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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It was ours, too — except my family was happy to put it that explicitly and even more so, offering detailed descriptions of those brutal eternal punishments and reveling at the thought…and making it seem sinful if you *weren’t* celebrating them. Incredibly warping to a person.
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When I was growing up I admired your family. I know how warping my cultural version was, and to take more glee in the brutality aspect *has* to be tied to even more intense psychological self denial.
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Yeah.😟 Coming to terms with that —what it had done to my own mind and intuitions, and what it had allowed me to do to others— was awful. But it’s strange: that view was engrained so early, yet I still felt like I was “coming back” to some lost part of myself once I was past it.
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Of course, my family (& I’d guess yours, too) would probably just quote that passage from Rom. 8 about the carnal mind being enmity with God — the feeling of “rightness” itself being evidence that compassion for apostates is ungodly. Unfalsifiable ideas are such an insane trap.🤕
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