How do you reconcile the idea of a loving God with eternity in Hell?

Ignatius: How do you reconcile the idea of a loving God with eternity in Hell?
Is there anybody out there who believes both that God is a loving, forgiving deity, and that Hell exists? If so, how do you reconcile those two seemingly opposite ideas?

I’m aiming this mostly at Christians, but if you’re of a religion with similar ideas, please feel free to comment.

Answers and Views:

Answer by levitical.order
SIMPLE. God is also a holy and just God who will NOT tolerate sin. If humans have courts to punish violators and provide justice for the innocent, why shouldn’t God, the supreme Judge do the same. If someone did grevious harm to you…would you want him to be with you in eternity? Come on….

Answer by Citizen Of The Cosmos
Apparently, you remove the eternity.

Answer by ICToA
How do you reconcile the idea of your mom giving birth to you knowing that you are going to die one day.

Answer by Edward J
Free will reconciles this. I believe we all have a choice and some would rather go to hell than give up their sins and then use punishment as an argument to justify sin.

Answer by Fajr
It is beyond my capability to understand this idea . I’m sure there must be something that we don’t know could explain it . I totally believe that God is fair so I don’t have to worry about whatever judgment He will give .

Answer by Jini T
loving God means obeying what He says. When there is obedience, then there is no need to think of hell

Answer by chieko
ever hear of “cause and effect”? your bad choices don’t turn God into some sort of monster…

rain and sunshine falls on both good and bad people…

Answer by i aint know
I do it very easily .. because he said it’s so .. lots of things i can’t seem to logiclly wrap my head around .. that doesn’t mean it’s blind faith .. but i know I have met christ .. I know he exists .. I know I’m saved by him .. i trust him .. i trust his word as it is plainly stated .. if he says he knew noah .. Than guess what noah isn’t a fictional character to make some point …Do you know jesus…?? do you know him intimately ?? You can … It’s your only obligation on this planet .. to know and love your god ….there is no reason not to have done that … if you’ve done that he will give you .. peace that surpasses all understanding .. and in that is the security that what he does is always perfect … nuff said ,,

Answer by chelsey
Becasue God wants to make those damn common-sense-using Atheists burn in hell! How dare we use our brains and question something so idiotic!

Haha, yeah, their religion is a little odd.

Answer by Follows Jesus
God is loving and forgives and yes there is a eternal hell.

No they are not opposites

God does not forgive until a person calls on God to forgive them and receive salvation in jesus.

If a person does not do that they do not receive forgiveness and will pay the price of their rebellion of God and breaking his law.

In america if you break the law you go to court or prison.
If you kill somebody you go to prison for life or you lose your life.

God sends people to prison for breaking his laws and not stopping from committing Sin.

God gives them ample warning to stop sinning and repent and people who refuse will face punishment

Answer by mjda1st
Hell is there for the refusal to allow Christ to forgive you.

Answer by Prof
Personally, I find the idea of a ‘loving god’ difficult to reconcile with an overwhelmingly hostile universe.

The ‘habitable earth’ amounts to only 1 in 10^-65 of the universe; that’s a 1 divided by 10 followed by 65 zeros; a number so small that we have no name for it. A truly staggeringly tiny number. And in that habitable earth, only a few hundred of the billions of species created are at all safe for us, the remainder being intent on killling us in various interesting ways. And as any scientist will tell you, even for the ‘reality’ we see, an unimaginable large percentage of that is nothing more than empty space.

If a god did create all this and us, out of love, he left us with only the most infinitesimal percentage of helpful stuff, the remainder being hostile beyond all imagination. Please do tell me that there is a ‘he’ and that he *does* love; because all *I* see is a void in which we are specks well beneath the level of perception.

Answer by torchholder
in the beginning, hell or hades was only a temporary holding area for the dead

the jews used the fear of hell as a whip to convert others to completely accept their religion else risk eternal hell, as did christianity later

but conversion out of fear of hell will not save you…only a desire to be with god and jesus will, and believing in jesus and his great task

we are not immune to fear, but that is a poor reason for us to seek god

Answer by Jay-dub
Because you had your chance and blew it….

