I have just been to what is officially the creepiest lecture I have ever been to. As the summary says, the Evangelical Students were running a talk - they're doing one every day this week. Their theme for the entire set of talks is "Is God Dead?". In this talk, the lecturer ran through what he thinks God is like.

It was like watching Hitler justify his genocide.

I'm perhaps using a bit more hyperbole than necessary - I'm pretty sure the lecturer has never killed anyone, let alone ~10 million people. Nevertheless, it was honestly that creepy.

Why?

Hell.

The lecturer was espousing on how God is a god of love, using the prodigal son parable to illustrate (Personally, I'd go with the six or seven different tribes God orders the Israelites to genocide, but never mind). He then segued into a discussion on how God is a god of justice, illustrating it by describing how he would pursue pedophiles who threatened his children to the full extent of the law, saying that that was a loving act. Fair enough.

But think a bit - this is his justification for hell. Hell. No matter how you construct it, it is an infinite punishment - whether directly, as in the more medieval constructions of the concept, or indirectly, as in the 'absence of God' argument constructed more recently because the older version made omnibenevolence a bit tricker to justify.

And more to the point, he proceeded to describe how any immoral action, no matter how minor, deserves this infinite punishment. He didn't mention the 'crime' of not believing, but it was certainly implied.

He said that for the imaginary crime of not believing in his deity, I deserve an infinite punishment.

Hitler didn't deserve an infinite punishment, and I'd like to think I'm a better person then the Fuhrer. No immorality committed by a human deserves an infinite punishment - by definition, justice is proportional, and we can only commit finite crimes. We cannot possibly deserve hell.

Some theologians have tried to rationalise by claiming that as all immoralities are an attack on god, they're all crimes of infinite proportion. Beyond the pretty sickening implication that everybody deserves infinite punishment (And they call atheists the misanthropes), I think it's pretty damned obvious that any omnibenevolent being worth its salt would forgive any and all crimes against its person. Oh, and would have a sense of scale.

At least the talk has driven home some of the reasons I dislike Christianity.