I personally think this statement("being away from God is hell") is a bit of a bad sell, like something more of the old testament than the more-progressive new testament. It's one I view as something that puts Christianity in a bad light. This statement is essentially saying that Christianity is about persecution, blindly following, and arbitrarily punishing without mercy nor the slightest empathy(in terms of the majority of people in the world whom are born without a strong push to go Christian wherever they live) in the eyes of anyone that isn't already believing in the faith. Getting further away from these far-outdated concepts would definitely be a good thing for all of Christianity. Like glossing over Leviticus and it's overcited/overblown statement interpreted as "God hates fags", it's something that would be beneficial to be swept under the rug and left as a sort of editor's cut, so to speak.
The messages of compassion, empathy, and all that other jazz delivered as the new testament is a much better sell than "fuck you, join us or die." That old motto sounds pretty failtastic too. I'm not certain what the new motto is, but it can't be as bad as the old one.
I think you might be misunderstanding what I'm saying. What I'm proposing, (though it's not me, it's Christian philosophers much smarter than I will ever be), is that God isn't all about those old testament, fire-and-brimstone stories, but love and is calling us to repentance, though he won't impose himself upon us. I'm saying the
opposite of persecution, blindly following and arbitrarily punishing. If we choose to not be with him, he's not going to force us, he's not going to "throw" us into a lake of fire. Those who reject him will go off into the "outer darkness." But the warning is that to be separated from him will feel, to those souls, like being cast alive into a lake of fire. It's not a "punishment," it's just the way things are. They can't be any other way.
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done."
That's my take on it. I may be wrong. But it makes sense of how the notions of a loving, forgiving God and an eternity of suffering can possibly be compatible. More than any other explanation I've heard anyway.
Synalon. The sixpence analogy is just an imperfect illustration of the reality. It's not going to explain every possible criticism that can be levelled at the real thing, because it's not the real thing. It makes sense to me, but if it doesn't help you, then maybe just forget about it.
Okay, so a tiny portion of humanity would spit in God's face and therefore go to hell. What's your point? Most atheists aren't like this, not least because they are atheists, and therefore can't hate God because they don't believe in him. Most of the hatred you're seeing is hatred for Christianity, which is a very different affair. The closest to hating God an atheist can get is hating the idea of God - and what with his many, many flaws - outlined in depth in The Bible - what's not to hate?
Also, how on Earth does anyone "volunteer" for hell? The vast majority of people consigned there either don't believe in it, or quite reasonably think their actions don't warrant the absolute worst punishment possible.
Finally, God doesn't have to be actively pushing us off to hell to be a monster for letting us end up there. If someone's about to fall in front of a train, and you have the power to easily rescue them, but you don't, you're still an asshole.
Right, and what do you suppose God should do to save us from such a horrible fate? Should he... maybe come to Earth himself and submit
himself to death to rescue us? He did it.
Most of your criticisms seem to revolve around the problem of evil. Either in the form of the Evidential problem of evil (Sodom & Gommorrah, tragedies of natural origin), or the problem of Hell. I am offering the "free will" theodicy in defense. It's probably easier to simply look these things up rather than post walls and walls of text about them, but I'll just say this small thing:
The fact that God chose to make creatures with the capability of loving him freely means the universe can only be a certain way. You can't complain that God should have set the system up differently, because it
can't be different, given free will, as you know yourself by analogy about the heavy stone paradox. If you think it would be better that he created a world of mindless automatons who are only capable of doing right, or that it would have been better for him to not have created at all, okay. I'm not God, and I don't presume to be able to weigh the benefits and disadvantages of multiple versions of reality, but I don't personally think that's a good alternative, because I find the value of the ultimate end of this real creation to be immensely good, even though some souls will end up in hell through their own choice. Probably those who do end up there would disagree. But now we're getting into speculation on the nature of realities that don't exist, so I don't think we're going to get very far.
