Hell is understood to be a place where the damned suffer torment and anguish for all eternity. Would God or anybody want to go through eternity with the echoes of the suffering of the damned reverberating throughout Heaven, or at least the knowledge of such suffering within their spirits? Wouldn’t it be better all around to just consign evil to oblivion? As it’s presented now, it is a picture of revenge and sadism and it isn’t pretty.
I think that in the afterlife, if there is one, that our souls are bathed in the undeniable light of Truth, where we can lie to ourselves no longer. Those who are unable to stand going on without the ability to continue to fool themselves, condemn themselves to cosmic oblivion rather than face another instant, much less eternity, of living any further with who and what they are. That God would ensure such a “humane” avenue of escape is a sign of pity and mercy, rather than the vindictive sadism of those who would ascribe their own such qualities to God, and will probably be among those who flush themselves down that cosmic toilet when the time comes.
How so? There it’s God or Jesus doing the judging. And there’s a Hell. And (depending), the sheep and the goats were determined from the beginning of time and written (or not) in the Book of Life.
In Orthodox theology, there is no determination of man’s ultimate fate, free will is affirmed and absolutely essential to the understanding of what’s going on with salvation.
Anyways, on the Orthodox view, Heaven and Hell are essentially the same thing experienced in different ways- our bodies and everything else that comes between us and God being stripped away so we are naked in His presense forever. Whether that’s a good experience or not, depends on the kind of person you’ve sculpted yourself to be. The presense of God is the judgement, as far as I understand, though there is something else that goes on that determines whether a person will rest in contentment or in dread if they die between now and then. That much I’m not so clear on.
The idea that Hell is a place to which you sent because you are punished is a later, Catholic idea. Purgatory and Limbo were developed to deal with a view of the inherent problems with the notion, which you’ve pointed out.
I basically agree with you that the notion of Hell and God’s mercy ought to be very troubling for most Christians (especially most Christians who are going to read something written in English like this). I just wanted to point out that there are major sects that don’t have these difficulties.