some people hate God;

I also hate the Big Bad Wolf and other fictional villains.  What are you gonna do, notify adult protective services that my delusions make me a danger to myself and others? 

others ignore Him entirely.

If God is going to deprive them of his direct communications they can experience with their empirical senses, God has no right to complain if sinners take their cue from him and likewise deprive him of their direct communications he can experience empirically. 

Draw close to sinners, and we will draw close to you.

They don’t choose to seek Him,

5-Point Calvinism says this is because God refuses to change their heart, which logically must come first before they can will to seek him, so blaming sinners for not seeking god is about as sensible as blaming dogs for barking.  So unless you are prepared to show Calvinism is "unbiblical", skeptics will have a valid excuse:  we refuse to seek God because only God can change our hearts, and he obviously doesn't wish to change our hearts.  If you can stop the fan's annoying rattling by fixing it, but you just sit there letting it rattle on and bother you, you have nobody to blame but yourself. 

You will say human beings are not analogous to inanimate objects, but Paul pushes his person/pot analogy to an absurd extreme in Romans 9:20-23.

and they don’t want to spend eternity with Him.

If you found out somebody tortured your baby to death over a period of several days (2nd Samuel 12:15-18), would you want to spend eternity with such a sadistic lunatic?  Me neither.  Glad we established at least some common ground!

God honors those kinds of choices.

But under Calvinism, we don't have the power to make good choices, so God's refusal to spread his Ezra 1:1 magic fairy dust on some unrepentant sinners is still the ultimate reason those particular sinners refuse to repent...and therefore you are being biblically dishonest by pretending that the sinner's accountability ends with noting that they refuse to repent.  They suffer from a freewill defect they are not capable of fixing, so they aren't going to repent in the first place unless God makes the first move.  God's unwillingness to change their heart is no less the cause of their resistance than is their own sinful state.

Who is at fault when your older teen, with your knowledge, gets drunk?  Them, because they had a choice? Or you, because you could have prevented it?

You will trifle that God makes that first move with prevenient grace which is enough to overcome the defective freewill, but which can still be resisted, but Ezekiel 38-39 proves God's ability and intent to force sinners to sin (i.e., put a hook in thy jaws and turn you around), so it follows logically that if God seriously wants you to do something, he will employ this level of force, he will not merely issue commands and arguments, then wring his hands in hopeful expectation that you'll deviate from the sinful course of action he infallibly foreknows you won't deviate from.

When you have infallible foreknowledge of how a person will respond to your command, you do not "expect" them to respond in any different way.  So if God in the bible acts as if he "expects" sinners to obey his commands, its probably beacuse he doesn't have infallible foreknowledge....or the ancient barbarians writing about him did so in an inconsistent fashion.

People who neither seek nor want God in their lives won’t be forced to spend eternity with Him.

And how fucked up would America become if our justice system took the same attitude, and said "convicted criminals who neither seek nor want jail in their lives won't be forced to spend time in it."

We also won't be forced to spend eternity with those who torture babies to death.  This is a good thing, so I'm not seeing your point.

How much more loving could God be?

If he stopped threatening to "stir up" men to rape women (Isaiah 13:15-17), that might be a start.   If he stopped torturing babies to death, that might show progress?  Or did I forget that you automatically equate the inerrancy of the bible with the inerrancy of your acceptance of classical theism?

Don’t you want Him to honor the choices of those who deny Him?

No and yes.  No, because we don't want earthly judges to honor the choices of those criminals who refuse to acknowledge the judge's authority.

Yes, because we also want him to honor the choices of some of those who accept him, such as little Christian kids who end up being raped, because God just stands there at the foot of the bed, watching and refusing to protect them.

People who neither seek nor want God in their lives won’t be forced to spend eternity with Him.

Criminals who neither seek nor want jail in their lives won't be forced to spend time therein.

Wallace, were you high on crack when you wrote this piece?

How much more loving could God be?

How loving is it to avoid forcing criminals into the jails they neither seek nor want to spend time in? Where did you get your idea of loving?  A toddler?

If our merely not being forced to spend eternity with god were all there was to say, that would be loving.  But the bible doesn't merely say God will honor the wishes of the unrepentant., it also says he will inflict torment on them against their will (i.e.,. "let the rocks and trees hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne", supra).  Under your idea of "love", God would not judge these people as long as they continued hiding, because they neither seek nor want that god in their lives.

