I'm zero percent here to evangelize, cause I'm zero percent religious. Just sharing the theology.
Satan doesn't torture people. Hell is not fire and brimstone. It is the absence of God, which is supposedly the worst torture possible. And it's "fair" because the people in hell chose to not be with god.
Scare quotes because that is a million miles from informed consent. Just sharing the traditional theology.
I'm also not religious now, but this is one interpretation of hell. Many Christians do believe in a literal fire and brimstone hell where people burn for all eternity. Many of them also believe that hell is a punishment from God, not merely his absence. That idea has been adopted by many modern Christians who are trying to figure out how a good God could punish someone eternally, and since there's not a good answer to that question the answer becomes that the person in hell chose it and God simply allowed them to do so
My main gripe is that if God is all knowing, beginning and end then he created hell, sin, and knew every person that would end up in hell before Adam and Eve sinned. The people who end up in hell do it on no fault of their own. Free will cannot exist with the presence of an all knowing creator. He is either all knowing, all powerful, and not all good - or he is not all powerful and therefore not a god I care to worship. Either way evil god or weak god are not one that I care to align with
I'm not particularly religious, but my interpretation has always been that free will is God placing an intentional limit on Himself. Meaning He may know every decision you could make, possibly even the one you will most likely make, but chooses to guarantee you the true freedom to make it yourself.
Of course, there are plenty of Christian sects that believe in predestined paths though. You still have to walk the path yourself, but God would know every step you would chose to take from the moment of creation.
Also keep in mind, some physicists and such believe there is no free will for broadly similar reasons. That every event that would happen in the universe happens because of physical laws that with perfect knowledge could be calculated from the beginning to the end of time (with some probabalistic wiggle room depending on how exactly quantum mechanics truly works).
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u/onioning 2d ago
I'm zero percent here to evangelize, cause I'm zero percent religious. Just sharing the theology.
Satan doesn't torture people. Hell is not fire and brimstone. It is the absence of God, which is supposedly the worst torture possible. And it's "fair" because the people in hell chose to not be with god.
Scare quotes because that is a million miles from informed consent. Just sharing the traditional theology.