[Serious] What God's justification for eternal torment?

[Fake Messiah]

I don't know if "God punishes people with eternal torment".

I've heard a lot of people say God is like that - but I'm not so sure.

What do you mean you are not sure that God is described like that? Doesn't the Bible describe Jesus that way?

Like Matthew 25:41 Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

Or Matthew 25:46 Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Simon Wagstaff (The Space Wanderer) spent more than 3000 years seeking an answer to the question, ‘Why are we created only to suffer and die?’ The answer he got was, ‘Why not?’

I don’t imagine we’ll come up with a better one.

Boru

[Rev. Rye]

I did a post on this same topic a long time ago, so I figure I may as well repost it:

I think it helps if you compare Hell to real-life prisons. You break the law, you go to prison. You break God's law, you go to Hell. For many believers in Hell, it's just that simple. And, of course, a lot of prisons in the real world are appalling places to be. I recently re-listened to Last Podcast on the Left's series on Carl Panzram, and if you ever wanted to know what could drive a man to say and do shit like:

In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings. I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies Larcenys, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. for all of these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don’t believe in Man, God nor devil. I hate the whole damed human race including myself.

... look no further than the first episode, where the gang talk about such things as a home brain surgery (yes, really) on a mastoid in his brain that he had removed at age 9, an incident a couple years later where he tried to become a hobo, only to get gang-raped by them, and, the one they dwell on the most, institutional abuse. At the age of 11, he was sent to the Minnesota State Training School, with its notorious "paint shop." It was a place where kids were painted black, blue, and red, often having their backs moistened with salt water, then beaten with leather straps with holes in them, creating blisters made all the worse by the salt water. Panzram would later burn the paint shop down. And that's not even the most abusive prison he was sent to. And, of course, they didn't just do this with the most monstrous prisoners. They did this with pretty much all the prisoners. And many prisons are still like this, think of the border camps the US is using as concentration camps for illegal immigrants. Or, indeed, I saw a recent movie from Lebanon called Capernaum where the main character, a child, is sent to prison, and if that film is any indication, the sort of shit that most right-thinking people decry in the US' border camps is Standard Operating Procedure for Lebanon's penal system.

And, bear in mind, if the people knew about this, in most cases, they either didn't care about the people undergoing these tortures, they just didn't think about it, or took them as incentives to stay on the straight and narrow. After all, if they're there, they must have done something beyond the pale, right? Take this PragerU video that I found from Shaun's latest video debunking it as an example of this mindset:



To be fair, believing that two wastes of jism who raped, strangled, and set fire to (in various permutations) a woman and her two daughters and beat the paterfamilias within an inch of his life should die isn't quite the same as thinking that prisons should have free rein to torture their prisoners for whatever reason, but notice how self-evident it seems to Prager, that this is the one issue that he legitimately does not understand why the other side believes what they do. I strongly suspect that the same applies to believers who believe in and justify Hell.

The only thing I can think to add to it is that maybe I should have been clearer that the video was put up as an illustration of this “wrongdoing must be punished and I’m not going to bother questioning the extremes the Powers That Be set up for it” mindset, not an endorsement. I don’t think this is a good justification, but that’s what I see as the moral justification that’s actually used to justify places like Hell. Or, indeed, prisons IRL.

[R00tKiT]

OK listen, I get that God has rules and all

You "get" it because of the brain God gave you. It's conceivable that you will get another kind of brain in the afterlife where eternal torment actually makes sense and seems fair for everyone.

why does God need to punish us with LITERAL FIRE? Why BURN BILLIONS of people as punishment for "not accepting my son" ?

Although I am a muslim and thus don't endorse this screwed "accepting the son" doctrine -christianity, I think all people, including myself, deserve punishment. I conceive of it as some kind of endowments/gratefulness ratio (>>1). You and I are literally endowed with many, many things and privileges we are not grateful for, or even aware of. Being alive is an extremely rare and unique event when you read the arguments for fine-tuning.

I am not going to build a case for Islam here but if Islam is the right religion, then God didn't really demand that much from his creatures, but his endowments do show an infinite goodness. Endorsing strict monotheism and regularly following simple rituals is all there is to it, roughly speaking.

And don't say "No they actually do die a second time in the lake of fire" because that "holy" book of yours is filled with contradictions.

Death itself is perceived as a creature in Islamic beliefs. In one hadith, the prophet PBUH portrays death as a sheep that gets slaughtered in the Day of Judgment. Meaning there cannot be any second death ever.

It's been a year since I registered in this forum, and I still beg anyone here to come up with an actual contradiction in the Qur'an, or anything that can instill doubt in me about my beliefs. I got nothing so far.

I used to discuss Islam with arab non religious people for some seven years now and never got any strong case against the Islamic core text.

God cannot deal with sinners in a civilized, and humane matter?

Why are you asking of a being that is not human by definition to act like if he were ? You are thinking of an anthromorphized God. And this distorted thinking is the origin of all your misunderstandings.

[Confused-by-christianity]

I don't know if "God punishes people with eternal torment".

I've heard a lot of people say God is like that - but I'm not so sure.

What do you mean you are not sure that God is described like that? Doesn't the Bible describe Jesus that way?

Like Matthew 25:41 Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

Or Matthew 25:46 Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

I didn’t say “... not sure God is described like that...”. I actually said the opposite. I said I’ve heard a lot of people say God is like that - but I’m personally not so sure he is like that.

[Fake Messiah]

I am not going to build a case for Islam here but if Islam is the right religion, then God didn't really demand that much from his creatures, but his endowments do show an infinite goodness. Endorsing strict monotheism and regularly following simple rituals is all there is to it, roughly speaking.

Following Islamic rituals/ rules is impossible for many people, like for homosexuals or those people who want to have a career in science because Islam doesn't allow them to accept biological evolution.

[The Grand Nudger]

OK listen, I get that God has rules and all

You "get" it because of the brain God gave you. It's conceivable that you will get another kind of brain in the afterlife where eternal torment actually makes sense and seems fair for everyone.

That's a rather stunning admission that it doesn't make sense and isn't fair.  We'd need to get heavenly lobotomies to imagine that it were.

 I think all people, including myself, deserve punishment.

Soooo....what did you do?  I'm sitting here wondering exactly what it is that makes you think you deserve something that doesn't make sense and isn't fair.

[Silver]

I'm screwing up the reply / quote system haha

It happens.

[Apollo]

Humans are imaginative story tellers—there isn’t a subject matter in the world that you can think of being so out of the left and right fields that you’ll still have people giving you a perfect rationale for.

If some prophet ever came up with the brilliant idea that one should beat his wife if needed you’ll end up thousands different useful justifications why that actually makes sense. Wait, there is already a prophet (Mo the bedouin) who did say just that!

[The Grand Nudger]

It's funny how god is into all the same shit his prophets are, isn't it? Big Mo liked to smack a bitch up in between raping and pillaging, and his buddy allah is the cause of sexual dimorphism in human beings as our designer. He pretty much made us for smacking, and females for getting smacked.