Because I’ve lately received a lot of emails asking me about hell, I thought I’d say this, which to my mind is all anyone—or certainly I, anyway—needs to say on the matter: *
“Hell is real” is an absurd declaration.
“Hell is not real” is an equally absurd declaration.
Bible or not, no one knows what happens to people after they die. Sorry, evangelicals, but all the passionate conviction in the world does not and cannot change this.
If God wants to withhold from people the knowledge of what happens to them after they die, I trust that S/He has an excellent reason for doing so. I also trust that God has given me and every other human being the ability to figure out what that reason is.
After thinking about it long and hard, I realized that the answer to the question of what happens to us after we die lies in the question itself.
If you persist in asking yourself why you cannot know anything about the afterlife, you will discover everything you need to know about this life.
You will find that ignorance of death creates ever-fresh knowledge of life. That’s what it does. That’s what it’s for.
Keeping us ignorant about death is meant to make us geniuses at life.
It’s meant to keep us in the moment.
It’s meant to bring us into fully trusting God. (Since, ultimately, what choice do we have?)
Trusting in God eradicates our fears.
Being fearless frees us to live in the moment.
And what happens to us when, trusting in God, we fearlessly live in the moment?
We do what is most natural for us, we do what we were created to do. We love.
We love, we love, we love.
We love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
*Well, that, and this.
I’m the author of UNFAIR: Christians and the LGBT Question:
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