[Serious] Why are you an Atheist?

[Belacqua]

So, I think there is some agreement on why we seek to communicate with other people regarding their beliefs.  I would say that more questions are necessary.  

What would convince you with out a shadow of a doubt that God does exist?  What specifically would be necessary for that belief to become absolutely truth for you?

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I have never claimed that eschatology precludes the destruction of the wicked at the end of the age.  I have said that I do not believe scripture teaches of a place called hell where the wicked are sent immediately at death to be tortured by burning for eternity.
I actually agree with your assessment as an atheist.  When you finally die you will quite possibly be dead for all eternity.  You will not be in some eternal flame languishing for all eternity.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus goes on at some length about people being cast into an eternal, unquenchable fire (Gehenna) and what people can can expect when they go there.  Pretty gruesome.  It seems unlikley that a fire which 'can destroy both body and soul' is meant as anything other then an eternal punishment.

It may not mean 'Hell' precisely, but it'll do.

Boru

The fact that it "seems unlikely" to you may well have to do with the fact that you read the Bible after centuries of interpretation. The English translations are always interpretations, and the Greek may not be as decisive. The earliest Christians and readers of Matthew disagreed on whether hellish punishment would be eternal, or more like some Jewish ideas of Sheol as something like Purgatory -- temporary purgation required to rejoin a pure God. The idea of eternal punishment was decided largely by Augustine. 

How people read the passage depends mostly on how they translate the Greek word aionios. It does mean something like the English word "eternal," but it may not mean "everlasting." Eternity in Greek thought is often said to be outside of time, so there is still disagreement among Christians as to whether damnation is everlasting or whether the existence of hell is an eternal truth derived from God's eternal law, but not everlastingly home to sinners. 

Blake thought that the fires last forever, but that no one stays in them forever -- a possible reading. Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, whose Greek was better than yours or mine, devoted much of his later years to discussion of aionios and, more importantly, whether everlasting punishment was logically consistent with the rest of what Christians hold to be true. In private letters he let it be known that he could not believe in everlasting punishment.

Recently David Bentley Hart, whose Greek and knowledge of Christian thought is better than yours or mine or Dodgson's, has published a book on why everlasting punishment in hell is inconsistent with Christian doctrine. I'm sure he won't convince the Pope, but it shows that intelligent people may disagree.