Among the recurring responses I encounter when discussing hell with believers is the claim that hell is a choice. I am told that non-believers want to go to hell because they reject the Christian god.
To that suggestion, I would say that A. belief is not a choice and B. if the Bible is true, when confronted with a real hell, people who rejected Yahweh/Jesus will be forced into hell whether they want that experience or not.
Regarding the ability to choose a belief, you can't choose to believe something you are not aware of. So the hundreds of millions of people who lived and died never having heard of Jesus will not have a path to salvation according to the Bible. And for those of us who have actually heard the gospel message and who don't find the claims about the Christian god compelling to believe, we cannot simply decide that those claims are actually believable and choose to start believing them.
Furthermore, if a non-believer dies and discovers he was mistaken about the Christian god and Christian hell, but does not want to go to hell, admittance into heaven is not going to be an option, and the Bible indicates there are only two options. No one would choose to go to a place where they were set on fire for any amount of time, let alone for all of eternity. Non-believers and people who never heard about the gospel will be tossed into the flames of hell whether they want to go there or not. If the Bible is to be believed, we only have this brief life in which to determine if the claims made in the Bible are true or not. We're given no tangible evidence of their truth, and we're punished for eternity if we cannot believe.
For further reading and a more in depth challenge to the idea that beliefs can be chosen, see my post titled "Family Matters: A Conversation with My Dad".
As stated in the previous post, Hell: Torturing Your Loved Ones, not all believers believe in a literal hell or an eternal hell. If you are one of those Christians, then portions or all of this post might not be relevant to you. However, I believe there is a good case to be made from the text of the Bible, that the authors of the Bible in the New Testament did believe in a literal and eternal hell.
To that suggestion, I would say that A. belief is not a choice and B. if the Bible is true, when confronted with a real hell, people who rejected Yahweh/Jesus will be forced into hell whether they want that experience or not.Regarding the ability to choose a belief, you can't choose to believe something you are not aware of. So the hundreds of millions of people who lived and died never having heard of Jesus will not have a path to salvation according to the Bible. And for those of us who have actually heard the gospel message and who don't find the claims about the Christian god compelling to believe, we cannot simply decide that those claims are actually believable and choose to start believing them.
Furthermore, if a non-believer dies and discovers he was mistaken about the Christian god and Christian hell, but does not want to go to hell, admittance into heaven is not going to be an option, and the Bible indicates there are only two options. No one would choose to go to a place where they were set on fire for any amount of time, let alone for all of eternity. Non-believers and people who never heard about the gospel will be tossed into the flames of hell whether they want to go there or not. If the Bible is to be believed, we only have this brief life in which to determine if the claims made in the Bible are true or not. We're given no tangible evidence of their truth, and we're punished for eternity if we cannot believe.
For further reading and a more in depth challenge to the idea that beliefs can be chosen, see my post titled "Family Matters: A Conversation with My Dad".
As stated in the previous post, Hell: Torturing Your Loved Ones, not all believers believe in a literal hell or an eternal hell. If you are one of those Christians, then portions or all of this post might not be relevant to you. However, I believe there is a good case to be made from the text of the Bible, that the authors of the Bible in the New Testament did believe in a literal and eternal hell.
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