The New Testament is all about love. Sure, there was some practices promoted in the old testament that could be considered a bit brutish by today’s standards, but Jebus fixed all that, not by recanting any of those barbarous edicts, but by saying ‘love your neighbor’. So you see, all you christian naysayers, the new testament represents a much nicer and loving image of god. Oh, yeah, one more thing, he also invented hell.

I was quite shocked to learn that the old testament doesn’t speak once about a lake of fire or eternal suffering anywhere within its dreary pages. Brimstone and torture that lasts forever was introduced by the new testament. Now up until I learned that, I was of the mind that the new testament was just as horrible as the old, but with this new tidbit of knowledge I find that the new testament is far worse than the old in terms of brutality and moral perversion.   Allow me to illustrate.

For this thought experiment, we need to be able to quantify the amount of suffering, or evil, that a person could do in his or her lifetime. Just for the sake of humourous triviality, I will call the units of this quantification “sin points”.

Let’s say we have an absolutely wonderful person, a real saint. Nice to everyone, very giving goes the extra mile to make the world a better place. Now, people being the fallible entities that they are, it wouldn’t be realistic to say that this person would acquire zero sin points throughout his life, so let’s say someone like that would only get one. The average person, let’s say, would get something like 1000 sin points in their life (that first guy was really REALLY nice) and your average rapist murderer type person would get 1 trillion.

Now, since we imagined one of the best people that could exist (only one sin point, for goodness sake!) lets also imagine the worst. This individual not only hates people enough to do horrific things to them, but through some unlucky circumstance, he also acquires the longevity and resources to take out this hate on more people over a longer period than anyone ever has in history. Imagine if, say, a Hitler type decided that anyone who did not have green eyes deserved much worse than death. So, this super Hitler successfully creates a worldwide totalitarian regime wherein he lives a long life of torturing billions of people death in the most excruciating ways possible. Even after his death, it takes the globe about 3 generations to recover from super Hitler’s reign of terror. Now this is one bad hombre. How many sin points does he get?

Well, a murderer gets 1 trillion. If the murderer uses torture, let’s say, it’s upped to 1 trillion squared. Multiply that by the number of people Super Hitler tortured to death (let’s say 10 billion people, just to say he was extra mean) and square that for all the suffering involved in the global recovery (a bit excessive, but we are making this guy the worst possible person) and just for good measure, lets square it again. Grand total that’s 1X10 to the power of 128 sin points (that’s 1 with 128 zeros after it, in case it’s been a while since your last math class).

Wow, that guy sure has a lot of sin points built up. Now then, let’s take a look at the prospect of justice in the hereafter. Let’s say there’s a god and he figures that, for every sin point worth of evil you cause in your life, you have to endure 1000 years in hell to make up for it. That means our super good guy (his name is Ted), for his one sin point, has to endure a millennium of unbearable torture to make it into heaven. I’d say that’s pretty harsh, but then, who am I to argue with a vengeful god?

Of course, this means much worse things for the average person than it does for our super good guy. The average person would spend 999,000 more years in hell than our super good guy, for being average. That is a lot of time with the ‘ole flaming thumb screws.

But lo, what does this mean for the Super Hitler? My goodness, he’ll be suffering quite a bit. According to the rule, he has to endure 1×10 to the power of 131 years in hell to make up for his life. But lets say that, for such a special case, the celestial judges call for some extra heavy penalties. Instead of the lowly 1000:1 ratio, for this guy they are going to square his sin point total, and then square it AGAIN to determine his allotted punishment. That would be 1×10 to the power of 1012 years in hell!

To sum up of all this, we have a super saint of a guy serving a millennium in hell, an average guy serving a million years, and the worst possible human ever serving more time in hell than any of us could comprehend. I would hope that most of you would agree that these are overly harsh punishments their misdeeds. And the point of this lengthy thought experiment is to note that these extreme sentences are finite. They end. At some point, the punishment stops.

Now then, compare this with the actual concept of hell. EVERLASTING torture. Compared to eternity, that extraordinarily harsh and unimaginably long sentence of 1x10to the 1012 years is not even a blink. That is what infinite means; any number you could possibly conceive of is insignificant in comparison.

The conclusion of all this is that it is impossible for a finite entity (like a human) to earn an eternal consequence, good or bad. Thus, any deity that would condemn anyone to a fate of eternal suffering must be classified as infinitely sadistic, cruel, and amoral. Even if hell housed only one soul, the very worst person ever, the injustice of that sentence would infinitely outweigh any amount of bliss that everyone else got to experience in the afterlife.

If anyone ever tells you that Jesus is a god of love, their statement is an affront to the notion of love in the highest severity. If anyone ever says that brutality only exists in the old testament, their statement betrays a complete absence of consideration. Any religion that preaches of an eternal hell is one of hate and horror, no matter how many messages of “love” they use to cover it up.