Why There is Little Difference Between Those Who Advocated a Temporal Holocaust and Those Who Advocate an Eternal One

To My Fundamentalist Christian Friends who predict that all Jews, Muslims (and presumably Mormons, Catholics (or Protestants if you are Catholic), Sikhs, Janists, Native Americans (who have not renounced the faith of their fathers), free-thinkers, Buddhists, Hindus, and countless other adherents to faiths and traditions you condemn) will be punished eternally (and who consider this outcome good and praiseworthy), let me try to put in words why so many of us consider this sort of speech hateful and immoral.

That you may sincerely believe these words does not make them right or even forgivable. No doubt many National Socialists who harbored similar anti-Jewish sentiments went to their graves as sincerely convinced of the righteousness of their secular holocaust as you may be of the righteousness of your eternal one (let's not forget that the word holocaust denotes the place where a burnt offering was made to Yahweh).   If you sincerely believe that God will punish an entire race of people for having been born in the wrong place to the wrong family who practiced the wrong faith, then it really is not that much of a logical leap to support those who are simply advancing their torment by a few years (which by definition will asymptotically approach zero when averaged out with infinity).

Cloaking these ideas in religious garb does not make them less offensive or excusable either, especially since you have admitted to cherry-picking a single verse from a much more complex text that generally does not support your narrow and idiosyncratic interpretation.

Your assumption that morality is trumped by metaphysics, that all of life is a game show that ultimately comes down to whether we choose Curtain #1 instead of Curtain numbers 2 or 3, is so patently immoral a child could see through it (and only an adult employing sophisticated pseudo-religious legalism could not) - what sort of father would punish his children based not on what they did but on giving the correct question to an obscure historical question on which even experts (and half of all early Christians) disagreed?   Are we really to believe that Gandhi is in torment because he died a non-Christian but Timothy McVeigh may be in paradise because he was a Christian (as narrowly defined by you, that is believing that Jesus was the "Son of God" and not the Son of Man, as he himself claimed)?   Is not the moral of the Good Samaritan that we should not overlook doing the obvious right because of some complex religious formula (the priests who passed the man beset by robbers did so because they were afraid he was dying and that touching a dying body would require ritual ablutions; the Samaritan, free of such nonsense, saw a human being who needed his help and let his compassion succeed where complex religious formulations had failed). 

The idea of the blood of Jesus atoning for our sins, a metaphor that may have made sense to a Mediterranean audience, is frankly inaccessible to members of a society who recognize that not only is animal (or human) sacrifice cruel and immoral to the animal (or human) but ineffective at appeasing an angry god.  We have long since stopped offering animal sacrifices on the holocaust in the temple, sacrifices that were largely motivated by an insensitivity to the suffering of fellow creatures, especially other mammals, forgivable in a superstitious agrarian society that knew nothing of DNA (and therefore of our kinship to all animals, even the lowly earthworm, but particularly the large mammals that were generally preferred for slaughter), but patently immoral today. 

Beyond the cruelty of human and animal sacrifice, the idea of Jesus dying for our sins makes no sense, since he was executed almost 2,000 years before anyone alive today was born.  Unless we engage in some sort of Terminator-type backwards time leap, someone like myself whose ancestors were born in Northern Europe taking responsibility for the alleged failures of distant, peripatetic Mediterranean tribe to worship a god my ancestors would not have heard of for another thousand years (after the pope launched a Crusade to force them to convert or die) is historically and morally offensive. 

And when you consider the "sin" that the cruel torture and execution (pre-ordained by a father in the clouds who so loved his son he set it up so he would be captured, humiliated, tortured, and renounced - first by his followers, then by most of humankind) of Jesus was supposed to atone for, it seems pretty weak stuff - eating a piece of fruit (not an apple specifically as is commonly misbelieved, especially by fundamentalists) by Adam and Eve (not only Eve as fundamentalists used to justify the subjugation of women and the pain of childbirth, among other things).    How is eating a piece of fruit - because it tastes good - such a horrific sin?   Because it was from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?  If this was such a horrific sin, why did Yahweh place the tree within such easy access of Adam and Eve, and does his surprise and rage at their rather logical action not make a mockery of the whole idea of omniscience?   If I leave poisoned candy in a bowl on the table then leave my children alone with it, even if I tell them not to eat it, who bears moral responsibility if they do - the errant child or the irresponsible father?    (Yahweh warned - incorrectly as it turns out, the first of so many false predictions in the Bible - that eating this fruit would cause death, but this was not true for either Adam or Eve.)  Again, try to explain to a small child why a man - the only son of God, in your estimation - had to be executed in order to atone for this crime of illicit fruit-picking that was supposed to pass generation-by-generation in our DNA (but magically passing Mary, the mother of Jesus, if the Catholic doctrine of immaculate conception is to be believed). 

