I know these points I’m making will cause some Christian eyes to roll, and I anticipate rebuttals in the comments.

But maybe some of you recognize that the idea of eternal punishment based on a few years of mortal life seems questionable.

Even if you have apologetics that rationalize why a loving God created hell, ask yourself: Are these always the most straightforward and reasonable explanations? What’s the real reason you believe them? Are they more likely to be true than the alternative explanations, or are you doing mental gymnastics to maintain a belief?

Here are 6 possible resolutions to the problem of a loving God’s hell:

1. God is not in control

Maybe it is true that God created hell for the fallen angels, and maybe he really did create the universe and deeply loved humanity, but then at some point around the time that sin entered the picture and things started to go wrong for his creation, he lost most of his power to exert his will on our planet — as though the whole creation business wore him right out.

So God in his exhaustion couldn’t deal with imperfect creatures, and sent us to hell because he had no energy left to create a different realm for humans, or because he was bound by rules that were out of his control. He’s indeed devastated by this reality, but he no longer has the power to change it, and he’s watching helplessly. Sending Jesus was the one final action he could muster to try to save some of us, but even that wasn’t good enough to save everyone unless they met specific requirements of belief.

Tragic, and confusing, but at least we’d know that God isn’t neglecting us on purpose.

2. God is malevolent

Perhaps God is completely in control, and set up the world exactly as he saw fit, knowing the outcome, and indeed we must choose Jesus or be sent to a horrible hell.

This could make sense if God is not actually benevolent. Maybe he delights in our ruin. Maybe the smoke of our torment rising up forever and ever is a smell that pleases the Lord like a burnt offering. Maybe he’s made salvation esoteric and exclusive because he enjoys torture.

A bleak outlook, but it resolves the paradox and we know where we stand.

3. Hell isn’t that bad

If God can’t stand to be in the presence of an unsaved sinner in the afterlife, maybe hell is simply another realm with the primary characteristic that it’s separate from God. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be a place of torment, or unpleasant at all.

Maybe heaven is for people who like sparkly gold cities and hell is for people who like forests instead.

If hell is a decent place, then God isn’t cruel for sending us there. It’s just the better place to be if you don’t love him. It also aligns more with the idea that we can freely choose to love or reject God, if one of those two options doesn’t lead to torture.

4. Hell is temporary

Maybe humans deserve to be punished for their wrongdoings. But since even the worst sins are finite in their impact, the punishment of hell must be finite as well — and when people have suffered enough for their transgressions, they will have paid the price, learned their lesson, and the punishment will end.

Maybe they will then enter heaven, or maybe their souls will be destroyed. Either of these options would be far more compassionate than eons of agony.

5. Hell is symbolic

Maybe hell is only a metaphor for the despair of being separated from God, and does not actually exist. In this case, God could more realistically be seen as loving, because nobody will be subject to never-ending torture, and instead it depicts the misery of living life on Earth without contact with God.

This might be compatible with the idea that the creation story is also symbolic; that we don’t literally live in a world created by God and face an afterlife dictated by God, but rather these are a set of metaphors — a Christian philosophical perspective that we can use to think about how we live our lives. It seems that liberal Christians often hold this type of view.

6. The Bible isn’t truth

If you’re convinced that none of these adjustments can be made, and the Bible clearly describes an all powerful and loving God who sends people to suffer forever — If you’re sure that’s the only objectively way to interpret the scriptures, and we must take it or leave it…

Maybe we leave it.

Maybe the whole premise is in fact contradictory, and this is evidence that the Bible is not divinely inspired, but rather it’s a human invention and therefore bears the marks of imperfection just like every other religion. Surely you’ve used this kind of reasoning to discredit other religions.

For me personally, the hell problem is just one of many that discount religion as a viable truth. When writing articles like this, I use language that implies that God and heaven and hell are real things, but I’m only doing so as a concession for the sake of communicating a point. I think God as conceived by any of the world’s religions does not exist.

However, maybe this viewpoint doesn’t work for you, so you must resolve it another way. I understand that.

