As far as believing in hell, whether you believe it is a literal, physical place of torment or a state of absolute alienation from God, it seems to me to be a necessity of logic. I feel as CS Lewis did in that if there was one idea, one doctrine I could delete from Christianity, hell would be the one.
But for there not to be some ultimate destination for our journeys would fill me with despair. And it’s not a matter of Jesus laughing at you or gloating saying “Haha, for no reason at all you have to believe in me or I’ll send you to hell”. The way to not face what is after this life with fear is also the way that will bring us most joy and true satisfaction on earth… back to the ideas Thomas Merton and our true selves.
Free choice is necessary for true love. Love cannot exist without the possibility of failure. Is this the reason God placed the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden? Probably. It wasn’t to tempt us; it was because he loved us enough to give us functioning brains and to lay choices before us.
We could not love God if it was impossible to not love him, but then we’d be robots right? He could have created a world with padded walls where we could never hurt him but we’d be dumb beings who could not choose because we would have no choices.
Beliefs do have a lot to do with where a person is from, but everyone is FROM somewhere. I hear some parents say “I’m not going to bias my kids with my beliefs. I’m going to let them figure that out for themselves.” What a gross mismanagement of parenting responsibility. They WILL be influenced one way or another and all one is conveying with this “non-influence” strategy that all the searching in life has not led to anything they want to pass on.
Yes, I understand some are in transition and many learned things as children that they don’t want to pass on, but what’s the point of having kids if you’re going to send them out into the world unprepared?
I agree that children raised under a certain belief system having all other systems withheld will be ill prepared to face the world. My children will be exposed to many viewpoints but I will certainly be passing on to them what I’ve learned along the way. As a responsible parent can I really just abandon them in their intellectually formative years to make an unaided decision?
That idea of an unaided decision is a fallacy anyway because children don’t make any unaided decisions (ok, so they decide to go pee when they need to but you know what I’m talking about here) – you will either primarily aid them or they will be aided by someone who is not you, and at that point what was the point of your parenting, or your lifetime of learning for that matter?
I understand our parents’ fear of allowing us to explore the ragged landscape of faith and reason, there are risks, but we were shortchanged because of it. What should have happened, and this is far more common today in my experience, is that they should have explored those landscapes with us, pointing out the hazard areas and explaining to us how they discovered the hazards.
Instead there was far more “don’t go there and don’t ask why” going on which led many of us to discover these hazards in secret or under questionable influence.
