FORCIBLY DETAINED IN HELL AGAINST YOUR WILL?

Christians have a hard time explaining how God could be perfectly good and infinitely powerful while some of his children languish forever in Hell.

They say that somehow the children are to blame.

But what if God forces them to stay?

He can do that against their will.

He can still force them in accordance with their will. It is still forcing if you are sent to Hell though you ask for it when the asking is not a consideration by God. It would be the same if you did not ask.

He can manipulate them so that they will not leave. That is forcing as well.

If there are people in Hell why do they stay there? The damned either want to stay in Hell forever or are compelled to remain there by the magic power of God. The latter is the favourite option. We want to know which is logical if any of the options are.

Today we hear a lot that those in Hell are individualists - it is all about what they want and what is in it for them.  Seneca was clear that simply working for your own happiness isolates you from others and you end up turning yourself into your own prison. Hell then must be beings trying to be happy and failing.

Some say that because sin is infinite in malice it has to be punished by everlasting imprisonment in Hell. They argue that a finite being cannot take unlimited punishment in one go therefore it has to be punishment that lasts forever which adds up to the same thing. But God made infinite space so he can change a finite being into one that can endure infinite torment in one instant.  If so then like any prison force is necessary.

God has four ways to force the damned to stay in Hell. He can keep them there whether they like it or not or repent or not. Or he can program them to want to stay. Or he can manipulate their free will and intelligence so that they stay there freely. Or he can put them outside time so that they will be eternally or timelessly damned.

The first is the biblical view. See Luke 16:19-31. There Abraham in Heaven revealed to a rich man in Hell that anybody who wants to go from Heaven to Hell or from Hell to Heaven cannot get across the great abyss. There is no hint that the story is a parable. Jesus then told the story as a true story. The main thought in the tale is how once you die and go to the place of suffering for sin you cannot escape. The rich man wanted somebody to give him a drop of water on his tongue for the pain was excruciating. Abraham didn't try to get help and said it was impossible. So there was no way the rich man could get any relief at all. The person in Hell is not there of their own free will anymore. The modernist doctrine that Hell is just where you go when you finally reject God and you make your own Hell can't be true for if you willingly reject God you will want to make the best of it and enjoy it as best you can even if just to spite him.
 
* Forced to Stay Whether Good or Bad?

Are the damned condemned to imprisonment in Hell whether they repent or not? Christians recoil from this idea. But if anybody can be put in Hell forever it hardly matters too much if one believes they could be there against their will. It’s only a technicality and what is important is the everlasting nature of the torment. Christians act as if it is more upsetting to refuse to let a prisoner watch television than to imprison him for life. Will God refuse to forgive the penitent or those who wish they had the grace to repent? If he does then he is an evil God. It is better to forgive if forgiveness is moral as he says.

* He Can Program Them to Want to Stay.

This option suggests that God forces them to stay by making them want to stay. But why make them want to stay? Would it be right to? And when they are programmed that is not their real will to stay.

* Wills Fixed in Sin?

Does God prevent the damned from repenting by fixing their will in stubborn impenitence for the sins they died in? The idea that their inability to repent forces them to sin on would be ludicrous for they have no free will. Some attempt to salvage the doctrine by saying the damned have free will in everything except repenting the sins they went to Hell for. But this solves nothing.

The moment their free will to repent any sin is removed they cease to be sinners in relation to that sin so the idea of God punishing them for it by keeping them in impenitence as an excuse is totally wrong. He would have to ensure that they freely sin forever to keep punishing them.

If they are completely puppets to evil they can’t freely do evil and consequently, can’t do good. No matter what a puppet has done in the past it is not right to punish it. You can’t torture a murderer who is in a persistent vegetative condition for his or her crime. God does not know what a puppet would do, so he would have to take it that they would repent their sins and forgive them. So, he can’t destroy the freedom of the damned for that would force him to save them.

If God deprives the damned of the power to return to his friendship then he is forcibly preventing their conversion. You can’t force a person to remain impenitent for sin without being as bad as she or he is. If advising a person to sin is as bad as the sin that the person commits as a consequence then this is worse. This God is like a hypocrite. He condemns what is no better than what he does. He is like one who hypnotises a friend to kill and then condemns him to jail though he is the one who should be locked up.

