It is sometimes claimed that Christians who reject hell as eternal conscious torment do so out of "sentimentalism". As if moral horror at the prospect of human beings suffering torture forever is being "too sentimental"? What a grotesque assertion!— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) April 2, 2019
Notice Rauser's sympathy for the damned rather than sympathy for victims of the damned. To take just one example, consider the lynching of Jesse Washington. A developmentally disabled teenager was convicted of murder, without legal representation, in a kangaroo court. A mob was waiting for him outside the courthouse. They chained him and hauled him off to torture him to death. Cut off his ears. Castrated him. Repeatedly raised and lowered his body into a bonfire so that he'd slowly burn to death. When he tried to climb up the chain to escape the flames, they cut off his fingers.
That's an extreme example, but I use it to establish a point of principle. What punishment does Rauser think is suitable for the lynch mob?
1) Rauser appears to be playing the "you can't question my feelings, my feelings are ultimate" card. Very modern, plays well to an audience indoctrinated in the modern "feelings are facts" social media Twitter-verse.
ReplyDelete2) Rauser simply states his conclusion as an argument. If it's genuine moral horror, then presumably God feels it too, and there is no such thing.
3) Rauser feels moral horror at God's righteous judgment. God says to Rauser, woe to those who call good evil, and evil good.
4) This morning I was studying Job. His sufferings were terrible; and he resisted the urgings of his wife to "curse God and die". And yet, when God spoke to him, he realised that he needed to repent in sackcloth and ashes - and was told to pray for his friends, with whom God was angry, for their woefully ignorant musings about the justice of God's workings. The book of Job knows nothing of the idea that it's compassionate to edit our theology to edit God down to our understanding of what his justice against humanity requires.
Paul hints at different levels of punishment. Dante constructed the inferno around this concept.
ReplyDeleteA couple who go through eternity together. Getting exactly what they wanted for eternity. Each other. Not exactly in torment but discomfort knowing this is as good as it gets.
The further down in hell you go the greater the punishments. Muhummad, Judas and then Satan at the very bottom.
Yes, I think that's a valid concept.
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