Hey Min it's all just a Stanislavski approach to people that think god is real. In this case they are constrained by a simple logical and moral straitjacket when trying to answer question whether a perfectly good God can send people to Hell.
Their beliefs are:
1: Anyone who tortures others is morally imperfect.
2: What God reveals in his Holy Scripture is true and should be believed.
3: God has revealed in Holy Scripture that anyone who hasn't been predestined to believe Jesus and accept his saving grace will go to Hell, where they will be tormented in fire for all eternity.
4: God is perfectly good.
Their problem is to decide which of these four statements to give up in order to preserve the minimal requirement of truth and rationality. After all, if someone has contradictory beliefs then their beliefs can't all be true. And rational discussion with persons who contradict themselves is impossible.
Given the undeniability of 1 and 3 they're obliged to conclude either that the Bible can't be trusted or that a perfectly good God can't exist, or both.
Their beliefs are:
1: Anyone who tortures others is morally imperfect.
2: What God reveals in his Holy Scripture is true and should be believed.
3: God has revealed in Holy Scripture that anyone who hasn't been predestined to believe Jesus and accept his saving grace will go to Hell, where they will be tormented in fire for all eternity.
4: God is perfectly good.
Their problem is to decide which of these four statements to give up in order to preserve the minimal requirement of truth and rationality. After all, if someone has contradictory beliefs then their beliefs can't all be true. And rational discussion with persons who contradict themselves is impossible.
Given the undeniability of 1 and 3 they're obliged to conclude either that the Bible can't be trusted or that a perfectly good God can't exist, or both.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
