So another Halloween has come and gone and with it the perennial “Hell Houses” that the fundies like to host. I’m sure they’re really fun, but I’ll pass. This year, in the wake of teen suicides by bullying victims, Wilmont Place Baptist Church in Oklahoma City held their version called “Judgement House.” Here’s a report by the Oklahoma Atheists on one of the scenarios in this entertaining attraction:
Rachel is a teenage girl who was poorly raised by drug-dealing parents who do not show her much love, and as a result she now lives with her grandmother and dresses like a goth. She is persuaded by her pious grandma to hang out with the church youth group and goes off to church camp, where she is ruthlessly mocked, maltreated, and ostracized by Christian youth….
At camp, Rachel gets the chance to hear a sermon about Jesus, however, just after hearing the gospel message she is given the news that her grandmother has died. …In the next scene, she swallows a few pills, scrawls suicide note expressing her wish to escape from suffering, and then has a prophetically hellish drug trip while writhing on the bed in the throes of death…
In the next room…a stern archangel…adjudges Grandma as saved, and Rachel as damned, based on whether they had believed in Jesus and prayed the right prayer. Grandma forgets all about her beloved granddaughter’s plight and skips off happily into eternal bliss. Rachel, however, remembers her Grandma as the one person who has shown her love and loudly calls for her, but is told by the stern angel that “She cannot hear you now” just before damning her to hell for her unbelief.
…Next we are taken to Hell, in which we find Rachel being pushed around and bullied and mocked once again…. It would appear that Hell is not without a sense of irony, torturing Rachel in the afterlife with nasty echoes of her short but unpleasant Earthly existence.
I’m sure this was not a coincidence. It is a watered down version of the very real suicide of a Norman, Oklahoma 19-year old and the other teens who have taken their own lives. Note that they made the victim in “Judgement House” a sympathetic character.
That wouldn’t matter to these people. “Rachel” didn’t say the right magic words. In their twisted imaginations, heaven is filled with otherwise detestable people who believed in Jesus.
They really believe this garbage. They have no idea how shockingly immoral they really are. Oh well, I guess they’re not the only ones who can be “judgemental.”
(Thanks to Jerry Coyne and ERV.)