You'r Going To Hell??

  You'r going to Hell??

Many times when I discuss religion with the religious, some form of Pascal’s Wager tends to come up. Frequently, the religious person will ask me where I think I will end up after I die. The implication of the question is typically that I will go to Hell to be tortured for all eternity. The religious person will then inform me that if I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior, I will not be tortured for all eternity. To me, this sounds like a terroristic threat.

When I call attention to the threatening nature of the religious person’s insinuation that I will be tortured for all eternity (which is a surprisingly long time) if I don’t worship their deity, the believer backs off a little bit by shifting the blame on to their deity. They often insist that they aren’t threatening me, God is. They are just passively informing me about an eminent threat. But it really isn’t that simple. They aren’t just passively informing me about a necessary consequence to my action or in this case inaction, they are making a value judgment about that consequence.

The believer isn’t just warning me about Hell, they are making a claim that I deserve to be tortured for all eternity in Hell if I don’t worship their deity. It is this value judgment that I find so disturbing. To the believer, God can do no wrong and as a result the nature of the system which believers refer to as “God’s Justice” is not just some random cause and effect scenario, but rather they see it as the best and most perfect system. You would be hard pressed to find a Christian who is willing to stand up to their deity and denounce God’s divine justice as barbaric and immoral.

By contrast, any warning I give about the consequence of an on coming storm would be devoid of value judgments. If I were to warn someone about in imminent storm, it would be immoral to root for the storm and yet this is precisely what believers do when it comes to the eternal torture of Hell.

A closter analogy would be a bank robber who puts a gun to the head of the teller while his accomplice “warns” that if the teller refuses to hand over all the money the teller would get shot in the face. The accomplice insists that it isn’t a threat; it is just a natural consequence of the bank teller’s inaction. While this analogy is extremely violent, it isn’t nearly as violent as the religious assertion that non-believers will be and ought to be tortured for all eternity in Hell.

 Examiner.com: Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/atheism-in-philadelphia/atheism-101-is-hell-a-threat#ixzz1CSjLS6e6