previously

Firstly, I want to stress that if you’re not an infernalist, if you don’t believe that all unrepentant sinners are subject to infinite punishment after death, I’m not criticising you. But this certainly is a belief that some Christian traditions teach. For example, from the (Presbyterian) Westminster Confession of Faith (§15.4):

As there is no sin so small but it deserves damnation; so there is no sin so great that it can bring damnation upon those who truly repent.

Various other denominations have similar statements. And they also assert that this repentance is only enabled by Jesus’ sacrifice, an event that happened at a particular historical time. Yet the obvious logical consequence of this, that all the unevangelized will be infinitely punished, is debated among theologians in the face of its glaring unfairness. Some bite this bullet, others concoct various devices to avoid it.

“Hell is just separation from God”

This seems to be a relatively recent development in Protestant theology, the notion that it isn’t God actively casting you into Hell, it is instead your own sinful choices that separate yourself from God.

I think this can be a helpful interpretation of the course of a sinful life: some people really do seem to end up in a “hell of their own making”, while still alive. But you cannot bridge the gap from there to infinite punishment after death for every unrepentant person.

And of course, “you did it yourself” is just the sort of thing Narcissistic God would say.

I’d like to speak up for those I call the “median heathen” here, someone who has no interest in or perhaps even knowledge of Christian or any Abrahamic teaching, who is neither notably worthy nor especially wicked — not least because I think of myself that way.

I think the median heathen, and indeed most people generally, are basically good. They love and care for people. They make mistakes. They have flaws. They improve the world sometimes and they damage the world sometimes. But overall each one is typically of benefit to the world: it is a good thing that they exist, not just in principle, or according to God’s intent, but given how they actually ended up living their lives. These people have not separated themselves from love, from goodness, from joy. They (we!) do not deserve infinite punishment.

“How can you, as an imperfect human, presume to question the infinite wisdom of God?”

OK, this is 100% something Narcissistic God would say.

My purpose is to show that Narcissistic God leads to utter moral horror by any human moral sense. That’s the most I can do. I may succeed at this or I may fail.

But I cannot prove that human moral sense isn’t utterly wrong. Perhaps it is. But then we are left entirely adrift — even if God tells us the truth, we would never listen.

“God has a plan that sinners corrupt”

Narcissistic God had a plan for Creation. But that plan didn’t work out, and Narcissistic God is in a narcissistic rage about it. God is omnipotent and omniscient, so all blame for this failure, and indeed for anything and everything, can only lie with Narcissistic God. But of course Narcissistic God will blame anyone but Himself, so He blames the very beings that He deliberately made imperfect.

I imagine Narcissistic God, with an infinite sucking void in place of a capacity to love, and desperate to fill it with the “narcissistic supply” of adoration, wondering, ah, but what if I created imperfect beings, would they still perfectly love Me and perfectly obey Me?

Loving God, by contrast, loves the world as it actually is, and finds it good overall as it actually turned out, and wants it to be even better.

“Sin actually does infinite worldly damage”

I did not anticipate this objection as it seems obviously wrong to me. I think it’s just a fundamental difference in belief in the nature of sin’s effect on the world.

The world is constantly changing, constantly becoming better and becoming worse in different ways. Some of this is due to deliberate human action, and some to mere accident, or some other cause. Sin damages the world, and natural disasters also damage the world. Any of it might be greater or lesser in degree, or last for a shorter or longer time, or have less or more knock-on effects.

It is true that human actions, human sin, human malice, can do a particular kind of emotional damage that natural disasters generally do not. This damage can sometimes be very grave, and very long-lasting, and have secondary effects. But all this too eventually passes.

Eventually, the damaging consequences of a sin or an event fade away into the constant change of the world. Everything changes. People die and new people are born. The world moves on. And of course the cosmologists tell us that all matter and all energy will eventually decay into elementary particles, leaving nothing of moral consequence.

This does not mean the damage never happened. It does not mean the damage is ever retroactively undone, simply that it is ultimately finite.

Billions of people have lived before us and were (inevitably) sinful. If all sin had perpetual damaging consequences, under that cumulative weight this world would be nothing but suffering and pain for all people.

I think those who see the worldly consequences of sin as infinite see it as involving a special kind of pollution, that somehow is never supplied by accident or natural disaster, that somehow lasts forever. This makes no sense to me. Perhaps they feel suffused with persistent guilt.

Why are people like that?

Why would anyone be infernalist? I think some people are horrified by the possibility of a world where bad people go unpunished. For them, the only way for good and evil to be objectively real is for a certain kind of God to exist. And this God must impose consequences for the morality of our actions. And it seems that in Christian theology, everything about God is either zero or infinity, so these consequences must also be infinite. Without all of this to nail it down, good and evil might evaporate into a meaninglessly amoral world. I can only assume that, at some level, this horrifies them more than the prospect of infinite eternal suffering of almost all souls.

I probably can’t move these people, but perhaps I can move those caught up in moral horror of what they have been taught.

— Ashley Yakeley

Time to put the fedora on. But not to argue against the existence of God, only against a certain kind of God, widely found in Christianity.

Here are two conceptions of God, which I call Loving God and Narcissistic God. Mainstream forms of Protestantism, especially evangelical, teach Narcissistic God, and I believe the Roman church mostly does too. Loving God loves the world, while Narcissistic God does not love the world, and isn’t even truly capable of love, but insists that He does.

The clearest view of their difference is their attitudes towards sin.

