To hell and back (and back to hell again) We've been around the block with this one a couple times already, and I'm still not done.
Camassia has been sharing her thoughts on hell, too. She writes:
... if my creator cares about morals at all, he could hardly have created a being more moral than himself. If human compassion spills unruly once it is released, what must the compassion of God do? ... I am having a harder and harder time believing that the way for me to become a good Christian is to lose my supposedly misguided objections to eternal torture and cultivate a Dantean taste for vicarious vengeance. If God knows me, he knows why; and if it is for the wrong reasons, he has not enlightened me yet.
I expressed some similar thoughts myself a few weeks ago:
I wondered if evangelicals had ever thought through the implications of this disjunction between a God who condemned sinners mercilessly to unending suffering and their own desire to accept and love without condition. Would this, I wondered, make them more compassionate than God? Or did they simply believe two different, indeed conflicting, things about this God, one with their heart and one with their head?
Basically, it boils down to this: If we recoil at the idea of eternal punishment, and we do so out of compassionate instincts, does that make us more moral than God? More compassionate? More loving?
Another thought has occurred to me since, however. I have noticed that many evangelicals are very eager to point out that while they accept the doctrine of hell because it's (ostensibly) scriptural, and they are bound by their convictions to accept it, they of course naturally find it repulsive and unpalatable, just as I do. Why is that? Why be at such pains to point out that they find it as difficult to accept as I do?
Underlying it, I think, is the feeling that they have to demonstrate their natural revulsion at such an idea in order to prove that they're human, to show that they're not cold-hearted, to announce that they really are after all compassionate and loving, despite their convictions. And that is very telling. For if a Christian can't proclaim such a doctrine without feeling this urge to defend themselves, to absolve their own character as if not to implicate themselves in this awful scheme of eternal damnation, what on earth are they saying about the character of the God they claim to believe in?
Dave
1:08:06 AM 
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