Christians say that God owes nobody the chance and power to repent for we deserve to be incarcerated in Hell forever. They argue that nobody can accuse God of being unloving or unjust if he won’t enable them to turn their lives around. If this is true then God owes it to himself and should give a hand. Only an evil God who hates his own guts would behave that way.

Every sinner does have the right to be allowed to repent for it is better to reform than not to. Christians are saying that persons have no rights at all for if we haven’t that one then we have none. That is what the Hell doctrine says. It makes mercy and forgiveness and reform immoral and stands self-condemned.
 
What should be done with the sinners in Hell is remove their free will and give them a counterfeit of free will so that they cannot tell the difference. Then they can be treated as good people. Then Hell can become a paradise for them. They can be happy in Hell by having the programming changed.
 
The saints do not need to know that the damned are in pain and the damned are not guilty anymore if free will has been removed. Why should it matter if the damned are free or not as long as they think they are free? After all, nobody in this world knows if they are free themselves. It could be a program in your head mimicking what seems to be free will. So it makes no difference. The Hell doctrine suggests that human beings have no rights at all when they don’t have the right to be made happy by conversion into an unfree agent instead of punished forever. If you deny that there is a Hell but still hold that sinners should be eternally punished you are not much better than one who believes in Hell. You are still denying that people have a right to be happy. Another thought, it is possible for a person to deserve eternal punishing and God not being able to carry it out for some reason. If that person pays some of the debt of punishment then God has satisfied justice in the sense that he punished him as far as he could. Therefore, since it is better to convert that person to a good and happy unfree agent it follows that God can’t punish eternally.

Retribution should not be geared just towards punishment but should endeavour to change the criminal for it is hypocrisy to punish crime and make little or no effort to prevent it happening again. The doctrine of eternal damnation evilly denies this. Jesus Christ taught eternal damnation so Jesus was a false prophet and not really the Son of God. Even if Hell is empty he is still evil for making such a place for he would use it if he had the chance.

Some religions hold that all people have merited rewards from God. If they have then he owes them the grace of repentance. It may be answered that he doesn’t for we did them by his grace but we still deserve them if we freely chose to do the good. Our choice would mean that we would earn them if we could and that stands for something. God has to accept efforts rather than successes.

If God is infinite love and is unlimitedly pleased by good and disgusted by evil then a good work deserves an infinite reward and a mortal sin deserves infinite torture. If sinners go to Hell the very least they are entitled to is the grace of repentance. God would not be good if he took away a person’s eternal reward to give them eternal punishment for it is evil to do evil when good may be done. It is concentrating on the bad side.

God would be the true Devil if he could make a person sin for he would be as responsible as the person would be if not more. Christianity says that God does not hypnotise a person to make them sin but he just deprives them of his grace without which nobody can repent and turn to him. That makes no difference. An act of evil is as bad as the evil done by an omission.

* God Manipulates Persons so that they freely sin in Hell.

God can control thoughts and feelings to influence the will to go the way he wants.

This is incompatible with the doctrine that God cannot tempt that we see in the first chapter of the letter of St James. The Bible says that God cannot tempt but this would be worse than temptation. A good God can’t urge people to sin against him. The Bible says that God cannot tempt and then it says that demons tempt us. When the demons are in Hell why are they allowed to tempt us? Because God wants to respect their free will? But the purpose of respecting free will is so that we might love. Demons cannot love so that excuse does not apply in this case. Since demons do not need to be able to tempt and God says that temptation is bad and that even he cannot do it for a greater purpose meaning that nothing justifies temptation even if it does make us stronger it follows that God can evilly manipulate the damned to stay in Hell. It is the biblical answer.

Since God is causing an infinity of sins rather than preventing repentance for a limited number of sins this theory is worse than the last one.

* Mystery of sin

The doctrine that sin is a mystery and that is the reason if you die in it you will never abandon it implies that it is possible that somebody could be predestined to separation from God in this life (Calvinists say just that very thing!). In fact it is cruel to say that this should only happen when you die. And it creates the suspicion that you are only using death as the cut off for nobody can check it out.