(!?)

And don't forget that the case of apostle Paul (Acts 9, 22, 26) proves that if God really wants to, he not only knows about, but approves of, a forceful method of evidence-presentation convincing enough to convert even those who are in the middle of acting out their murderous hatred toward the Christian god.

What else was God doing when manifesting himself to Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus, except violating Paul's freewill?

Would it take too much energy for God to give a less convincing display to skeptics who are less inclined to murder Christians?

Maybe you think causing your opponent temporary physical blindness (the way God inflicted in Paul) constitutes "respect" for their freewill?

Response #3:
“What do you mean by ‘hell’?

That's your problem, as Christians disagree about the nature of hell, and whether it is a place of eternal conscious suffering or something less.  Skeptics are under no obligation to give two shits about biblical issues that Christian scholars disagree with each other about.  When God's like-minded ones get their act together on the nature of "hell", let me know.

Most of us hold a notion of hell that is shaped more by tradition and culture than by the scriptures. For example, the Bible never describes hell as a place where people experience torture.

Then apparently you never read Luke 16:

 22 "Now the poor man died and was carried away by the angels to Abraham's bosom; and the rich man also died and was buried.
 23 "In Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham far away and Lazarus in his bosom.
 24 "And he cried out and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.'
 25 "But Abraham said, 'Child, remember that during your life you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus bad things; but now he is being comforted here, and you are in agony.
 26 'And besides all this, between us and you there is a great chasm fixed, so that those who wish to come over from here to you will not be able, and that none may cross over from there to us.'
 27 "And he said, 'Then I beg you, father, that you send him to my father's house--
 28 for I have five brothers-- in order that he may warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.'
 29 "But Abraham said, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.'
 30 "But he said, 'No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent!'
 31 "But he said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.'" (Lk. 16:22-31 NAU)

Notice that last verse:  most Christian apologists don't believe it.  They think that proving the resurrection to skeptics is far more likely to convince them Christianity is true, than would a mere bible study on Moses and the Prophets.

Wallace continues:

Instead, it’s described as a place where people will be tormented. You can be tormented, for example, by simply making a bad choice (like choosing to deny God’s offer of heaven).

Sorry, but your word-game is abortive:  The issue is not whether torment can result from your own realization that you made a bad choice.  The issue is what does the bible say the nature of hell-torment is?  In Luke 16, a passage that has convinced millions of Christians over 2,000 years that hell is a place of eternal literal conscious torment, the torment is inflicted by "flame", and as shown earlier, Revelation adds to that flame angels as the instruments through which the torment comes.

The Bible describes levels and degrees of punishment. Some will be punished severely, some will only experience the torment and regret of being separated from God and believing family members for eternity. Have your notions of hell be shaped by popular fiction rather than the scriptures?”

No.

Our “Quick Shot” series was written specifically for the Cold-Case Christianity App (you can download it on Apple and Android platforms – be sure to register once you download the App). When confronted with an objection in casual conversation, App users can quickly find an answer without having to scroll beyond the first screen in the category.

One wonders how the Holy Spirit obtained the success he did before the advent of the internet.   You seem to think that Christians who are without your gimmicks are thus deprived of significant apologetics sources.  One would think, from Acts, that the Holy Spirit is quite as dead as your ceaseless employment of psychological tricks implies.  If you seriously believed the Holy Spirit doesn't need your gimmicks to do his job of convicting the world of sin, common sense says you'd probably pay more attention to bible study and less attention to interesting marketing ideas that your publicist tells you will likely increase sales of your highly unnecessary book.

Use the App “Quick Shots” along with the “Rapid Responses” and Case Making “Cheat Sheets” to become a better Christian Case Maker.

And don't worry if you are just a stupid teen Christian with nearly zero biblical knowledge.  There's nothing requiring a foundation of spiritual maturity or watching out for spiritual wickedness in high places. No, arguing about Jesus no more puts demons on your trial than would arguing about the sanitation procedures that must be followed by Denny's dishwashers.

