If you haven’t listened to this week’s “This American Life”, it’s so worth the time. It’s one of those where they dedicate the entire hour to one story, and it’s worth it, because it’s a fascinating story. Reverend Carlton Pearson is a protege of Oral Roberts, a lifelong Pentacostal who basically thought about religion and theology until he thought himself out of believing some of the most critical and illogical aspects of his brand of Christianity. Specifically, he decided that he couldn’t believe in hell. He was watching some TV footage of the genocide in Rwanda, and staring at all the people who are experiencing hell right now—-all while knowing that your average suffering person he saw on the TV was not an evangelical Christian, and most likely, in all honesty, never would be. (Rwanda is majority Catholic.) And these thoughts sent him on a tumble of logical thinking that most people who reject this belief or that are familiar with. It’s clear that the world through the eyes of evangelical, fundamentalist Christians is one where god is an absolute monster, toying with people for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense. He makes billions of people, swears he’ll save a handful who figure out exactly what he wants of them, and will condemn the rest to hell where they’ll be tortured for eternity. As Pearson put it, that means god is worse than Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Hitler put together, just in terms of the amount of suffering and death he inflicts. But he’s supposed to be a loving god that you’re supposed to worship with love. It doesn’t compute. Pearson realized to keep his belief in a loving god, hell had to go.
Apologists for religion—-including some atheists who condescendingly believe religion is for other, simpler people—-often say that people need religion for morality. But that doesn’t really make sense when you look at examples like this. Here’s a man who is still a devout evangelical Christian who believes in the blood of the lamb and all that other jazz, but who rejected a religious teaching because it offended his sense of morality. As it should. What made the whole thing even more fascinating was that Pearson got all these letters from people who conceded outright that the existence of a hell where the majority of people go was a moral outrage, but who nonetheless suggested that he best comply with god’s wishes. God, in other words, is a terrorist holding a gun to people’s heads. And, more importantly, if you’re moral you do everything in your power to save other people from the wrath of this evil, torturous being by spreading the, um, Good News. Their entire system relies on the belief that people are more, not less, moral than god. Jesus’ role in this is that he became a man, and thus basically adopted some of man’s morality, and he pleads with the vicious, nasty, vindictive god to show a little mercy to his creation.