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If Hell is a real place, where is it? Let's get the Marines to go there and rescue those poor folks!

I suspect believers in Hell are rolling their eyes at this point. Of course, they reply, Hell isn't a real "place." It's a state of being, a spiritual plane, an infernal dimension, and so on. But even though we're all agreed that Hell isn't really a place, somehow the argument is not over.

So let's grant doesn't have to be a physical location. I still think there are two good arguments against the existence of Hell:

1) The idea of an eternal Hell is incompatible with the idea of a just God. Surely justice involves matching the punishment to the crime. But what crime merits eternal torment? Even if we decreed that an Adolph Hitler would suffer one hundred years for ever second of suffering he caused in the Holocaust, we still wouldn't even be close to sentencing him to eternal suffering. In fact, we would still be infinitely far away from such a sentence. The fact is that nothing a finite creature can do to merit eternal torment. Yet we are expected to believe that God metes out this punishment on a fairly regular basis - for unrepented murders, for loving somebody of the same sex, for failing to speak in tongues, etc. etc. etc. A God who could sentence someone to everlasting punishment for a finite act - no matter how heinous - is creating unimaginably more suffering than he's punishing. Such a God could not possibly be considered just. Either God is just, and there is no Hell, or God is unjust, and there's no point to Heaven.

2) You can't suffer after death. If Hell is a place of eternal torment, what exactly is it that is tormented? Every kind of suffering we know about is related to our nervous system. We know this because both mental and physical suffering can be alleviated by acting on the nervous system. Once the body dies, what can suffer? If there is a soul that is completely non-physical, it cannot suffer in any meaningful sense. Granting the validity of this point, some have argued that God gives us a resurrected body which may then suffer - sort of like curing a death-row inmate so he can live long enough to be executed. But then we're back to square one: if these bodies are physical, where are they? Let's go break 'em out!

Learn more about this author, Scott Knickelbine.
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