Don't worry about whether you are even "ready" to do apologetics and battle demons at this level.  JUST BUY WALLACE'S BOOK.  If you find out later you've jumped into a spiritual wrestling ring you were never prepared to enter, Wallace will be happy to send you a google search list of christian counselors and Pentecostal churches in your area.  Have a nice day.  And don't forget to make a donation to our "important" work.  Nothing fails quite like prayer, and nothing succeeds quite like money.  Have a nice day.  Sincerely, J. Warner Wallace.

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.

Matthew Flannagan finds it difficult to answer simple questions about the sufficiency of scripture

In reply to Christian philosopher Matthew Flannagan's blog piece, wherein he tried to dispute the liberal interpretation of hell, I asked him whether he felt simply quoting the bible was sufficient to discharge his obligation as a Christian to teach and refute error.  He replied in the negative, that proof-texting was terrible error, I responded that this is exactly what several NT authors do in their own treatment of the OT.

Matt then asked me to go waste somebody else's time, and I took that as his subtle way of asking me to quit stomping him down intellectually.  Here's how it happened.

barry
Jan 5, 2018 at 10:17 am
 Matt,
 Do you believe that the biblical wording is “sufficient” for Christian faith and practice?

 Matt
Jan 5, 2018 at 12:09 pm
 Barry, sorry, but I don’t know what you mean when you say that “biblical wording” is sufficient for Christian faith and practise? 

 barry
Jan 5, 2018 at 1:19 pm
 By “biblical wording”, I meant the words of the bible. 

 Matthew Flannagan
Jan 5, 2018 at 6:37 pm
 By “biblical wording”, I meant the words of the bible.
 Sounds to me like your equivocating, when a person talks about the words of the Bible, they often mean by that what the bible teaches. But it could also be a reference to the phraseology, used by biblical authors.
 I am still unsure what you mean. 

 barry
Jan 6, 2018 at 8:41 am
 Do you believe that merely quoting Luke 16:19-31 verbatim to an Evangelical Annihilationist, without adding any commentary or argument, is ‘sufficient’ to discharge your Christian obligation to refute error?

Peter S WilliamsJan 7, 2018 at 3:27 am Please get someone to copy edit this article. There are sentences that make no grammatical sense and this is unfortunately obscuring the content.

 Matt
Jan 8, 2018 at 12:49 pm
 Barry, No, Luke 18 is a parable and it comes in a section where Jesus is discussing money and greed. So simply quoting it wouldn’t suffice, you’d have to make the case that in addition to making a point about money and greed, Jesus intended in this parable to give an accurate description of what hell is like. I think that’s dubious.
 Generally just quoting a passage without taking into account the context or Genre is a terrible method. Its known as proof-texting and is widely disparaged. 

 barry jones
Jan 10, 2018 at 12:13 pm
 If “proof-texting” is is a “terrible method” and is “widely disparaged”, then do you accuse Jesus and some NT authors of using a terrible method? 

 Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14, without commentary…as if he expected his readers to just “get it”, despite the obvious fact that no surviving pre-Christian Jewish commentary describes it as messianic (i.e., there was great likelihood Matthew knew the unbelieving Jews he wrote to did not accept Isaiah 7:14 as messianic, yet he quotes it verbatim, plus nothing, as if he expected that the quotation, alone, would be sufficient. 

 And since patristic testimony on Matthew indicates he wrote also for non-Christian Jews and not just Christian Jews, this appears to be a case of a NT author expecting an unbeliever to “get it” through nothing more than “proof-texting”.
 Hebrews 1:6 quotes Psalm 97:7 as if the latter was speaking about God’s “Son”, but again, without commentary. If Clement and Eusebius can be trusted, then Eusebius at H.E. 6:14 reports that Clement explained “the name “Paul an Apostle” was very properly not pre-fixed, for, he says, that writing to the Hebrews, who were prejudiced against him and suspected, he with great wisdom did not repel them in the beginning by putting down his name.” 

 That is, Paul was addressing unbelieving Jews (i.e., who were prejudiced against him) and apparently expecting them to just “get it” without his further commentary despite how obvious it must have been that such unbelieving Jews did not understand Psalm 97 to contain any references to Jesus. So Paul’s lack of commentary when quoting the bible to unbelievers seems to constitute the exact proof-texting that you call “widely disparaged”. Paul wasn’t doing much different here than KJV Onlyists do when street-preaching.
 Paul in Hebrews 10:5-10 does even worse: Although the Hebrew of Psalm 40:6 says “my ears you have opened”, Paul here quotes the Lxx form which says “but a body you have prepared for me”. 

