Now suppose a young man wanted a young lady to love him. Suppose he threatened to punish her with smoke, and fire, and brimstone for eternity for withholding that love. Presto! She “loves” him! Is it love? No, it is fear. Love, to be love, has to be free.
Bingo! Do your research on languages & contexts, and one will find this nonsense about an eternal fiery pit is crap that was introduced by Pagan traditions into the church. God is not a two headed monster who says love me or I will torture you forever.
Before it could be answered, the young man was tragically injured and emasculated. Now day's he's on the run from the his crazed lover! Was it love?
Please forgive me and understand if I suggest something that you yourself did not say. I am going for an omnibus post, and I can't hit all targets with one bullet. Work with me, okay? I don't mean you have to agree. If I meant that I would just dictate. I DO mean, try to look at it another way, even if after doing so you still think it's nuts.
The basic problem is the problem of radical monotheism. What do I mean? (If you find out, please tell me.)
Let us postulate ONE God, who created everything that is.
If we do so, we cannot reasonably say that God is, for example, sometimes good and sometimes evil. To do so would be to postulate some standard independent of God, by which He can be judged. And that makes Him not one supreme God, but rather subject to a standard more exalted than He.
Consequently, (remember, you're working with me) there is no good thing, no capital 'G' "Good", that does not have it's origin in Him.
Now let's look at the Fall Story AND the Creation of Man story. Man is made "a living soul" when God's breath (or wind, or spirit) is breathed into a body. It is the union of animating breath and flesh that makes a human. Importantly, without the Divine "flatus" (one of my favorite terms) all that's there is a body which will tend to fall apart.
IF man rejects God, and if God somehow can be described as "honoring" Man's choice, then Man is rejecting what keeps him not just "alive" but "together."
And the story would seem to confirm that. Adam blames Eve; Eve blames the serpent -- they INSTANTLY disavow personal integrity -- which is just another word for being "together with yourself." And ultimately they die, and fall apart.
I get the impression that for some whom I am addressing, it seems that God made an arbitrary rule and severely punished breaking that rule. Against that I am suggesting that, whatever the intrinsic properties of the fruit of the tree, God had given Man an opportunity both to intend and to act to maintain a positive allegiance to God. Man rejected God.
IF God is to honor man's choice, then it is not a punishment pulled out of some cosmic sack o' punishment that God inflicts. It is nothing more than the reality of what man chose.
A limited analogy would be that if you choose to drink poison, God does not arbitrarily inflict a painful death on you. He honors your choice, and your choice was to do something which leads to a painful death.
Consider for a moment the alternative: If God were NOT to honor your choice, then when you gave way to rage and shot someone, God would turn aside the bullet. It's nice because the person you shot at is not hurt or killed.
But there is nothing like freedom there. You simply cannot, in this case, make an effectual choice against God.
So, what it means to affirm one and only one God who is the origin of all good, is to affirm that without God there is no good.
So the Devil, Satan, our ancient Adversary, is not, cannot be, the simple opposite to God. The Devil is a created entity. His opposite, for us Christians, is not God, but the archangel Michael.
This point is probably uniquely Catholic (and maybe Orthodox). Ideas, we think, are real. And because God thinks them, they are eternal. Consequently (skipping several steps) the "faculty" which perceives and deals with ideas (like triangularity or justice) is eternal. Otherwise it would not appreciate ideas. (I know this is not a popular view, but I think it is one of the few coherent views.)
So angels and 'rational animals' (humans, and maybe ETs, who knows?) are created with an eternal aspect. Angels have no body to fall apart, so they are entirely eternal. Fallen angels are the Devil and the demons. They exercised their will at the instant of their creation. Some chose God, some chose enmity with God.
The entire "future history" of angels, demons, and humans is the "coming true" of their choices.
Consider: if you are a notorious liar, God is not arbitrarily punishing you if you are not believed and if you yourself get confused about the truth. That is what you chose.
The paradigmatic overeating glutton chooses less and less satisfaction with more and more heartburn and other pains. He requires more and more exotic and extreme gustatory experiences to gratify him. What is the natural playing out of that choice? What other than a perpetually unsatisfied appetite plagued by pain?
Many of the Christians on this thread know I am devoted to Dante. That is because the punishments he envisions in hell are not arbitrary tortures inflicted on the disobedient. It's not even a matter or "the punishment fits the crime." In Dante's Inferno, the punishment is nothing other than the crime itself, revealed in all its horror.
So, finally, the idea of God as a punitive and jealous husband only goes so far. We can envision the wife having a happy life without the husband. But we cannot envision happiness without happiness. And, to us at least, God is happiness and the only source of enduring happiness.
Rather than that, the guy seems to be suggesting that Hell is the flip side of God's willingness to respect our free will.
Whereas love leads to good things (and we know it does), Hell would be the creation of people living according to their own baser instincts.... in that sense, Hell may be not unlike one of those especially grim inner city areas we all want to avoid.
It probably started with the Congregationalist John Edward's famous sermon "Sinners in the hands of an angry God". . . or at least with liberal secularists teaching in high school and college about that sermon. But if you actually read that sermon in its entirety, it's not really what the secularists made it out to be. Edwards was a pretty good theologian.
There have always been fire and brimstone preachers, but it's they that are trying to scare their listeners into the pews and their wallets into the collection plate . . . not God.