Letting go of hell PART 2

The original greek meaning of sin is something akin to “missing the mark”, which originally relates to archery. To be a good archer, you have to be able to keep your eyes on the target. And to do so, you have to be able to see clearly. This is very much in line with what I’ve been talking about in the last post in this series. Now, it’s clear that the world punishes us for making mistakes. But why would God do that? In a much more painful way than the world does? For all eternity? It is quite possible that I’m missing something here. But to me, this makes no sense at all. Some believers in hell claim that God has to punish people in this way. They usually invoke the idea of God’s holiness, justice or something similar. 

First: When does God ever have to do anything? If God does something, it must by definition be because God wants to do it. And invoking the idea of holiness or divine justice does not add anything to the conversation. Unless you can explain why the holiness and justice of God would require that God sends people off to get tortured for all eternity after death, these concepts don’t add anything to the conversation. 

Yes, I’m very aware of the limitations of human reason. So you can’t just label something as unreasonable and dismiss it because of it. But we cannot just dismiss human reason because it’s fallible either. And when it comes to hell, as I said in the first post, I’m hard-pressed to find anything that would be more incompatible with an all-powerful, all-loving God. Thus, I’m hard-pressed to find anything more unreasonable.