 Here’s the problem: Paul is speaking to unbelieving Jews (Clement, supra), and here, quotes to them not just the Lxx form they are unlikely to prefer anyway (their problem with the Lxx obscuring or corrupting the text goes back at least to Ben Sira’s grandson’s extended prologue to Sirach, saying the Greek translation doesn’t have the same force as the Hebrew original, and that such differences are “not small”) but a specific form of a verse that aligns much more closely with Paul’s thought that God prepared a body for Jesus, a thought utterly at odds with what the unbelieving Jews Paul was addressing would accept…and yet Paul does exactly nothing to justify to them his convenient preference for a controversial Greek translation that just so happens to make the incarnation of Jesus much easier to prove. 

 Worse, Paul characterizes this as what God does when he brings Jesus “into the world”, when in fact nothing close to kenosis can be found in Psalm 40. So not only is Paul refusing to justify to an unbelieving audience his preference for a controversial translation of the Hebrew, he is also refusing to justify why he thinks this Psalm has anything to say about God bringing Jesus into the world. 

 If Paul didn’t feel the need to academically justify his arguments to those who clearly didn’t agree with those arguments, why do you? 

 If Paul can be comfortable quoting to unbelieving Jews a version of Psalm 40 that they do not agree with, and feel no need to provide the academic justification for it, why can’t you be comfortable quoting Luke 16 to liberals who do not agree with you on what it means, and feel no need to provide them any academic justification for your particular understanding?
 In Luke 4:4, Jesus answers the devil by proof-texting from Deut. 8:4, again, no commentary, as if he thought the mere verbatim quotation of the scripture, alone, was sufficient to discharge the need to rebuke or correct those who are in theological error. 

 We would hardly find the NT justifying such “proof-texting” if the NT authors agreed with modern conservative Christian scholars that one’s obligation in preaching/teaching requires them to follow up their verbatim bible quotes with their own commentary. 

 It would appear then, that the NT authors find it far less needful to provide academic justification, than do modern day conservative Christians. 

 How could you go wrong making the change and imitating the NT authors’ more simplistic methodology? You quote Luke 16 verbatim to the liberals who say hell is mere metaphor, that’s it, and you allocate the job of overcoming their academic objections, to the Holy Spirit. 

 Yeah, you’d lose your standing as a Christian “scholar”, but it’s more important to you to align as close as possible to the apostolic method of teaching unbelievers/heretics, than it is for you to impress your modern peers with your ability to trifle about scholarly minutiae, amen?
  

Matt
Jan 10, 2018 at 2:21 pm
 Barry, I see you want to change the subject from the post again to ask me to exegete a swath of different passages you disagree with.
 But for the record there is a difference between proof texting of the sort you were mentioning and enthyeme.
 How could you go wrong making the change and imitating the NT authors’ more simplistic methodology? You quote Luke 16 verbatim to the liberals who say hell is mere metaphor, that’s it, and you allocate the job of overcoming their academic objections, to the Holy Spirit.
 This is mistaken on several counts, First, the phrase “hell” is a metaphor, Jesus isnt literally referring to the valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem but using a well known apocalyptic symbol almost no one conservative or liberal denies this.Theologians such as Jean Calvin and Charles Hodge acknowledge this, are they liberals? Second, as I pointed out the passage in Luke you mentioned is a parable, so your just misreading the Genre. It would be like the someone quoting Nathans story about a sheep as a teaching on shepherding.

 Yeah, you’d lose your standing as a Christian “scholar”, but it’s more important to you to align as close as possible to the apostolic method of teaching unbelievers/heretics, than it is for you to impress your modern peers with your ability to trifle about scholarly minutiae, amen?

 This is just ironic, skeptics emphasis reason and science and complain that religion is thoughtless based on faith and not reasoned, then they complain that Christian scholars use reason and complicated arguments.
 You come in and demand I respond to your arguments and then complain I engage in argument. I suggest you waste someone elses time. 

 barry jones
Jan 10, 2018 at 3:21 pm
 Matt,
 I’m not changing the subject. You impugned “proof-texting” as “terrible error”, so it was a legitimate move on my part to confront your evangelical self with passages from your own bible where biblical authors are committing the same alleged “error”. And since you didn’t do much to oppose, apparently, that strategy was correct. 

