(September 15, 2010 at 9:23 am)Ace Otana Wrote: I have asked in other threads about the reasoning of sending people to hell for all eternity for a finite victemless crime. Didn't quite get an answer. (snip)
That's part of my argument against God being "just".
Leave off the "victimless" part for now - since some sins for which you can be sent to Hell of you die unrepentant of them actually have victims.
Regardless of anything that anyone can do in life, even if it causes untold damage and suffering to real victims, there is only a finite amount of evil you can create in a finite time, in a finite space, shared with finite numbers of other individuals. Hell is eternal and infinite suffering. Any finite quantity is always less than an infinite quantity - you can always +1 to any finite quantity and still not reach infinity.
So, if one gets infinite punishment, that exceeds any finite crime or sin. Thus, Hell is always unjust, as the punishment exceeds the crime. If we as ordinary humans can understand this, and human judges, juries, and lawmakers can understand this, certainly an infinitely wise and knowing God would know it. Hence, He is unjust or Hell does not exist.
When I was a theist, although along the way in my own deconversion process, I went back to worshiping God as I believed in God. When I first started praying to this divine being, I was groveling and asking for forgiveness for "abandoning" God and "hurting" God. I worked myself up into tears for crying for the hurt I'd caused God. In retrospect this is laughable, but at the time it seemed to me to be a very real, moving experience that "proved" the existence of God - Who had "forgiven" me for abandoning Him! But, the notion that anything that a creation could do in respect to loving God or worshiping God is a "sin" or is deserving of any punishment at all - particularly in light of the lack of evidence that God exists, let alone "loves" us or intervenes on our behalf is grotesque. It would for one thing show a very insecure God who somehow likes playing a guessing game. In instances where people count up their "blessings" and weigh them against the undeserved ills that have happened in life, and find that the negatives in their life outweigh the positives, how can such a person be "grateful" for anything God has given them? A starving refugee, with their family murdered before their eyes by brigands or insurgents, diseased, watched their friends and others in their family die of disease, and this refugee has again lost their home because of a flood or earthquake would rationally have a hard time coming up with "gratitude". "God, thank you that the brigands stopped raping me after the 10th one. and "Thank you for letting my daughter suffer 5 days with cholera" and "Thank you for the quick death of my husband who was buried in volcanic ash." seems very disingenuous. Or, "I'm sorry for hating you because of watching my brother die of AIDS over a 6 year period." seems like something that an evil person would want - not a loving, all powerful, all knowing God.
