Five Questions For Christians

1. What keeps people in heaven from committing evil, or making someone else suffer in some way? Anything preventing people in heaven from doing that? Or can Christians in heaven later commit evils, create suffering, maybe even wind up damned?

2. Does God have free will? If so, then can God choose to do evil? If not, why not?

   A related question, is the free will of human beings to do evil, something that even God lacks? And if so, doesnʼt that make human free will something new, in a category by itself, something even God does not possess?

3. Are there other things that God lacks? Can God “suffer?” Did any “suffering” ever exist inside God before He created the first sentient being that “displeased” Him? Or is “suffering” something new that only arose after God created sentient beings?

4. Did God create solely out of His own will, intelligence, power and love? Then how could anything that came SOLELY out of perfect intelligence, power, and love, wind up as imperfect as this cosmos?

   Life in this cosmos is only possible on a tiny sliver of one planetʼs shaky surface, with life eating life, mass extinction events, and all living things eventually dying. Life, at best, is in equilibrium with death in our cosmos, thatʼs what we know for sure. We do not see people popping out of graves after being dead for three days, nor people rising into the clouds, nor cities (like the “New Jerusalem” mentioned in the last few chapters of Revelation) descending out of heaven above.

5. Whatʼs the point of arguing with Hell-Believing Christians Over The Problem Of Evil? According to Christian orthodoxy, The Problem Of Evil/Suffering is writ even larger in the next life than in this one. And since so many Christians take for granted eternal suffering and are willing to justify it as part of what they are taught “in the Bible,” then whatʼs the point of arguing about suffering with a Christian like that? They already justify eternal suffering in their own minds, so no tsunami or mass extinction is going to sway them otherwise.

   Personally, I see Christianity as a roach motel of the mind, or like Chinese handcuffs, i.e., people are attracted by the outward love and trappings, and then once inside, they canʼt get their minds out again, because of fear of eternal suffering. Doubt itself becomes a sin. So they wind up justifying every pain and evil, including eternal suffering.

   I think youʼll find that those Christians who DO come to doubt the logic of eternal suffering are the ones most likely to turn to some version of Christian annihilationism, or universalism, or at least a broader, more inclusive hope for salvation, and find those types of answers more comforting than belief in an orthodox hell of eternal suffering in which a jealous God punishes people for eternity.