In today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “reason,” the barmaid suggests that both Jesus and Mo are going to hell. I am puzzled; why would they? They are prophets and, in Jesus’s case, the son of God/God. 
Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ hell
November 13, 2024 • 9:00 am
She’s not saying Jesus and Mo are going to hell, she’s saying they’re going to spend eternity with the deity who tortures his own creations by sending those creations to hell..
Precisely!
My thoughts exactly.
My interpretation also.
Yup
+1.
Might not spending eternity with such a deity count as spending eternity in hell?
Classic wit from this comic!
I think the bar maid meant “you are going to spend an eternity with Him” … “In Heaven”. Her point might be “how can you want to spend an eternity with a God in Heaven when he sends people to suffer in hell”. An alternative response, at least from Jesus, might be that God gave us free will and if we use our free will to reject God, then we are choosing to live without our Creator for eternity, which might be the definition of hell since God designed our spiritual DNA to desire a relationship with him for our happiness.
My spiritual DNA must have been in the deletion responsible for my inability to cook anything that tastes good.
The question I posed to myself at 15 when I became an atheistically leaning agnostic: how can a merciful, just, and all knowing god allow children to be born who will make choices that will lead them to suffer for all eternity? There is no justice or mercy in that construct so my whole religious foundation crumbled. I went searching for a new one. That bucket is still empty. 🥴
But there is mercy if one chooses it, through redemption and the grace of God.
God knows that no human is perfect and that we all sin, and thus we are given a chance for forgiveness and eternal life through him.
We are given an instruction manual in the form of the bible and the choice to follow it or not. If you choose not to, then that’s your choice for your path. We have free will to sin, and free will to ask for saving, and to keep asking to God for forgiveness as we keep sinning. Justice is meted out based on adherence to God’s laws and our repentance. We are also encouraged to help others along in their journey.
At least that’s how I would steelman it briefly for most Christians. Calvinists would have a different take on free will. Catholics prefer their requests for forgiveness in the form of gossip to the priest.
Yeah, we’ve all heard it before, and these rationalizations are pathetic. “God knows that no human is perfect”… well, I guess “He” would, since He is the “Creator” that supposedly made each one of us exactly who we are. Saying that people have “free will” is just a cheap, meaningless dodge. The omniscient god gave us free will to do things he doesn’t know that we will do? It’s a nonsense; religious apologists just want to have it both ways.
Why even have hell, unless “He” plans to use it? The notion of a “kind and loving” god creating humans that he knows he will torture for eternity is a description of the stupidest, cruelest game ever conceived.
Yup, God’s version of The Hunger Games.
Actually she is suggesting they are going to heaven, to spend eternity with a god who knowingly creates humans that will suffer for eternity.
“Deeply-held belief” is a phrase that is meant to inoculate the user from criticism. When I read or hear it—as I do all the time—I am immediately triggered (phrase intentional) to think bullsh*t. Here it appears in the first sentence.
My definition is a little more basic.
Barmaid: do you want by choice, spend your eternity with an arsehole.
Depends on the available choice of alternatives I suppose…
In a Gary Larson cartoon back in the days of smoking sections, one of the Devil’s minions is greeting a new arrival at the Gates of Hell: “Do you want infernal or non-infernal?…. Ha ha ha, it’s all infernal. I just love saying that!”