“They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might,” (2Thess 1:9)
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Yeah, that, it’s unjust, inadequate, nasty and illogical.
It is just. The people who go to hell have deadened their conscience, have no love, only hate, thus they have themselves cut themselves off from God. And they do enormous amount of harm to others around them as a result of having no conscience and no empathy. Hell is the only place fit for them. Oblivion forever.
They’ve never known God. Where’s your empathy for them?
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Wrong! They have rejected God.
Empathy is for those who are humane. Those who are inhumane are only the devil. One has empathy for the victims of criminals, not for the criminals. And furthermore those victims, who are humane. If the evil kill each other, so much the better.
Whatever you say. Inhumanity is only human.
Except a man be born again he can not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
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Because of your sins, your death will bring Gods just penalty on you. The only way to be free from wrath is to be immersed and become one with Jesus’s death and resurection. That does not happen by default, it is a purposeful turning from a self centered, sinful llife now and putting all your confidence in Jesus death and resurrection and living a life of obedience motivated by love for Him.
There is no neatly divided population of “victims over here” and “criminals over there”. For any one crime there is, of course, a victim and a criminal; but those roles are not permanently occupied by the same sets of people; I doubt the criminal exists who has not also significantly been a victim (or very few, anyway).
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Ultimately God gives us all our entire lives to abide in him. Everyone who encounters the gospels will have the Holy Spirit revealing the truth to them and those who never hear the gospel are judged by their conscience and the law wrote on their heart.
Those who don’t have their names in the book of life are given the eternal punishment of being destroyed for a second and final time with no hope of resurrection and those found in it are resurrected to eternal life.
Well put… I love Chesterton here, in Father Brown:
“No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.”
“There are two ways of renouncing the devil,” he said; “and the difference is perhaps the deepest chasm in modern religion. One is to have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other to have it because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are so much divided as those two virtues.”
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So well said! 
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Welcome to the forum, Kitty! It is good to have your voice here!
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Human is made up of two vastly different groups that have no real commonality other than they have a human body.
The humane have a conscience and love thus they also have a form of love which is empathy and sympathy.
The inhumane have NO conscience and NO love so they also have NO empathy or sympathy.
There are sheep and there are wolves and yes, they are both animals but we need to distinguish between them if we are to avoid being eaten.
Where do you get this idea of some vast schism between people that are presumably good, and those who you seem to be painting as unredeemably bad?
As has been said by Solzhenitsyn: “the line dividing good from evil cuts through every human heart.”
Or on a bit more of the humorous side … “There are two kinds of people: those who think there are only two kinds of people, and those who don’t.”
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Solzhenitsyn is plainly wrong. Or, perhaps he was equating being “bad” with being “evil”. A person can do some bad action, but on reflection they will see their error and have remorse and want to make amends otherwise they live with a bad conscience.
To do evil, a person has to first deaden their conscience. On some other thread I discuss this but I can’t recall where so I will repeat it here. To deaden the conscience, according to my late, psychopathic husband, it takes two steps.
The first step is to do harm to others (human /animal) until they feel nothing, feel indifferent to the pain and suffering of the other.
The second step is to do harm and get pleasure from seeing the pain and suffering of the other. At that point the conscience is dead.
This is a conscious, free will, deliberate choice and action and it has spiritual implications because they sever the connectivity or love between their own soul and other souls. Thus they have hate or are disconnected from others spiritually. This chasm is irreparable. They have cross the abyss from whence there is no return.
I don’t know Chesterton and his Father Brown character, but I do know that people do not need to renounce the devil because the devil is not in them as a matter of course. Those that have the devil within them are part of the evil spirit and they have purposely invited the devil into their lives. Once a person invites the devil, he or she is stuck with them forever. They have sold their souls to the devil. There is no renouncing possible.
I believe that Chesterton alluded to that in that when we take our own way, we are not following God’s–similar to the way the Devil rebels against God.
What I find is unless I can forgive others, I can’t forgive myself. It takes a lot of practice. Thanks be to God who shows forgiveness as an example.
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Methinks Solzhenitsyn has had a bit more reflection and experience with this (on all those fronts - whether merely ‘bad’ or outright evil) than you have perhaps had. But that isn’t to deny the presence of very serious and pernicious evil that can take over a person’s life. It sounds like your own experience too has been formed and shaped by some extreme exposure. That must be a terrible thing indeed. May Christ’s mercy prevail in the end, as I have faith that it will.
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God’s way, regardless of what religion you care to name, is the Path of Righteousness and God has given us a conscience and love so as to be able to follow that path.
To forgive one’s self, as also to forgive others, there has to be a confession of wrong doing, remorse and a change of heart and a willingness to make amends. That means that the person doesn’t have to be brought kicking and screaming to the “negotiation table”,
God is not universally forgiving. After all he kicked Satan out of Heaven. He didn’t say “no worries mate, you’re forgiven”.
Forgiveness is a process. If another person is not even willing to admit to wrong doing and/ or has no remorse for their actions, then forgiveness is inappropriate action. It would not be what God wants us to do.