I don’t know whether I believe in hell or not, honestly. But I do believe that God is just. God is fair. God is love. I trust his judgments will be fair and just and right.
If you asked me to defend the idea of hell, I’d say that I think God doesn’t want anyone to go to hell. I think humans do, though. Humanity demands justice of God night and day. I think if God did not create a place like hell, we would demand that he does.
All you have to do is look around at all of our crowded jails and prisons. Or look at the number of people on death row. Or look into the hearts of those who have had their loved ones taken away by a murderer, a rapist, a child molester, despot or drunk driver or so on. I don’t know why people have trouble with the idea– it is a human idea if there ever was one.
You can find the idea, and the longing for such a terrible place– in the heart of man.
Who has never read the news of a terrible murder and not demanded justice ‘of whatever gods may be?’ Imagine a hypothetical godless person. Also a nihilist. Someone who believes that morality is for the birds, so to say. So this man cheats and lies and steals and murders and plunders, doing whatever he thinks he can get away with it– when he thinks nobody is looking.
God isn’t looking. God doesn’t exist. Nobody sees me, anyway.
If he were allowed total annihilation at death, would not his whole philosophy of life have been justified?
Was he not “right” to live this way?
Would that be justice?
I also think you can also make a case that hell is a natural byproduct of the human yearning for eternal life. We all long to live forever, to never die.
Hell could be the other side of that coin. If we look into our souls, we may find the answers. We may be judged one day and obscenely question God about hell, and He may laugh and rip open the human soul and show us that heaven and hell were demands made nightly ON HIM; that it was humanity who demanded of him eternal modes of bliss and punishment. And that hell was originally created for the devil and his angels.
Maybe he would allow us to hear the desperate pleas for justice, for retribution, for comeuppance that he is inundated with nightly by his earthly children.
Finally, hell is simply a human demand on God. The proof of it? Even if you believe that God does not exist, you still have to recognize that billions of people believe in hell. Hell is an all-too-human belief, and a deep and powerful yearning for eternal and divine justice common to all in every society, in every era and epoch.
Someone who doesn’t possess that longing for divine justice is the anomaly, and the freak. Not the hundreds of millions that do.