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

[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.