Originally Posted by awareness
Hey Jr. Glad you're hear to get spunky with our traditional conceptions of hell.
Could a loving God invent an eternal cosmic torture chamber?
Well, you provided a quote (a long one by the way), so I'll answer this with a quote (see if you get it):
"This Bible is built mainly out of the fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; all its best precepts and rules of conduct came also from those Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one, and that singular heaven I have told you about. What shall we do? If we believe, with these people, that their God invented these cruel things, we slander him; if we believe that these people invented them themselves, we slander them. It is an unpleasant dilemma in either case, for neither of these parties has done us any harm. For the sake of tranquillity, let us take a side. Let us join forces with the people and put the whole ungracious burden upon him—heaven, hell, Bible and all. It does not seem right, it does not seem fair; and yet when you consider that heaven, and how crushingly charged it is with everything that is repulsive to a human being, how can we believe a human being invented it? And when I come to tell you about hell, the strain will be greater still, and you will be likely to say, No, a man would not provide that place, for either himself or anybody else; he simply couldn’t."
~ Twain, Mark. Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings (Perennial Classics) (Kindle Locations 240-246). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
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