In one of my previous articles, a blog reader, Gringo, sent an interesting comment to which I wanted to respond in this new article.
The comment in question says the following:
“No, God does not force anyone to love him… but if you do not love him, he sends you to hell. And on top of that, God is supposed to love you even if you do not love him, but if you do not return his love, he sends you to hell. In the end, God brings people into the world (because we all come into the world by God’s will, don’t we?), so that they may live a few decades in this vale of tears, and then make some of them spend all eternity in weeping and gnashing of teeth. And they tell you that God loves you.
And that is so, even though some of you do not want to admit it because the contradictions in which you were raised from childhood do not fit into your heads. God loves you, even though you do not love him, but he can condemn you to the worst of punishments forever, because you have not loved him, although he loves you. Madness”.
It is certainly an interesting objection. Objections of a “moral” kind against the existence of God, although intrinsically contradictory, are always interesting.
In this case, however, more than an objection, it is a misunderstanding. It is not that our friend Gringo disagrees with what Christians believe on this subject; rather, as happens so often, what atheists or agnostics think Christianity is is not, in fact, Christianity, but something very different. What Gringo has described, undoubtedly in good faith, is actually a caricature of the Christian faith, which has hardly anything to do with the original.
What our dialectical adversary has not taken into account is that the essence of hell is precisely separation from God. Indeed, hell is horrible because separation from God is horrible, God who is the Good, the Truth, the Beauty and the Unity. That is, everything that can make the human being happy.
Once one remembers this, the question changes completely. If you consciously and voluntarily decide to separate yourself from God, it does not seem very strange that the consequence should be… to separate yourself from God, which is exactly the same thing as hell. In that sense, saying that God sends you to hell is fundamentally the same as saying that you decide to go to hell and God respects your freedom. Of necessity, our way of speaking about God is always analogical and, depending on whether we use one phrase or another, we will be emphasizing the fact that God is Someone and not an impersonal force, that what we receive is what we deserve, that God is just as well as merciful, or the fact that what God wants is our salvation; but in essence both phrases say the same thing.
Therefore, hell presents in this sense no moral problem that is not also presented by the everyday fact, known to all, that God lets you hate your neighbor if you want to, despite the unhappiness that this will cause you and will cause your neighbor. Or even that he respects your freedom to try to murder him, despite the horrible consequences of that act.
Why does God allow you to do something that he knows will harm you? Paradoxically, because he loves you, and that respect for your freedom is the only possibility that one day you may come to love Him, which is where your happiness lies. Full love is not forced, but free. A love without freedom would be, for example, like the instinctive affection of a dog, which is something very pleasant, but incomparably less important than human love.
Exactly the same thing happens with hell: God respects your possibility of deciding to separate yourself from Him, which is the same as going to hell, because that freedom is a necessary condition for you to be able to love Him and be happy. It is a terrible paradox, but evident as soon as one thinks a little about it: the existence of heaven (of a real heaven) has as a necessary condition the existence of hell, apart from the concrete fact of who may or may not be there, which is something only God knows. The freedom in this life to decide for the good entails the possibility of deciding against it. This, far from being something strange and esoteric, is the most normal and everyday thing in the world. We see it and accept it every day when we appreciate and thank other people for the good they do us, because we know that they have done that good freely; but we do not thank the ground for supporting us or our coat for warming us, because the good they provide us is not free.
Another of the things often rejected about the very idea of hell is its irrevocability. Eternity is one of those things that tend to break our mental schemes and that we resist accepting, and the idea that hell is forever bewilders and anguishes us (as is normal).
The reality, however, is that the irrevocability of decisions is also something we experience daily. We have freedom, given by God, to do evil, great or small. And, horror of horrors, once done, that evil remains done forever. If, for example, we lie to the neighbor, rob the blind man who sells lottery tickets on the corner, or are unfaithful to our wife, those actions are irreversible. It does not matter what we do afterward, whether or not we change our mind, whether we remember it or forget it, or even whether we try to make amends or change our behavior. It is a factum and what has been done remains done forever. Nothing will change the fact that, on June 27, 2013, at the moment of decision, we chose evil when we could have chosen good, with all the consequences. Therefore, if in twenty years our neighbor reproaches us for what we did, we will be able to say many things, but what we will not be able to do is deny that, in fact, we lied to him.
Thus, the irrevocability of hell can (and should) frighten us, and can (and should) give us an idea of how serious life is, but what makes no sense is to claim that this irrevocability is a sign that it does not exist, when our life is made up of countless other small irrevocabilities.
In short, I think it is evident that the two great objections mentioned against the existence of hell have no true moral substance. They are, rather, the expression of a curious rebellion against the everyday reality that we have before our eyes at every moment. It does not seem very logical to say that God cannot exist for reasons that would equally imply that it is impossible for one to get along badly with one’s neighbor. If anything is “madness,” as the reader said, it is to deny that what happens every day before his eyes is possible.
This type of objection actually comes from a generalized climate in our time that I call “social adolescence”. Our society, as a whole, is a society of adolescents who have not known how to mature completely. And the most characteristic trait of adolescents lies in demanding rights without accepting duties, in claiming total autonomy while at the same time expecting their parents to pull their chestnuts out of the fire when they make mistakes. Nothing is worse than definitive commitment. The motto of adolescents, and of our society, is “freedom without responsibility” (which, for this topic, we could translate as “heaven without hell”).
Of course, I am not saying that Gringo in particular has remained in adolescence, but I am saying that he belongs, as we all belong, to a society that has remained in adolescence. And that greatly influences our thinking.
It is not strange that this social immaturity clashes in many things with the Christian faith, because it is not and cannot be a faith of perpetual adolescents. Christianity bears at its very center immense paradoxes that resolve the poor contradictions of moral and existential adolescence: one must become like children in order to grow spiritually; life is found by giving it away; God’s omnipotence is lovingly revealed in His respect for our freedom; and our true freedom is found in obedience to the Will of God.
Author: Bruno Moreno Ramos
Source: Infocatólica