 You refuse to say which instances I quoted are a case of the bible author employing enthyeme, so I guess that means you wanted me to guess which ones were doing that. I shall not play guessing games with you. 

 When I said the liberals view hell as metaphor, I wasn’t mistaken, your problem is that you think there’s a “mistake” merely because, like a jailhouse lawyer, you can capitalize on your opponents failure to speak in detailed qualified manner. I obviously meant that the liberals view hell as ONLY metaphor, that is, they deny there’s any literal aspect to it. But because I didn’t use the word “only”, you cry “mistake!”, as if I didn’t’ know the conservative position that agrees biblical hell is metaphorical in certain aspects. Stop being so quick to leap from somebody’s failure to qualify, over to “mistake!”. 

 You say you “pointed out” that the passage is a parable, but “pointed out” is not “argument”, and as such, you did not justify disagreement with other Christian scholars who say this story is real history and not parable, such as Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Intervarsity, 2006), p. 534?

 “skeptics emphasis reason and science and complain that religion is thoughtless based on faith and not reasoned, then they complain that Christian scholars use reason and complicated arguments.”

——-But that’s your problem: Your own bible condemns any effort you make to justify your treatment of scripture to unbelievers or heretics with academic argument. Therefore, when you make such argument, you can be condemned with your own bible as not living up to the more simplistic method advocated by NT authors. When you DON’T make academic argument, you might be living up to the more simple standard of NT authors, but the consequence is that nobody is obligated to seriously consider a position that has nothing more behind it except “proof-texting”. It is not my fault if you wish to uphold two contradictory standards of proof, the academic argument approved by modern scholars, and the proof-texting employed by NT authors.

 “You come in and demand I respond to your arguments and then complain I engage in argument.”

——-You wish to look good to modern people, thus calling for scholarly level argument, but you refuse to condemn the NT authors for their more simplistic argument via proof-texting.  It is not my fault if your attempt to serve two different masters makes it easy to condemn pretty much any scriptural argument you attempt.

 “I suggest you waste someone elses time.”

——Perhaps I was also wasting my time asking you to describe and source whatever moral yardstick you were using to justify saying torturing babies solely for entertainment is objectively immoral, given that you essentially disappeared after I pressed that matter.
 That you are wrong about me wasting your time (and wrong in your implication that this was my primary motive in dialoguing with you), all anybody has to do is check out my list of challenges to you in the last post over at http://www.mandm.org.nz/2017/10/richard-carrier-on-the-moral-scepticism-objection-to-divine-command-theory.html 

 When you are prepared to defend the matters those challenges attack, you know where I blog.
 https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2017/11/my-challenge-to-matthew-flannagan.html
 Conversing with you was fun and educational. Fare ye well.

CrossExamined.org: Why did a "Good" God Create Hell? (and other loaded questions)

This is my reply to an article at CrossExamined.org by Al Serrato entitled

Why did a "Good" God Create Hell?

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Many people today accuse God of unfairness.

Like me.  It is unfair for God to cause a man to rape a woman.  Deuteronomy 28:15, 30.  It's even more unfair for God to take "delight" in causing a man to rape a woman.  See v. 63.

 Since God can foresee the future, they ask, why didn’t He simply never create all those he knows to be destined to spend eternity in Hell?

If his foreknowledge of our future acts was infallible, then those acts were logically incapable of failing, so anything in God's infallible foreknowledge must come to pass.  But this is all esoteric crystal ball bullshit.

  One skeptic I know put the question like this:

God supposedly knows everything that will happen before you are ever born, so if all your choices are set beforehand, how can they possibly matter? Furthermore, if God knows you will “choose” Hell before he creates you, why does he simply not create you? Personally, I would much prefer nonexistence to eternal torment. Is God deliberately creating people knowing they will end up in Hell? Then I would call him evil. Is he compelled to create people regardless of what he sees in their future? Then he doesn’t have free will, which would certainly be an interesting interpretation, but one I doubt many people share. Is there some other explanation? If so, I can’t think of it. 

