Hello Notch, thanks for responding.
You said:
“That’s funny. Of course he wouldn’t have to remove humans to remove hell.”
This only reveals that you aren’t using the biblical definition of hell.
You’re taking a different definition and importing it into the Scriptures.
Read Isaiah 6. Isaiah feels hell — absolute agony when he is brought briefly into eternity. He feels hell from his own sins — his own sins created the hell he experienced.
When God removed his sins, the feeling of hell went away.
Hell wasn’t like a prison Isaiah could be thrown into unjustly. That’s the idea you’re using — that hell is a place separate from Isaiah, and God could simply destroy that place if He wanted to, because it’s separate from Isaiah.
But that isn’t the biblical idea.
Isaiah creates his own hell. God can’t remove that without removing Isaiah.
God can forgive sin — but only if we allow it.
If we resist God, and resist His forgiveness, then we retain our sins. We retain the hell our sins make for ourselves.
You said:
“God created flawed humans who can’t achieve the behavior standards that he created. God then punishes us for not being able to achieve the standards.”
Nope.
God offers forgiveness.
God wants to forgive everyone.
That’s why Jesus died on the Cross.
The only reason you suffer hell is that you resist the forgiveness of the God who wants to save you from yourself.
You said:
“Only because God designed it that way by creating flawed humans and unrealistic behavior standards.. He allows hell to exist, no matter what one thinks hell is.”
Again, my friend, you keep returning to this idea of behavior standards, as though God is punishing people for not being good enough.
That’s not the Bible.
As long as you keep filtering your thoughts of hell through this lens that it’s all about being good enough or not, you’ll always be in error.
It’s not about random standards.
God designed life. God knows how life should work.
The commands God gives enable life to flourish the best it can. Love God, love your neighbor, don’t steal cheat or kill, honor your parents, care for everyone with a need.
When we don’t do this, we not only damage our own lives but the lives of those around us.
God isn’t looking at this as some arbitrary standard of behavior.
He’s looking at this through the lens of love, wanting us to do what’s best for life, both ours and those around us.
You said:
“Why not? What does God get out of punishment of any kind. Do you know what omnipotent means?”
God doesn’t want to punish.
The Bible says, quite explicitly, the Lord takes no pleasure in punishment. It says, quite explicitly, that the Lord does not want anyone to perish.
God gets nothing out of punishment.
Omnipotent means that God can do all things that are doable. He will never lack the power to do something that’s doable.
It does not mean that God can make a contradiction not a contradiction, as you want it to mean. You want it to mean that we can have genuine free will, yet choose to reject God and suffer no consequences. That’s as much a contradiction as a round square. God is the source of life. If you cut yourself off from the source of life, you get death. There’s no way around it.
You said:
“One can choose to not serve in the military and the military will not punish them. True free will would allow a person to not choose God and not be punished for that decision.”
Again, it’s not an arbitrary choice.
You keep acting as though these standards are arbitrary, like the decision of whether or not to join the military. You can, or can not. It’s your choice. Either way, you have a life you can live.
That’s not what we’re talking about.
These aren’t arbitrary choices.
God is life. He is the One who created your life, the One who sustains it, the One who designed it, the One who knows how it should be lived, the One who can rescue it from the hell you’ve created for it.
If you cut yourself off from Him, you’re choosing to cut yourself off from all of that.
You want it to somehow make sense that you can cut yourself off from God and not cut yourself off from God at the same time. That can’t happen.
You want none of the effects of cutting yourself off from God.
You want the ability to cut yourself off from the stream of water keeping you hydrated without suffering dehydration. It’s non-sensical.
You said:
“Do you know what omnipotent means? An omnipotent God has no threats. Humans can’t harm an omnipotent God in any way.”
Now you’re just equivocating.
We can certainly harm a God who loves us. Rejecting His love harms Him, as it harms any parent.
To be sure, we aren’t killing Him. We aren’t threatening Him. We aren’t bringing a threat to His existence.
But we are hurting His heart.
Humans can cause emotional pain to God because that’s how God designed us. He designed us as His children, whom He loves.
An omnipotent God has all ability to create children in His image, children whom He loves, children who can hurt Him emotionally by rejecting His love.
You yourself assert how omnipotent God is.
Therefore, accept that God in His omnipotence can indeed create children who have the ability to hurt Him by rejecting His love.
Why would you deny His omnipotence?
Why would you say He can’t do that?
You said:
“God loves us.” No, he doesn’t. Look at his track record. Look at the slaughter in the OT (likely billions of people, including children, babies, and the unborn. And this doesn’t include animals.) Look at the disproportional punishment. Look at the mental and physical suffering he created and sustains.”
Look at the eternal life He grants to people who don’t deserve it.
Look at the home He made for us, a home full of beauty.
Look at every good thing you’ve ever enjoyed, all of which came from His hand.
The “slaughter” in the OT isn’t slaughter as you accuse it of being. Those who choose evil, who devote themselves to evil, are removed. Every society on earth does this. You can’t let people committed to evil go free, because they visit that evil on the innocent. That isn’t loving.
The OT makes clear that people under 20 were not held responsible for their choices. Anyone who dies under that age, especially babies, are taken to God. They aren’t held eternally responsible for their choices yet, because they’re still growing, still learning.
You want to ignore all the good and accuse God of all the “bad,” even if the “bad” is Him removing evil people before they make things worse.
You said:
“If you believe the Christian narrative, it does more than grieve him, it causes him to punish us. But in reality, we can’t lay a finger on an omnipotent God. Nothing we can do can pulse him.”
If you believe the Bible, God isn’t punishing us. We are punishing ourselves through our own sin, as Isaiah 6 makes clear, as Genesis 3 makes clear.
Were Adam and Eve skipping along happily before God punished them?
No.
They immediately suffered the effects of their sin. They punished themselves, bringing hell on earth upon themselves before God ever spoke a word to them about what they did.
You keep assuming that the way you view this is the “Christian narrative,” but your view does not match Scripture.
You said:
“Who did Adam and Eve sin against?” Each other. Adam could have been the only one of the two to eat the fruit and Eve would have still been punished with death and suffering.”
This isn’t a biblical idea.
You’re making up ridiculous ideas and accusing God of them.
There is no sense in which Eve could be fully innocent and still suffer punishment. The Bible never says such a thing.
Rather, it is quite clear that God is perfectly just. He does not punish the innocent, nor does He let the guilty get off scot free to keep doing more evil.
You said:
“As a matter of fact, Adam sinned against all of humanity because God punished all of humanity with suffering and death because Adam made a single mistake. And just think, God could have simply forgiven Adam. Now that would have been love.
God did forgive them, immediately.
God stayed with them. God covered them with animal skins. God stayed with them in life, talking with them and their children daily.
Yet notice how you contradict yourself, just to try to make a point against God.
First, you say that Adam and Eve didn’t sin against God. They sinned against each other.
Then, you say God should have forgiven them.
How? If what you say is true, that they only sinned against each other, then God would have nothing to forgive.
The only way God could forgive them is if their sin really is against God, which you don’t want to admit.
You said:
“That’s just the go-to anthropomorphizing of God trick.”
God made us in His image.
We’re not anthropomorphizing God, as though we could make God like us.
God made us like Him.
But if you want to talk about “tricks,” acknowledge that what you’re doing is the go-to of slapping a label on a point to dismiss it without actually dealing with it. We call it a logical fallacy for a reason.
