THE FIRE OF HELL BEING A SYMBOL FOR LONELINESS IS NONSENSE

Jesus never once said Hell was loneliness but kept saying it was fire.  As that sounds like a threat of torture, it leads to the Churches ignoring what he said.  Most priests today define Hell as a place where there is no love for the love of God is shut out by the people in Hell.  The implication is that you have failed to relate to God enough to go to him forever to be with him.  Each one is alone and unloved. Each one has only her or his choice to blame. These doctrines are not in the Bible.  Jesus talks about Hell in judicial terms.  He said you have to make peace with the judge on the way to your trial.  This is not the language of one who says that forming a loving forgiving relationship with the judge solves the matter. 

If you love God and God is a judge who gives out judicial decrees you will love him for that.  The priests are advocating a bias against punitive justice and thus against God for a judging God might not be likeable but he will get respect.  It is paradoxically a message of, "I love you God if you punish nobody."  The end result is not a loving relationship with God but a conditional contract.

It is strange how people fear a judicial God who gives out punitive justice but the one that you need a relationship with is going to be more scary for who can enter the presence of a perfect God when sin is a barrier and a choice to say no to God?

The priests are telling lies to rationalise the contradiction between the everlasting misery of Hell and the doctrine that Jesus was the perfect man and pure fountain of wisdom. Jesus described Hell as everlasting punishment. Self-inflicted isolation is not punishment. To say that God does not punish is to say that the saint and the sinner should be equally praised. Hell is not defined as the state where there is no love but as the state of everlasting punishment. There may be no love there but that is not what makes it Hell. It is the punishment that makes it Hell.

To choose something properly you need to know what you are choosing. Respect for choice is often not so much about choice but to facilitate the formation of society. For example, a man and woman marry. They choose each other for life. So we are told. But in so far as they do not know how time will change the other person it is not a choice. In so far as they only think they know the other person it is not a choice. And we may have a strong belief that we are not dreaming or hallucinating our lives but that is not certainty. That imposes another limitation on choice. What we call choice is more about having to act than about making a proper choice. We have to do something - and doing nothing is doing something too. Society cannot function if we don't treat what people do consciously as a choice even though it is not really a choice or much of a choice. The system works well enough. It works despite the fact that limited free will is not free will at all but is a good substitute.

What if your decisions are partly caused by things outside of your control? That is no freedom at all. You will never know if you really chose anything. You can only believe but you know you could be wrong. And nobody - not even you - would have the right to accuse you of having meant to commit murder or some serious evil. And nobody would have the right to be sure that the heroic good you did was really from you.

Until you experience what an eternity of torture or suffering or loneliness is like you cannot really fully choose it. You may say, "But it makes no sense to expect people to endure something before they can choose to endure it." Yes it is impracticable. But that is not the point. The point is that if knowledge and choosing go together then because you cannot know except from experience what an eternity of suffering is like then you cannot choose it.

Reason and experience show that the reason why we act is very complex. There is a mixture of good and bad reasons behind everything we do. No matter how evil you want to be, you will never be evil enough to walk into Hell and make your Hell. You cannot be bad enough to freely isolate yourself in Hell forever from the God who pleads with you to come to him. If you are in Hell then you have been shoved in.

Instead of honouring human nature by saying we can't become evil enough to willingly stay in Hell forever, believers put the fact that the existence of Hell is stated in their scriptures and Catholic faith first. They prefer to accuse us of potentially infinite evil than to contradict their scriptures and religion. God is evil if he asks us to believe and so if Hell exists it is where he unleashes his vindictiveness.

From all that, it is clear that it makes no sense to say that Hell is anything other than a torture chamber operated by a vindictive God and vindictive saints and angels.

Romans 9 : I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it through the Holy Spirit— 2 I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, 4 the people of Israel.

If Hell is entirely your own fault and due to you blocking God out and not God blocking you out, then how could the apostle Paul write in the Bible that he wished he could be lost after death if it meant others would not be lost? If Hell is not the rejection of God but is a place of torment then it makes sense for Paul to wish he could suffer it instead of others. But Paul could not wish that he would abuse and hate God forever even to spare others. Remember the Bible is the inspired word of God according to Christianity. Also, if Hell is all your own fault and is merely the rejection of God, then it makes no sense to wish that you could go there instead of others.

If you argue that God does not punish and rewards sins and thereby punishes the victims of the sinners by treating them as he does sinners, then if you believe in the version of Hell taught by those priests you will surely end up in it. You want a Devil for a God and that is what you will get if the existence of Hell is true.

If Hell is horrible, it follows that God makes it so. Spirits don’t have nerves so they should not be able to feel anything. God then must intervene to make them be capable of suffering. Also, if he raises their bodies from the dead on the last day, that is merely so that they be tormented in the flesh. Those who say he is not tormenting them are liars. It cannot be denied that he is being cruel. He is like a monster who makes weapons for the sadists to torment their prey.

If mere rejection of God hurts and that is the pain of Hell, then it is God who has ensured that it will be painful and the source of suffering. Those who reject God on earth are often happy. If those who are in Hell suffer then it is God’s doing. To deny that as Christians do makes the religion crueller than it already would be.

Many modern theologians emphasise that Hell is just a state of being where you have to endure your own selfishness for all eternity. If selfishness is really that unpleasant then why do we love being selfish? Their doctrine is really an advertisement for going to Hell!

Jesus never made the slightest hint that Hell was merely enduring yourself and your hatred for God and everybody else for all eternity. He spoke of it in terms of being punished for dying in a state of disobedience of God. He mentioned a soul being in Hell wanting his living relations warned so that they wouldn’t end up in it. For Jesus, Hell was a prison where God administers everlasting punishment. That means you stay there against your will. A Hell where you stay of your own free will because you want to be selfish is not a prison or a place of punishment. Would jail be punishment if the door was left open?

The notion that hatred is an emotion and is measured by how strong it feels is nonsense.  A person who feels so badly against you that they hit you deserves more compassion and understanding that one who is not consumed by hate for you but who has enough disgust for you to hit you of their own volition.

The believers say such selfishness is immensely worse than any fire. If that is so then why are they so against the idea of Hell having a torturing fire? If the selfishness is so bad then the torturing fire is nothing. It might exist then after all.