It seems such weak and cruel stuff.  If indeed Jesus was the Son of God, why did he not say so?  Why did he command, again and again, that the demons he supposedly cast out (who somehow knew him to be more than what he appeared) remain silent about his identity?  Why did he also command those on whom he practiced faith-healing not to tell anyone what he did (and why did his disciples violate this order by passing on the oral tradition that decades later was written down by scribes in what we now call the New Testament)? 
If the FDA is trying to get the word out that a dangerous medication has been recalled, it does not simply tell 12 close advisors and a few random patients, asking them all to remain silent.  It advertises, it proclaims the message from the virtual rooftops, it uses its police power to yank the dangerous medication from pharmacy shelves.  Why would Yahweh - with a much deeper advertising budget than the FDA and much greater police powers - not proclaim in similarly effective fashion the poisonous competing non-Christian doctrines, if indeed they are so poisonous?  Could it be that they are not?
Jesus never appeared to me (except perhaps through a grilled cheese sandwich someone posted on the Internet) or to anyone else except allegedly a handful of his followers, George Bush, and an occasional child - conveniently in a field or behind a bush.  Why this coyness when so many are slaughtering each other in his name?   The most benign interpretation is that the interpretation of the half of Christians who believed Jesus was divine was incorrect.  The more sinister interpretation is that he was not, but that Yahweh is indifferent to the suffering of the countless victims of the wars, pogroms, witch hunts, Crusades, Inquisitions, and genocides launched in his name.  When Christian Catholics were slaughtering Christian Protestants and vice versa, why did Jesus not appear and settle the matter once and for all?  Why the silence during the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, the Bartholomew's Day Massacre?

These are not legalistic, sophisticated questions of an overeducated psychiatrist with too much time on his hands, but questions that any school child (or Monty Python fan) could (and generally should) generate.  The fact that when my mother asked such questions while growing up, she was met with a savage ruler strike on the palm of her hand and a threat that she would go to hell forever and ever just for thinking them, and that when I raise such questions with my fundamentalist friends, visions of fire and brimstone are invoked yet again shows the fear the religious have of an honest debate.  Only those who know they will lose a debate will use terrorist threats to try to shut it down preemptively.    

Asking questions is not a sin; giving a lie for an answer is.  The same Bible that some use to justify burning their enemies alive also says the truth will set us free.  Indeed.

I know it is generally considered impolite to bring up these sorts of ludicrous inconsistencies, but so is telling everyone they are going to hell (and that the teller presumably is not).   This cosmic Schadefreude - the Bible makes clear that the sounds and smells (burning flesh) of those in eternal torment is necessary to heighten the pleasure of the righteous, who can witness the infernal torture from their perch in heaven - is not only immoral, but deeply undermining to the purported goodness of these saints.  Where is their compassion, sense of justice, or even basic proportionality (punishing someone infinitely for a finite sin, especially one as trivial as what one believes about a distant historical event, is like giving someone life in prison (with daily water-boarding) for speeding).

I have heard all the counterarguments:  that even though this strikes us as immoral, it must be true because it is in the Bible.  That what we believe in our hearts should be trumped by the legalistic translations of scribes we never met.  That in the end what we see, think, and believe does not matter.  That obedience and geography are more important than morality and logic.

To which I ask, why then should you be any more confident in your belief in this hateful doctrine and your use of reason to choose what you admit is one verse of all the possible thousands of verses of the dozens of known sacred texts on which to place your eternal bet?   Casting stones at those you believe are sinners may get a rise out of them, but are you really so confident that those vitriolic words and actions will be forgiven?  Isn't there a risk that your projections of eternal torment on those who disagree with you (in this narrow question) are themselves sinful, a sadomasochistic Stephen King fantasy dressed up in Biblical clothing? 

I hope that Jews, Muslims, free-thinkers, and Christians of good faith read carefully what you wrote, and realize that people who hold such views cannot be on the side of someone you think will burn in hell forever.   Why should you treat someone with decency and compassion if you are convinced that God won't?    If you really believe God hates an entire class of people, and you have established that this God is perfect and to be praised and worshiped, then how can you escape the fact that you too have a Biblical obligation to hate this class of people too?  This is the ugly underbelly of fundamentalism and it is why I will continue to speak out so forcefully against this sort of hateful nonsense.