If you’ve ever read the book of Genesis in the Bible, and exercised at least a little bit of skepticism, you might have noticed that the Official Creation Story contains several conspicuous omissions. I’ve already discussed one of them — the strange case of the Tree of the Knowledge [1] — and now I’m going to discuss another one: who created hell and why?
Why doesn’t the book of Genesis discuss this? The holy text goes to considerable length to credit the god-of-the-Bible with creating everything else in our universe — the sun, the moon, the stars, our planet, every living thing, etc. In fact, the authors of the Old Testament were so enamored with this story that they included a second version of it in Genesis chapter 2. So, why doesn’t the Bible mention who created hell? Indeed, why doesn’t the Bible mention who created *any* of the Bad Stuff — the Serpent who supposedly tempted Eve and forever tainted the entire human race, the demons who supposedly serve the Serpent, the burning hellfires of damnation where they all live…? Obviously, if the god-of-the-Bible created everything in our universe, then he *must* also have created the bad stuff, but why doesn’t the Bible ever mention this?
And, more to the point, why did the god-of-the-Bible create this stuff? Why did he create the Serpent, knowing (because he knows the future) that the Serpent would eventually cause humanity to fall from grace? Why did he create demons, knowing their sole function would be to spread turmoil and strife? And why did he create the burning pit of hellfire, knowing that its sole purpose would be to torture humans who, for whatever reason, didn’t get his message? If you were the Supreme Creator of the Universe, and you had infinite love for all the humans you created, would you create all this bad stuff? Do human parents arrange such things for their disobedient children? Really, was it necessary for the god-of-the-Bible to create eternal torment just to punish people who didn’t sufficiently worship him? Why not condemn heretics to eternity in, say, a sports bar, or a lukewarm Jacuzzi, or a casino in Vegas? You know, something bad but not really that bad. Why hell?
I don’t know about you, but it makes no sense to me that any infinitely loving god would create hell. It’s obviously a self-contradiction: an infinitely loving god would never have created that stuff; therefore, if the god-of-the-Bible created that stuff, as the Bible implies, then the god-of-the-Bible either doesn’t exist or is not infinitely loving.
Maybe that’s why the Bible doesn’t discuss it.
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