NrFive

Just read through an article with the name as my title.
It´s written by a man that tries to explain how God can create a hell with eternal pain for those of us that choose sin before God.
You can find the article in whole here
There are several things I´d like to disagree with this article.
My former religious believs are based on that God never created hell as a place of eternal suffering. When referred in the bible as the burning Gehenna, I was taught that it referred to the pit of garbage outside of Jerusalem. People that didn´t deserve a proper burial, thiefs and murderes, was thrown down this pit of burning garbage. When Jesus talked about the Burning Gehenna he talked about a death where you are completly forgotten and burned down to ash.
There is, to my knowledge, no verse in the bible that talk about eternal suffering as the punisment of evil men.
I did a search in Bible2000, for the word: Gehenna. Nothing. But when I searh the word: Hell, I get more than 10 hits. Not anyone of them talks about suffering. According to mat 10:28 we should be afraid of hell(gehenna) because God can destroy our body and soul there. Still nothing about eternal suffering.

Second, the writer talks about how God is just, by giving us the oppertunity of chooing between good or evil. And if we choose evil, we have choosen hell, and for that we can´t blame God.
But this is only true if the choise is absolut. If we can be sure which way leads to which end.
If you are given a choise between two roads and you can see that the left on ends in a pit of burning flesh, while the right one goes to a heavenly paradise, which one would you choose?
But if you can´t see any ending to any of the roads, and both roads look the same, how can you then be blamed for taking the wrong turn?

It can only be called a free choice, when we actually knows for sure what we are choosing. And religion today is a maze of different belives. There´s a large amount of holy textures that all say they have the salvation to humakind. There´s million of people of different religions that all claim that they have the only true way to heaven...
And in all this, the almighty God, the God of Love, wants us to choose right, so that we can avoid a eternal time of pain.

I don´t belive that a God of love would create a hell. If there is a God, and if he cares about us, I would understand if he takes away those people that only do harm, or help them to see the error of their ways. But even the most evil person should not have to face a eterenty of pain for 60 years of bad things he/she has done.

A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. Not thousands of years of unhuman pain for a lifetime of crimes...