The Refusal.

Clearly, if Christianity is True, and as advertised, one needs to redefine "good". But this has been clear since the various Christian cults gained political power. If you really want a currentish example of 'Christian Good,' take a look at the work of Mother Teresa. Take a very good look and discover how the welfare of the body is secondary to the eternal destiny of the soul. No doubt the Inquisition would have agreed.

Here is a religion that takes joy in the condemnation of billions of living, breathing, feeling individuals to an eternity of agony beyond anything that can be imagined. Here are adherents that will look you in the eye and tell you that it is a good thing that by virtute of the fact you refuse a relationship with Jesus Christ, it is perfectly fine with them that you will spend the better part of eternity in agony that cannot be endured, an agony that by definition has no end. While I do not yet believe it with any seriousness, I am begining to consider that these people are not human in any meaningful sense, because they lack the primary criteria of being human, which is to say empathy: the ability to feel for your fellow beings.

The thing about Hell is that it is too much. It is, on the one hand, infinite punishment for things that are trivial by comparison (and everything, any finite act, is trivial by comparison), and on the other, it is infinite punishment for refusing a relationship with an entity would would impose infinite punishment for what are by comparison, trivial reasons.

Should Adolph Hitler spend eternity in Hell? Should Pol-Pot, should Joseph Stalin? Should your next door neighbour, or that daughter of a distant friend who had an abortion? In the context of eternity, the answer must be no, and to say otherwise is to deny that which makes you human.

How much is enough?

Should Hitler suffer for a million years? Should he live each life that was lost as a result of his ambition? Should he suffer a billion years? Should he live each life that was lost as a result of his ambition, with all its feeling and dispare and agony, once, twice, ten times, or ten thousand times over? What would satisfy justice in the context of eternity?

The point is that whatever he did and caused to be done, whatever he made possible, ended and Hell has no end. If Christianity is to have any meaning, all, everyone, must at length, be saved.

Well, so what do we do?

Personally, I simply don't believe the Christian message on and intellectual level. As far as emotion goes, it revolts me.

But what if I am wrong? What, if, when I die, I should be confronted by that Omnipotent, Omniscient God who will call me in the person of my sins to account. What then?

Well, morally, one has no option (were one given the choice) but to enter Hell, freely and of one own will. In the unlikely event that Christianity is True, I doubt I would have the courage for the moral course, and yet, one must entertain the notion that the only possible sanction against an Omnipotent, Omniscent God who keeps a private torture chamber is to deprive Him of ones company and ones worship. It would be, of course, the kind of victory that does not require defeat, but sometimes, life is like that, and words of comfort regarding the right course do not exist..