Hermit wrote:

laklak wrote:How do we know Hell is bad? Because the religious assholes say it is?

Many Christian theologians have reinterpreted hell. It is no longer fire and brimstone, the gnashing of teeth and all that. Now hell is - so they say - "an absence of God". You make a good point just the same. Who wants to sit next to the throne of god, singing songs of praise to him for all eternity? He is, after all, "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." Yuch. You'd have to be an extraordinarily hypocritical or deluded person to be able to stand it.

Theologians may object to this description of the ogre. They might say something like: "Yeah that was the God of the Old Testament. We now have a New Covenant. God has changed. He has become all lovey-dovey." They might say that while busily sweeping Matthew 5:17 under the carpet: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or. the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." They also forget to explain why the Old Testament is still part of the Bible on every Christian church's pulpit. That is a bit weird if the New Covenant has superseded it.