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

[Confused-by-christianity]

I think that personal experience is the most compelling rationalization for why a person might believe, but it's no certification of the accuracy of the contents of that experience.

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Yeah that is true.  It's my own experience but it's likely not persuasive to someone who doesn't believe in God.  I could be lying, or telling the truth but mistaken.  It's also not verifiable to any other human.

That you dreamt of jesus instead of vishnu is entirely cultural. 

If God does not exist, it was likely entirely cultural, probably a mixture including my own acceptance of my culture too.  
If God exists, it might have been cultural anyway (the true God might be different than the Christian God I imagine).

Personally - I assume I am almost certainly incorrect about God.  I think Jesus really did come to me in a way that I could understand Him.  Perhaps as much as my mind could handle??

That you imagine a god would be kind or loving or patient or calm or understanding, equally so.  Perhaps you've mistaken god for those things based on the expectations your culture manufactured?  

That's possible.  

Personally - I wouldn't go so far as saying my experience proves A,B or C.  It doesn't.  I have made sense of it and applied a meaning to it

Taking the terrible out of god satisfies our ethical impulses, but it erodes one of the legs of the sense of the divine - which is found in dread and tragedy, cruelty and indifference and pain and death.  If there's some sacred all then these must find inclusion, else we begin to express our growing inability to believe, fully, in the notion of gods.

That statement is huge.  I don't even know where to begin thinking about it.
Is it the fear religion?  Is God really a horror for a bad reason?  Is He a horror for a good reason?  Are people horrible and they put their own horror twist on scriptures to whip people into shape?  

It's probably beyond the scope of my experience??

It's clear in this example, at least, that your faith (or the contents of your faith described) reduce to what you believe should be true, regardless of what is - and, ultimately, that's the fundamental basis of any religion that people have faith in.  

I think it's fair enough to conclude that but maybe a bit far to say it's "clear".

I think of 2+2=4 as "clear".  Is it fairer to say you have a standard of proof that must be met before you'd believe my conclusion, and I haven't met that standard?  (Your standard isn't unreasonable - it's fair from your perspective to conclude that my experience might have causes other than God??)

We have come to believe more in our ethical statements, ourselves-in-effect, than we have in the power and being of gods, right down to the faithful.  

Good chat man :-)  Lots to wonder about.

My assumption is that God exists, and, we do the thing you mentioned above as well?

It's not particularly recent - the transition from largely descriptive (and multitudinous) pagan gods to a single declarative god like the abrahamic is the story of monotheism and of man setting out to create the  truth he wishes to see instantiated in the world.  The imposition of human order to and in contrast to brute facts of nature, which, by turn, fascinate and terrify us.  The late pagans called the new monotheists atheists - and not for no reason.

I can see where humanity might respond to horror / nature and other - with religion.

Good chat man.

What's your view?
What's God's justification for eternal torment?  
If He exists, would He be right to do that?
If He exists, would He be wrong to do that?
If He doesn't exist - Did people just make the horror up out of fear?  malice?  control?

None of the above??  :-)