Answer by christianos mathēteusate
well look at it this way a man own a manor. one day a stranger goes and says i am now living here with you. the owner has never seen him before and so has him sent away. would you say that they owner was unkind and evil for having a stranger leave his house. Most people see heaven as a place that they have a right to not as God’s house. you need the correct relationship with the owner to be allowed in to live there

Answer by upit14
Since your aiming this at Christians than I will try and give you a Christians point of view on this. This would otherwise be a very open question. It still is to some extent. Lets start by defining evil, or at least what I believe the bible’s definition of evil is. Evil is the absences of God. God says that he is perfect, that in and of it’s self is hard to understand from a humans point of view. Since perfection is something we really have no idea about. So if God’s will is perfect and he is perfect than what does that make evil if it is the absence of god? Imperfection or corruption might be the answer. The reason a good person can be evil is not because they do bad things, but because they are not in the will of god and therefore imperfect or corrupted.

Now god gave humans freewill. We have the power to make choices and think independently of god. In a society, our choices affect everybody around us and society as a whole. They have repercussions that not only affect us, but others now and even thousands of years from now. One of the things that I hear a lot is: why does god let bad things happen to good people. Or: why does god let famine and poverty exist. If god was always fixing the world then the human being would not have free will. In order for bad things not to happen then god would have to stop someone somewhere, sometime from doing the things that led up to that bad event. We need to suffer the consequences of our actions. God doesn’t stop that from happening, otherwise god would be that controlling parent that doesn’t let their kid reap any of the wrongs he has sowed.
We all know those kids hate their parents and never learn their lesson.

Right now you may be asking; “what does this have to do with hell”? Well, I’m getting there, hold on to your britches. Now it is time for some Daniel Ideology. This entire thing has pretty much been “Daniel’s Ideology”. Which by the way is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.

Let’s look at the way that I think the bible demonstrates the way that god mainly operates. If god is all knowing, than god knows everything that has or will happen down to the number of hairs on your head or tears you have ever cried. God knows how people operate, he knows how the earth operates. He knows where a speck of sand will be in five thousand years. Let me rephrase that better. He knows where the photons in the electrons that orbit the protons and neutrons in all the atoms that make up all the molecules in that single grain of sand will be in five thousand years. He can stop something terrible from happening if only people would listen to him. There would be no war, no famine, no poverty. He knows how to solve those problems. That’s why having faith in god is not enough, you need to have faith in what he says and do what he says. But most of all you need to try to understand knowledgeably what he is saying. Not acting on emotion and traditional beliefs. That means reading the bible.

Why does a loving god let good people go to hell? God sends unsaved people to hell because he has to. Since he is perfection he can not tolerate corruption. A person operating outside of god’s will is just that. Corrupted. That’s why he asks us to follow him. We have the freedom to choose god and his will or to do what we see fit and go to hell. Sin is the effect of being in evil and absent from god. God can forgive sin, he can’t forgive someone who is evil. Its not that he doesn’t love them, he just can’t tolerateccorruption.

Answer by ben.boycott
This is a really tough question, especially for Christians (like myself). I’ll offer my thoughts…but certainly not try to pretend to know everything.

The answer to this question depends upon the way we look at the world. Generally (and naturally) we look at the world from a man-centered worldview, and we ask this very question. “If God loves us, how can he eternally punish us in hell??”

We as Christians believe that the answer to this question lies in the seriousness of sin (a totally unintuitive concept in this culture, and I include myself here). We believe that we have all rebelled obscenely against God. He formed the stars in the sky, he directs the mountains where to go, he tells the vast oceans where to exist and where to stop. Then, he tells men what to do, and we look him in the face and say, “No. I’m not going to do that, I have a better idea.” If you can grasp just how vast is the separation between ourselves and God (no easy task, to be sure), then the question changes from “How can God sentence people to hell” and becomes “How can God, who is fully JUST and righteous and the opposite of sin, let rebels who are consumed by sin into heaven.” Like I said before, it is the difference between a God-centered and a man-centered worldview.

Well….my computer’s about to die and its late I’m not sure what I’ve written even makes sense. Please email me if this hasn’t answered the question or I can clarify for you.