This challenge has a bit of intuitive appeal.  It seems to put God in a box, as it were, trapped between being “evil” for choosing to create rebellious creatures or lacking free will, by being unable to do otherwise.  Let’s take a closer look at the two horns of this apparent dilemma.
Good God Hell
To the Christian, “evil” is the label we give to words, thoughts or actions that deviate from God’s perfect will.

First, many bible passages forbid the distinction between the perfect/permissive will of God, which appears to be a distinction that was conjured up by Christian philosophers for no other reason than enable them to believe the bible statements on God's will are all in harmony.

Second, if there is nothing evil in God, there's no reason to create the perfect/permission distinction in god's will in the first place, all of God's acts would be good regardless of how they are categorized.  God allowing child-rape would be no less good than god positively decreeing that some atheist should be given a free bible.

 If we were created robots, there would be no evil in the world; we would operate exactly in accordance with God’s desires.

That's exactly what is taught by the metaphor of God putting a hook into your jaws and forcing you to sin, then punishing you for doing what he forced you to do, as seen in Ezekiel 38-39:

Ezekiel 38:1 And the word of the LORD came to me saying,
 2 "Son of man, set your face toward Gog of the land of Magog, the prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him
 3 and say, 'Thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal.
 4 "I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords;
 5 Persia, Ethiopia and Put with them, all of them with shield and helmet;
... 16 and you will come up against My people Israel like a cloud to cover the land. It shall come about in the last days that I will bring you against My land, so that the nations may know Me when I am sanctified through you before their eyes, O Gog."
 17 'Thus says the Lord GOD, "Are you the one of whom I spoke in former days through My servants the prophets of Israel, who prophesied in those days for many years that I would bring you against them?
 18 "It will come about on that day, when Gog comes against the land of Israel," declares the Lord GOD, "that My fury will mount up in My anger.
 ...21 "I will call for a sword against him on all My mountains," declares the Lord GOD. "Every man's sword will be against his brother. 

Ezekiel 39:1 "And you, son of man, prophesy against Gog and say, 'Thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal;
 2 and I will turn you around, drive you on, take you up from the remotest parts of the north and bring you against the mountains of Israel.
 3 "I will strike your bow from your left hand and dash down your arrows from your right hand.

Serrato continues:

 But in creating man, God did something quite different. He gave us “free will,” the capacity to rebel against him in our thoughts, words and actions.

In other words, you think the atheist reading this has a moral obligation to spend the next 25 years investigating Christian theology to see whether your statement on freewill is actually "biblical" and why plenty of other Christian advocates of bible inerrancy disagree with you.  No thanks.  But Ezekiel 38-39, supra, justify viewing God as evil for forcing people to sin, even if your view of freewill were the "biblical" one.

And rebel we did.  God “foresaw” this development, but only in a manner of speaking – a manner focused upon the way we think.  This is because God is not bound by time.

Not being bound by time constitutes an incoherent notion, as do other words preferred by apologists like god living "outside of nature" or "above nature".  Worse, every one of the bible's descriptions of activity in heaven, describe the acts as occurring in temporal progression no less than do events down here on earth:

19 Micaiah said, "Therefore, hear the word of the LORD. I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left.
 20 "The LORD said, 'Who will entice Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?' And one said this while another said that.
 21 "Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD and said, 'I will entice him.'
 22 "The LORD said to him, 'How?' And he said, 'I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.' Then He said, 'You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.'
 23 "Now therefore, behold, the LORD has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the LORD has proclaimed disaster against you." (1 Ki. 22:19-23 NAU)

Job 1 contains the famous dialogue of God and Satan up in heaven.  Read any description of heaven in Revelation, the same applies.  Sorry, but your premise that God isn't bound by time, is biblically false.

For him, there is no future to “foresee.”  There is only an eternal present.

You haven't the slightest fucking clue whether god experiences reality like that or not.

 All times – whether past, present or future – are accessible to him in this eternal present. Thus, at the moment of creation, God was aware that man would rebel, that he was rebelling, and that he had rebelled. He was aware of the acts and the consequences, the motivations and the ultimate end, of everyone.  

