Z500

It's been stated that hell is the complete absence of God, and that if you're a non-Christian who knew of God but didn't believe, then it's your choice to exist without God. But what if you told someone who previously knew nothing about oxygen that it was one of the most important things keeping him alive, but he dismissed the idea as preposterous, then you deprived him of oxygen somehow and killed him to make a point? It sounds ridiculous, but isn't that what God does? Apparently, His presence is so essential to not living in torment, but if you don't believe, he condems your soul to hell for eternity, essentially going "I told you so!"

Selsaral

Since no-one else has responded yet, I will comment.

Well.....yeah it's absurd isn't it? It's not like it's the first contradictory, morally repugnant concept to appear out of theological squirming.

But this particular argument seems to be more of an inability to understand what atheism actually is. If you know of the concept of the christian god but don't believe that such an entity exists in reality, then it's impossible to 'choose to exist without god', because there is no god (as far as you are concerned) to choose to exist without. (I don't know about you, but currently I am not choosing to live without an infinite number of imaginary entities). It's similar to being asked 'why do you hate god so much' when you inform someone you are an atheist.

sharon45

A person can not really know of god, yet not believe, once you know of god, you can't help but believe, they go together. Since no one can really know god, no one should be punished then because there is no such evidence of god so far.

But,

You are also talking about the christian version of a god, and it does not matter of whether you do/don't know of god, do/don't believe in god, or realize god is outright wrong, you are sent to hell anyway. The christian belief as stated, only those that accept jesus as their savior go to heaven. What god thinks, says, and does/did, has not much to do with that belief. It's really about jesus, and how he thinks things are or should be, you answer really only to him. After all, he claims to 'clearly' talk for god almost all throughout the gospels.

trendkill

Supposedly, Christianity teaches that the scenario described in the OP, which sounds totally unfair, is actually 'justice', and that God pretty much has to do it because justice is his nature. Why it seems completely at odds with any humanly-understandable concept of justice, even though Christianity tends to teach that the human sense of justice is an echo or replication of God's justice (rather than being something completely different), I have not seen explained to my satisfaction.


Well, the usual theological way around this seems to be to claim that everyone in fact does know God, but that people naturally suppress or hide the knowledge from themselves because their nature is evil and they "hate" this knowledge, even if they don't know they do. Of course, this is totally counterproductive for discussion, since it dismisses out of hand the only source of evidence about other peoples' thoughts, which is what those people actually say, and furthermore smacks of conspiracy-theory-style rationalization such as that engaged in by racists (it might be interesting to compare the reasonableness of racism and other types of ideology that are less generally frowned-upon, although that would be another topic). It also seems to beg the question of how any one of us can know that we are not mistaken or being deceived by some force we are not aware of about our beliefs, whatever those beliefs might be. Basically, this position seems to preclude civil and logical discussion altogether (since the person being deceived by his bad nature would be prevented from understanding the "correct" logic of the theist by that nature).