Letting go of hell PART 3

I think that I may have stumbled on something important here, when it comes to hell’s absolute incompatibility with an all-powerful, all-loving God. Why? It’s not just that it is self-contradictory. It is that I truly cannot find anything more self-contradictory than this. God, the archetypal, loving father sends his children off to be tortured forever because they fail to understand his will? What?!

As I wrote the last sentence down, something strange happened. I felt a strong, pleasurable, energetic shiver and tears started running down my cheeks. As a matter of fact, I’m still crying a bit as I’m writing this and my body vibrates with energy. 

God’s goodness and perfect love and hell cannot co-exist, unless the idea of goodness that God himself instilled in us, runs totally contrary to the real idea of goodness. You cannot bring the idea of hell to its logical conclusion, without running into one total absurdity after another. 

Try it for yourself and see if you can find anything that that contradicts itself more than this: Absolute goodness and love, inflicting absolute pain and suffering for something someone has done because he/she didn’t know any better, for no good reason. Or even worse, because he/she failed to believe the right things in the face of insufficient evidence. This, I would say, is the perfect self-contradiction. The only way this could make any sense, would be if Satan was as powerful as God.

For the reasons presented in this series, I believe that the fear of hell is part of the fearful, negative programming instilled in us at birth. Thus, I believe that it is vital for each and everyone of us to do our best to let it go.

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.

Letting go of hell PART 1

I believe that there are good reasons for throwing the idea of hell on the dust pile of history, at least as far as hell in a literal sense goes. Even more so after having written these blog posts.

I wish to say from the beginning that this is a three part series, that I will continue on Saturday, because I wish for as many people as possible to read it. The reason is that I, while pondering this question, truly think that I reached an important conclusion.

The reason that I believe that the question of hell is important in the first place, is because I find the question of choosing love over fear very important. Because whether we let love or fear guide us, has a tremendous effect on what actions we take and what kinds of persons we become. And I believe that the idea of hell, whether we believe in it or not, is a source of much fear in the world. I know that I fear it, even if I don’t believe in it. This fear has however lessened in later years, both because of the transcendent experiences that I’ve had of God’s unconditional love, and because of what I’ve observed with regards to human behavior, and the conclusions that I’ve drawn from these observations.

Here is what my observations tell me: If a person truly understand him/herself and his/her being in the world, that person would not wish to commit any sinful act. What is a sinful act is, is a different topic for a different post. Here it suffices to say that I don’t look at sin from a moral perspective. I rather see it as something that leads to undesired results. 

If a person sins in spite of seeing the actions from a clear perspective, it is because of brokenness and weakness and not because the person is evil. I’ve come to this conclusion because I have seen for myself, how egoistic acts bring me further away from God. Because acts that are not in line with God’s will bring me further away from God. And being separated from God is its own punishment, without anyone but ourselves having to to inflict the punishment upon us. When we see things clearly, we will know beyond any doubt, that we don’t need the threat of punishment to want to do God’s will. We will know that we do it because it is the only way to live a meaningful life. And because it is the only true remedy for the suffering of being. This makes hell superfluous. Something unimaginably cruel, inflicted on people for no good reason. By an all-powerful, all-loving God? I honestly have a hard time thinking of anything that would be more self-contradictory. 

Could we become totally separated from God? I find this unlikely, since it is possible to become severely corrupted and still turn around and earnestly seek God. What would be the meaning of having this possibility taken away by death? At the same time, I believe that the inevitability of death and the uncertainty of what comes after, should be an incentive to prioritize our spiritual life right here and now. Because we don’t know what we may throw away by wasting this life on trivialities.