Wrong, Jeremiah says the idolatry of the Jews was a sin that had never entered God's mind:

Jer. 7:31  "They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, and it did not come into My mind.
 Jer. 19:5  and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, a thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever enter My mind;

Serrato continues:

Consistent with his nature for perfect fairness,

What fool thinks it fair for God to cause a woman to be raped (Deuteronomy 28:15, 30, 63)?  Christian apologists who think intellectual sophistry is more important that spiritual maturity, that's who.

he created a means by which man – though in rebellion and deserving punishment – could nonetheless find reunification with him.

Which was a waste of his time and makes him rather forgetful of his own abilities.  God doesn't need to create a means, he can get rid of your sin with a wave of his magic wand, not Yom Kippur or altar in sight:

 11 "Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.
 12 'Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.'"
 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.
 14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."   (2 Sam. 12:11-14 NAU) 

The highlighted part doesn't stop saying what it says merely because you point out that God caused David's baby to die.

 But in implementing this scheme, he did not force this choice upon us.

Then he was stupid and mean, because true love sometimes forces the loved one to prevent them from suffering the consequences of their own stupidity.  Mother doesn't just stand there presenting choices to her child in the street as the drunk driver speeds toward him.  And yet when compared with God, we are like "children".

He gives us the means to salvation, but remains content in allowing us to choose which path we will follow.

Like the father who remains content that his son has disobeyed the rule about playing with chainsaws.  When the parent is brought up on charges of criminal neglect after the boy cuts his hand off, perhaps the man will have a Christian apologist as a lawyer, who will thus argue that because the man made clear his prohibition on playing with chainsaws, nobody else is responsible for the calamity except the child.

Those who use their free will to turn toward him – more precisely, to accept his free gift of salvation – will find a welcoming father, ready to do the work needed to restore us.

No they will find a lying asshole who tells them the more they sin, the less reason they have to believe they are saved.  We call it legalistic grace.  

Those who use their free will to turn away from God – to reject his gift – will find that this choice too is honored.

Some would argue that true love will put forth serious effort to convince the rebellious loved one to obey.  Creating thousands of conflicting Christian denominations for the atheist to choose from in the gamble to pick the one that just happens to be the right religion, does not constitute "serious effort" by God.

 Expecting God not to create those in this latter category would have two significant effects: it would show that God’s provision of free will is really a fiction, since only those who choose to do his will are actually created,

You cannot reconcile freewill of man with God forcing people to sin in Ezekiel 38-39, so there's not much harm in saying freewill is a fiction.

and two, it would mean that Hell is a place of evil.  But Hell is a place – or perhaps more precisely a condition – which was created by God to serve a purpose.

An atheist would have to decide how much time to spend researching Christian fundies and liberals on the nature of hell, and since there are fatal problems with God's existence and the bible being the word of God, it is rational to turn away from this tempting opportunity to impress my girlfriend.

Since God does not create evil – i.e. he does not act against his own nature

Fuck you, God not only causes women to be raped (Deut. 28:15, 30), but will take "delight" to cause that curse no less than he takes delight in prospering those who obey (v. 63).  Gee, you never knew that rape was morally good until just now, eh?

– then Hell cannot be a place of evil. Like a human prison, it may be inhabited by those bent on doing evil, but the place itself – and the confinement it effectuates – is actually a good, just as separating hardened criminals from society is a net positive for both the evil-doer and the society that is victimized.

Sorry, but it does not seem the least bit feasible that the horrific realities of hell would fail to convince those there to repent in sincereity.  And if there comes a time when God no longer responds to sincere repentance, then you just found a limitation in one of God's "eternal" attributes.  And if God hardens those who are in hell so they don't wish to repent, he is not too different from the parent who withholds the Ritlan from the disobedient child, knowing the child will just rebel more and more as a result.

Some will be tempted to argue that God should have forced this choice upon us anyway. Isn’t it better to be forced to love God then to spend eternity in Hell? Only, I suppose, if one believes it is better to be a robot than a thinking, self-aware and self-directed being.

Ask the people now in hell, they'll kindly disagree and tell you being a robot forced to love god would have been better.  Your opinion is nowhere near controlling or persuasive.

 There is no middle ground. Either free will is something real – with consequences attendant to the choices we make – or it’s a fiction.  One cannot have it both ways.

It's a fiction, Ezekiel 38:4.

To recap: God is not trapped in an either/or dilemma. God is not “evil” for having created, because in the end he treats his creation fairly, giving each what he or she deserves.

