Whenever someone brings up the fact that a being who sends people to hell must be a moral monster, the typical response by Christians is something along the lines of "God gives people a choice to accept his offer of salvation or not, and God is just giving those who don't accept his offer what they want by not saving them since they never asked to be saved."
Who said this is a Being who sends people to "hell"? The Bible does not say that at all....."hell" (sheol, hades) in the Bible is no more scary or torturous than going to sleep. There is no consciousness in death. If you are not conscious, you can't be tortured. (Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10)
People mistake the mistranslated "gehenna" for this fiery hell, when all it was in Jesus reference to it, was a garbage dump where fires were kept burning day and night to consume the city's refuse. Criminals who were executed for breaking God's laws were not considered worthy of a decent burial so their bodies were cast into gehenna where their remains were burned up...since they had no memorial tomb with their name inscribed, according to Jewish belief they would not be remembered by God in the resurrection. It was nothing more than a symbol for eternal death.
God actually sends atheists to where they themselves expect to go. How is that unfair?
However, this rationalization fails miserably and still makes the Christian god out to be a monster. For an analogy, consider a parent who is watching their child swim in a lake and can see that the child is drowning. Now suppose that the child does not ask to be saved or even outright rejects the parent's offers for help, and says "I don't need you, I can save myself!" Would a loving and benevolent parent who KNEW the child could not save themself sit back, watch the child drown and say "Fine. I won't save you because you rejected my offer" or would the parent save the child anyway? The parent who lets the child drown simply because the child rejected the offer for help is of course evil, and if this scenario happened in real life, we would immediately demand that the parent face prison time. Yet when Christians imagine their god doing the same thing, they call him "loving", "fair", and "just." Pretty ironic, isn't it?
What a ridiculous analogy. We aren't talking about children...we are talking about grown adults who have free will and who can make the choice to abide by God's rules or not. Since the penalty is set by the Law written by our Creator, as our rightful Sovereign, he has right to set the terms of our tenancy here on planet Earth. If we break his rules, he has the right to evict us. How does that make him a monster?
If you want an analogy, how about selfish brats dictating to their parents what they will and will not do? This undisciplined, self-serving attitude spills over into adulthood and then we have ungrateful adults who continue to behave as if they can still be brats and get their own way for the rest of their lives.
The attitude of "I can have my cake and eat it too" is a very foolish platform from which to make value judgments about the Baker. The potter does not dictate to the clay, the terms of his molding.
"I did it my way" might have been the name of a successful song some time ago, but in reality "doing it my way" hasn't really made for harmonious relations with other humans, has it?
Read your tenancy agreement and if you can't abide by the rules, how can you whine about your impending eviction.....
The Landlord sets the rules.....who else has the right?
Its a clear cut case of "shape up or ship out"....IMV