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Rebekah's avatar

It really surprises me that so many Christian leaders are holding firmly to the idea of eternal conscious torment in hell even though the Biblical text seems strongly weighted against it. I like your arguments for universalism. I would like to believe universalism, and there are some Bible passages that support it. But I also find many passages that speak about the destiny of the wicked in terms of death and destruction. What do you do with those passages? Also, I'm not a fan of the idea that the fire of hell is a refining or purifying process. Is there a version of universalism that doesn't believe we need a purifying fire? My problem with it is that I think Jesus was enough for all the purifying we would ever need: "By one sacrifice he made perfect forever those who are being made holy." Thanks!

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Peter Gerdes's avatar

Also, free will isn't enough to explain why God creates beings who will choose to exercise that free will in ways which result in them going to hell. A OOO god would certainly be capable of only creating some people and putting them into their own reality bubbles where all the bad people don't actually have souls.

Ok, some people who aren't compatabilists about free will may feel that free will is incompatible with being able to predict what someone will do but this leads to some really odd conclusions. Not only can god not predict the future but that what choice you make in a tempting situation isn't even a function of your character or soul (god could then predict). Moreover, would it make sense to punish someone for mere chance rather than something which flows from who they are?

At the very least it would seem like you'd need to believe that God would only create the souls which are predisposed to make the right choices and place them in a reality which maximized the chances that they would do so. But then you run into a tension between the existence of hell and the usual doctrines about salvation (faith and for Catholics works) which seem to depend on factors that seem incompatible with saying God is giving everyone the best shot to be saved a OOO god could.

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