**
Let me tell you a little story. Hold on to your bladders, folks, because we’re about to take a TRIP STRAIGHT TO HELL!!!
(BTW, I feel obligated to remind everyone that I am not a sicko. If I seem particularly imaginative on the hell issue, let me remind you that I recently visited a torture museum hosted by Amnesty International. If you want to suspect anyone of being a sicko, I’d suggest that you look to the people who actually believe in this stuff, and believe it to be a good thing, and even, at times, seem to delight in the idea that people who disagree with them will go to hell.)
Let’s say you have two coworkers living in 1930’s Germany. One is a Christian, and the other is a Jew. The Christian tries to convert the Jew (let’s call her Miriam,) but he’s an ignorant dork and doesn’t do a very good job of it. Miriam (who is, by the way, very orthodox and observant, and loves God with all her heart,) listens with an open mind, but isn’t convinced. Miriam concludes that God made a covenant, and that He would never break it. Besides, Christianity just seems blasphemous to her, and the supposed proof that she was presented with just doesn’t hold up. In her mind, Christianity is tantamount to an insult to God, and she would never insult the God whom she loves so much by believing that He would break His word- at least, not without damned good reason. The Christian shrugs and tells himself the typical excuse: “Oh well. The good news is that my skill at proselytization doesn’t matter one whit as to whether someone goes to heaven or hell. She chooses to reject God, and that’s not my fault.”
Then the Nazis take over. The Christian manages to keep his head down and stay out of trouble. He dies of old age, and spends an eternity of bliss with God in heaven.
Miriam, who has spent all her life working for charity, has a chance to get out but stays behind to help others, and is sent to a concentration camp. And now, we apply the spoiler tag:
While in the concentration camp, she sees her baby, still twitching as it is skewered on a bayonet, tossed into a vat of boiling lye and hears it scream as its flesh is boiled from its bones. She herself is brutally gang raped until the ligaments supporting her uterus tear loose, causing her vagina to flop inside out and dangle bloodily between her legs. She dies soon of blood loss, much to her relief, because her great faith in God tells her that she can rely on God to keep His promises.
Then she finds that she’s in Hell. Whups! I guess God can change his mind after all.
The demons rip away Miriam’s eyelids, so that she cannot avert her gaze as she sees her baby thrown into a vat of lye. His cries cut her to the core of her soul as his skin is stripped from him, his flesh eaten but not consumed, burned for all eternity. Maybe Christians no longer believe in infant damnation- but the demons are masters of illusion, and are clever in their tortures.
With wheels shod in red-hot iron the demons smash Miriam’s limbs to pulp, reducing her to a bloody, squirming, shrieking thing like some boneless sea creature hauled up in a fisherman’s net. They weave her limbs into the fence of the City of Dis, where she must watch as over and over again ravens smash their beaks of broken glass into her lidless eyes, only to have them grow afresh so that they might be ripped in bloody gobbets from their sockets without end. And over and over, without pause, the demons use her in unspeakable ways until her violated flesh is no more than bloody tatters quivering with pain.
After countless ages of her torment, when her entire existence seems nothing more than pointless suffering extending without end into past and future, just as her last, faded memory of her earthly existence flickers before being extinguished forever and she is cast into an eternal darkness in which suffering is all she knows, all she has ever known, and all that will ever be, at that moment she knows true despair, for she knows that she has no hope.
And she wonders: why has God turned his back on me? Didn’t we have a covenant? Have I not kept His commandments? Haven’t I loved God with all my heart?
But we all know the answer. There’s no point in blaming God. She turned her back on him. All her fault, really, so no use whining.
And then that last memory of life is put out, and she truly becomes a creature, a native, of hell. For hell consumes her entire consciousness. She knows nothing of anything but foulness and degradation and pain, and never will.
Oh, BTW, you can find a recent photo of Miriam at the bottom of this page.
So, could we have some hallelujahs? Any fundamentalist here willing to go on the record to state that Miriam’s case is an example of perfect divine justice?