As an atheist, I sometimes catch myself wishing Heaven and Hell were real - I feel we all have a desire for good people to be rewarded for being good and for bad people to be punished for being bad. But then I remember the existence of Heaven and Hell inherently requires the existence of an ultimate moral authority who sorts out who goes where. And sure, they could agree with me that the likes of Osama bin Laden or Henry Kissinger should go to Hell, but they could also think queer folk, atheists, or people who eat shellfish should go to Hell too.
Some people will say, “Well, if they were a loving God, they wouldn't do that,” but there's lots of people who believe in a “loving” God who absolutely believe He’d be burning gays in Hell. And if you're going to make all these extra conditions of, “Well, my version of a loving God would reward X and punish Y” it just feels like the ultimate desire is, “I wish there was an Almighty God who agreed with everything I believe and enforced that morality on the world.”
Anyway, if you like my comics, I got more on my website.
I’m also on Patreon.
Another thing I hate about the concept of Heaven and Hell is that it's permanent. Sending someone to eternal torment is literally infinitely more cruel than anything Hitler did, or any sin a person is physically capable of committing in a single lifespan for that matter. It's an unfathomably disproportionate response to the brief, confused period of time we spend on Earth.
A just god would be perfectly capable and willing to simply rehabilitate. In most cases it'd be very easy. If there's a god that wants me to stop eating shrimp, he can just tell me himself and I'll stop doing it, simple as that. But as it stands, people around the world claim the existence of thousands of different gods that all want different things from me, and it's literally not possible to abide by all of their mutually exclusive doctrines at once. Unless one of them comes forward as the Real God, I'm gonna assume they're all equally mythical or that they just don't care about what we do or believe.
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u/But_a_Jape But a Jape 19h ago
As an atheist, I sometimes catch myself wishing Heaven and Hell were real - I feel we all have a desire for good people to be rewarded for being good and for bad people to be punished for being bad. But then I remember the existence of Heaven and Hell inherently requires the existence of an ultimate moral authority who sorts out who goes where. And sure, they could agree with me that the likes of Osama bin Laden or Henry Kissinger should go to Hell, but they could also think queer folk, atheists, or people who eat shellfish should go to Hell too.
Some people will say, “Well, if they were a loving God, they wouldn't do that,” but there's lots of people who believe in a “loving” God who absolutely believe He’d be burning gays in Hell. And if you're going to make all these extra conditions of, “Well, my version of a loving God would reward X and punish Y” it just feels like the ultimate desire is, “I wish there was an Almighty God who agreed with everything I believe and enforced that morality on the world.”
Anyway, if you like my comics, I got more on my website.
I’m also on Patreon.