Narcissistic God proclaims to love the world, but in truth does not. Narcissistic God commands us to do and to not do various actions, and sin is disobedience of this command. Narcissistic God then chooses to take infinite offence at this disobedience. Sin often has a damaging effect on the world, and this damage is nominally the reason for Narcissistic God’s command, but as it turns out, it is actually irrelevant. Sin’s effect on the world, the actual damage it does, is finite, and therefore of zero relative importance to the infinity of disobedience.

Disobedience, not any finite consequence to the world, is Narcissistic God’s definition of sin.

And there is no “anti-sin”. There is no good act, no degree of supererogation, that can compensate for the infinite badness of disobedience to Narcissistic God. Bad acts are worth negative infinity, good acts are worth zero, by the account of Narcissistic God. Absolute perfection is the absolute bare minimum that Narcissistic God demands.

And since Narcissistic God has chosen to make everyone imperfect, everyone eventually disobeys Narcissistic God, and therefore everyone is deserving of infinite punishment.

For all of human history, millions of years, up until about two thousand years ago, Narcissistic God subjected every human soul to infinite punishment after death. Let us consider a typical person during this time. David is a Jew living one hundred years before the time of Jesus. David becomes aware of his sin, and cries out to God for forgiveness of it.

But Narcissistic God, who claims to be the Jewish God, will not forgive him despite any entreaty, despite David’s sincerity and remorse. There is no hope for David. There is nothing David can do, nothing the entire world can do even, that will save David from infinite punishment at the hands of Narcissistic God.

Narcissistic God, who claims to love the world, does not love David. Narcissistic God hates David. Narcissistic God will infinitely punish David, with absolute perfect certainty, and provides no possibility, no possibility at all, of his salvation. From the moment of David’s first sin, the rest of his life is worthless, just a short pointless lapse of time before absolutely inevitable infinite eternal punishment.

Apparently Narcissistic God got bored with this arrangement fairly recently on the scale of human history, and so He installed a mechanism in the world that would give Himself a pretext to forgive sinners who ask for forgiveness. But to get that forgiveness, sinners must hold certain particular beliefs about this mechanism at the time they ask Narcissistic God for it. Just to maintain the credibility of the pretext.

Devotees of Narcissistic God, when they preach to the heathen, refer to the doctrine of this mechanism as “The Good News”. And indeed it is Good News, when considered in isolation. When considered together with everything else about Narcissistic God, however, it is Bad News. It is Very Very Bad News Indeed.

Since the worldly consequences of sin are finite, and the spiritual consequences of sin upon the soul are infinite, devotees of Narcissistic God may make little concern of the former. They only wish to obtain forgiveness from Narcissistic God for the infinite benefit to their soul. Mere worldly actions, such as making amends with those damaged, or other reparations, are of no relative consequence except inasmuch as they might bear upon the process of obtaining Narcissistic God’s forgiveness. Reparations to the world, even if they were to make whole and more, can never undo Narcissistic God’s narcissistic rage at being disobeyed.

Like all narcissists, Narcissistic God is principally concerned with controlling what other people think of Him. Of course Narcissistic God commands that you love Him, on pain of infinite punishment, and obviously that you not love any other gods. But this is actually not enough for Narcissistic God. Narcissistic God also commands that you believe, or at least not dissent from, a whole body of doctrine to justify the arrangement, although the exact doctrine is disputed by various factions of devotees of Narcissistic God.

Loving God, by contrast, actually does love the world, and hates sin for no other reason than that it damages the world. For this reason, and for this reason only, Loving God commands us not to sin. What makes something sin, what defines sin, is that it damages the world, not that it is disobedience of God.

This damage, though it may occasionally be very great, is ultimately finite. We are beings of finite power, with finite consequences to our actions, and Loving God will not infinitely punish us for finite offence. To do so would pointlessly add infinite damage to our souls to the finite damage to the world caused by our sin. And our sin does not damage Loving God. God is infinite and perfect and therefore cannot be damaged by finite beings.

What is the nature of Loving God’s command not to sin? It is no more than love. When you love something, the prospect of damaging it becomes odious to you. When you love the world, the prospect of sin, of damaging the world, becomes odious to you. This odiousness is precisely Loving God’s command not to sin. This is the sense in which God is Love.

Is repentance before Loving God of any value, given that it is not needed to save from infinite punishment? While repentance before Narcissistic God focuses inward on the damage to oneself, to one’s own soul, reflecting that very narcissism, repentance before Loving God focuses outward on the damage one has done to the world. Meaningful repentance before Loving God benefits the world: it turns the repentant away from the path of sin, towards the path of loving and healing, and it inspires the repentant to make amends, where that may still be possible. This reduces the amount of damage to the world. And only because it benefits the world does repentance then benefit the repentant, does it lift their burden.

If Loving God would never allow an infinite Hell, might there still be some kind of purgatory of the sinful after death? Perhaps, but it would have to work something like this (and this is pure invention): After death, God reveals to the sinful soul the full truth of its sin and its consequences in the world. The soul, now perfectly filled with God’s love, is thus filled with remorse, and craves purgatory, which God grants. This purgatory would no doubt have something of the character of “hard work”, similar to the process of repentance. This would be a purgatory to hope for, not to fear, like anything given by Loving God.

To love the world is to be filled with God. This is the sense in which God is Love. Leigh Hunt illuminates:

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
“What writest thou?”—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”
“And is mine one?” said Abou. “Nay, not so,”
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, “I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men.”

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blest,
And lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.

Is Loving God supportable from the Bible, or from the teachings of Jesus, or from some particular Christian tradition? I have no idea. I’m not a Christian.

— Ashley Yakeley

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