The brand of theology I grew up in was pretty brutal. Why did God make hell, and people who were gonna go to hell? We believed in predestination, so He *knew* he was making ppl who He was actively sending to hell. Why?
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The answer I was taught was basically 'for His glory.' Those people He created, *deserved* to go to hell, so it was right and just and good for Him to send them there. It's good to create things and then put them in their rightful place.
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He did the whole world-creation-send-Jesus-die-for-sins thing as an expression of His might and holiness; He chose to save a subset, and this is magnificent mercy. He chose to condemn the rest to be tortured for an eternity, and this is magnificent justice.
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But... is that good? Eternally torturing ppl He predestined to it seems horrifying.
Well, that's a *you* problem. See, God is *definitionally* good; anything He does is holy and beautiful and correct. If you personally dislike it, that's a reaction of your flawed human nature.
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The people around me probably wouldn't have phrased all those beliefs in that way; they couched it in more gentle things, putting more words to describe His love, and often didn't directly grapple with those concepts, but really that *was* our underlying belief system.
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(forgot to mention: this was 5-point Calvinism)
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also ok before yall shit on Calvinism, it *is* brutal but also the strength is it resolves a lot of philosophical confusions present in other denominations. Other Christian beliefs sacrifice consistency/logic for more 'goodness'; Calvinists are the autists
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For a bit more Calvinism I forgot to explain: yes, you and every human born is inherently sinful and deserving of hell from the moment of conception. You personally did nothing to warrant it, it's just a deep, intractable part of your nature.
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Yes, this means that babies go to hell, in the same way adults do. This is a facet of covenant theology, which views human/God interactions as bound by covenants; basically programming in conditions into the 'way things work', which are modifiable
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I kinda view it as the rigorous autism of Christianity; it's nerds who take the concepts very seriously and paint themselves into a moral corner and get out of it by concluding their own moral sense must be off
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