Ultimately, if there is a conflict between hell’s existence and God’s other perfect attributes, then perhaps there’s something that’s been misinterpreted in the history of Christian apologetics that landed us at this untenable conclusion. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened, right? Especially if you’re a protestant, you already believe that Christian theology got it vastly wrong for the first 1,500 years of its existence. Couldn’t it have also been wrong about other aspects for 2,000 years?

So, which piece of the contradiction is most likely to be wrong?

God’s love, omnipotence, and omniscience are attributes that have always been ascribed to him, by the New Testament writers and by Judaism before that. They are key to the character of God. Without them, God’s would be fundamentally different, and it would shift the meaning of the entire Bible.

God’s justice is also a key attribute, but there’s no reason that justice has to include hell.

The idea of hell doesn’t have the same firm historical or theological foundation as God’s other attributes; the Old Testament doesn’t give any solid idea of what hell is. It mentions Sheol and Gehenna but these do not align with the Christian idea of a strict binary between an blissful heaven and a horrendous hell.

In fact, hell has a long history of different conceptions. Do some reading on the way it’s changed since ancient times and you’ll see that it’s a fluid concept open to re-interpretation. The ancient Sumerians had mythologies about “the great below” — a shadowy underworld where all the dead went, very much like what we see in the Old Testament’s Sheol. The ancient Egyptians included the concept of an accounting happening after death; a weighing of your soul, which dictates what happens to you next. The ancient Greeks had their wicked dead travel to Hades by way of “woe”, “burning” and “wailing” on the River Styx.

In the Greek New Testament, Hades is mentioned 10 times, Gehenna is mentioned 11 times, and Tartarus is mentioned once. These all get translated into “hell” but again, they don’t have the same meaning we associate with hell today. Since the time of Jesus, there have been quite a variety of interpretations of hell inside Christianity. Our typical view of hell wasn’t really established until the 5th century.

There are a lot of people today — Universalists — who interpret the gospel to mean that Jesus came to save literally everyone regardless of whether they believe in him. Far from being a heretical view, this idea has been around since the early days of Christianity, and there are numerous Bible passages that point to its truth.

If you ask me, Universalism makes Jesus’s love and salvation much more powerful. A God whose son died to save literally everyone regardless of whether they give him glory is far more selfless and, well, Christ-like, than a God who makes salvation conditional.

Setting aside the theological issues discussed above, hell is one of the most evil and destructive concepts humanity has ever endured. I can’t tell you how many people have been deeply traumatized by the idea since a young age. It has driven many to dysfunction and insanity. In my interactions with ex-Christians, it’s the most common piece of fearful trauma that endures for many years even after all traces of faith have vanished. Christianity should not be proud of this.

Even if you’re confident in your own salvation, you must live with the constant pain of believing that some, if not most, of the people around you who you love and respect will face unending torture. Hell makes people think of God as an abuser, and it coerces many to follow him out of fear rather than love — or to reject him completely for being so cruel.

Though I don’t believe hell exists, I know that the act of believing in it creates a real-life hell on earth.

The idea of never-ending torture creates such potent fear that people will do anything to avoid it. It is a psychological tool that has given religious leaders power over society. Today, it’s used to scare people into going to church, and to push them to try to save other people and bring them to church too. Combined with the admonishment that we must give the church our tithes, this is a surefire business model.

I’m passionate about speaking out against hell because many Christians are perpetuating a very damaging idea that they don’t even want to believe in, but have been assured is true by people who would seek to control them.

Though I’m not a believer, I can understand why people hold on to the ideas of God and heaven. They bring a sense of peace and security and purpose. What is to be gained from clinging to the idea of hell, other than fulfilling a revenge fantasy or feeling superior to others?

If your current sect of Christianity encourages you to believe that all humans who don’t hold the correct beliefs are evil and deserve to be tortured, you might be stuck inside a manipulative, destructive system of thought. I don’t want anyone to suffer from that worldview, so I hope that this article at least inspires some of you to look into other versions of Christianity that teach a more loving version of God.