Another headline, another senseless tragedy. During a week full of them, this one hardly caused a blip on my radar, except that it happened here. First I read that a group of teens forced a boy to watch his mother repeatedly raped, then have sex with her himself at gunpoint.…
When my friend Doug wrote that “God loves us like an abusive parent,” it sounded so very harsh, but it then reminded me of that most troublesome of concepts: hell.
I was raised Catholic, where hell was portrayed to be a very bad place to go. Many Catholics, however, and many liberal Christians, don’t believe that hell is a place where people are literally tortured. Check out today’s conservative Christians, however, on your local AM radio station. You’ll hear them fervently arguing that the version of hell taught by moderate Christians is way off the mark. Hell is not a metaphor or a mere figure of speech. Here’s what it is:
The reality of hell is the most horrifying, terror striking, fearful truth known to man. It encompasses the worst possible fear and the meanest conceivable existence, continual never-ending torture. “And they will be tormented day and night forever and ever (Revelation 20:10).”
Therefore, many fundamentalists believe that someone sent to hell will be (literally) tortured (literally) forever. It will be like being forced to go to Dachau, the Rape of Nanking, Abu Ghraib or worse, for eternity.