Then you must agree with Deut. 28:15, 30 that circumstances can arise which would make a woman "deserving" of being raped.  You must also agree that when God causes pagans to beat Hebrew children to death (Hosea 13:15-16), those children "deserved" it.  Is this the part where we email Dr. Copan and ask him if its possible that God had morally sufficient reasons for causing pagan armies to beat children to death?

 Since he values free will enough to have given it to us, he apparently intends to make that gift real by allowing some to reject him.

Like the mother who allows her three year old to stay in the street according to his will, despite her knowledge that if not forced out of the street, he will be run over.  Apparently any who would call that woman unloving, never took Apologetics 101.

Likewise, God is not lacking in free will, because he is not “compelled” to create against his will.

That's also bullshit.  If God infallibly knows that he will cause a hurricane tomorrow, well, "infallible" means "incapable of failing", in which case God would not have the ability to deviate from this infallibly predicted event.  But again, infallible foreknowledge, living outside of time, maybe it can be loving to beat a child to death, etc, etc. is nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Since Hell is not a place for eternal torture,

Then apparently you don't know your bible well enough to justify your commentary on it:

 23 "In Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torment (Greek: basanos, torture), and saw Abraham far away and Lazarus in his bosom. (Lk. 16:23 NAU).

 46 "These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." (Matt. 25:46 NAU)

 11 "And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; they have no rest day and night, those who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name." (Rev. 14:11 NAU)

Some would argue that being on fire and yet unable to extinguish it, is "torture".

but an appropriate destination for all rebellious human beings, God does not violate his own nature – does not engage in “evil” – when he separates himself from some of his creation.

You have already settled in your mind that God is synonymous with good.  That's precisely why you'd never call God evil no matter what horrific atrocity you believed God caused.  Your assurances that God doesn't do evil are about as stupid and ill-informed as any Nazi who says Hitler wasn't able to do evil, who then proceeds to hem and haw and "explain" that massacring the Jews in WW2 was actually a "good" thing in the long term.  Fuck you.

What this challenge brings into focus is not some internal inconsistency in our conception of God. No, what it highlights is just how different our thinking is as compared to God’s.

Giving us justification to wonder whether you got jack shit right anywhere in this article.

For like the skeptic, many would view the decision to create nothing all – neither good nor bad people – to be a better – a more noble – alternative.  Yet God sees things quite a bit differently, it seems.

Not according to the Christian liberal theologians who deny all of your bullshit and assert everybody will be saved.  How long do you recommend atheists spend invenstigating why Christian fundies disagree with Christian liberals?  And why should we feel the least bit compelled to do so?  My atheism justifies me to not worry about the truth of Christian hell, just like your Christianity justifies you to not worry about Muslim hell.

In the end, that he views things differently should not really surprise us. Our judgment as to right and wrong, good and evil, has been corrupted by our rebellion.

Yeah, if only we'd become spiritually alive and born again by accepting Jesus into our hearts, we'd then recognize that sometimes women "deserve" to be raped (Deut. 28:15, 30) and that children "deserve" to be beaten to death (Hosea 13:15-16, Isaiah 13:15-16.

Since we all share this fallen nature,  we should realize that we are not in the best position to render judgment as to the way eternal things “ought to be.”

A criticism that applies with equal force to the theology written down by the sinful imperfect biblical authors.

We wouldn’t ask a group of incarcerated rapists for guidance on issues of sexual mores;

But you'd certainly ask your raping-god for guidance on issues of sexual mores!

nor would we consult death row inmates for advice on how best to treat one another.

But you certainly consult a god who allows non-fatal beatings (Exodus 21:20-21), on how best to treat one another.

Perhaps, in the same way, God has little need to consult with us to determine what ultimate “fairness” demands.

That's a possibility, but not likely, since even God has to sometimes accept correction from his creatures.  Exodus 32:9-14, a story that you always thought was literally true history until you discovered that taking it as literally true history would produce a conflict in biblical theology.  Anthropomorphisms, to the rescue!

No, the Creator of the universe may occupy a slightly better position to judge matters eternal. We might be wise to heed him, rather than try to ensnare him in a “logical” trap.

We also might be wise to do whatever we're asked by powerful space aliens, but that hardly argues that they are good.