by C Michael PattonNovember 5th, 2013
Below is an email (edited) that I received recently. How would you respond? Please speak directly to John Doe.
“Dear Michael,
Right now I am in a crisis of faith and am in great need of your advice.
[He then talks about the abusive and legalistic Christian environment he grew up in]
Right now, intellectually I believe in double predestination but
emotionally I am a Universalist. If I allow my emotions to bleed into my
intellect then I will become a heretic and if I allow my intellect to
bleed into my emotions I will become suicidal. In other words, I can’t
handle the truth, so I lie to myself.
In an attempt to become consistent I read some of Jonathan Edwards.
His view seems to be that because God hates the damned, the saints in
heaven will also hate the damned and will rejoice over their misery. I
thought that maybe we as Christians should do likewise, so I watched a
bunch of YouTube videos by Fred Phelps (the “God-hates-fags”, funeral
picketing guy). He argues that God hates the reprobate more than Satan
hates the elect and that therefore we should hate non-Christians. I grew
up with a lot of abusive, unstable, racist, paranoid relatives so I
have seen what hate looks like. It’s a very ugly thing, but what’s
really scary is that there’s a part of me that enjoys watching Fred
Phelps; that enjoys the adrenaline that comes with stomping on another
human being with your mind. I watched Fred Phelps the other morning, and
for the rest of the day I felt like I wanted to fight somebody, so I
decided to not watch him anymore.
My question that I desperately need answering is: **How do you
believe in hell without becoming a suicidal psychopath?** All my life I
have struggled with mental illness and my main goal has been peace of
mind. I have sought peace in religion but many a time it has been an
aggravator and not a soother. I am in a part of my life where I’m going
through religious change and am afraid that I may abandon orthodoxy for
the sake of the emotional stability that I have so desperately sought
all my life.
I realize that such is dangerous because even benign quirks in
theology will lead to illogical patters in life. Right now I’m very
close to deciding to never have children because they’ll probably go to
hell (there’s a part of me that suspects that the vast majority humans
do) and it is cruel and evil to bring souls into existence that are
probably doomed to damnation. They’ll probably grow up in a world ruled
by homosexuals and Muslims. I have become so bitter that I have come to
often feel that God hates humanity; that He delights in our misery. I
still love God, but I’m starting to love Him in a Stockholm-Syndrome,
Battered-Woman, masochistic kind of way. There’s a part of me that feels
like I should never get married because my wife will probably go to
hell, in fact, it may just be better if I become super reclusive and not
have any relationships because everybody’s going to go to hell. There
have even been times when I felt like I would probably go to hell and
that I should torture myself in order to prepare myself for the
afterlife. Michael, I think I’m losing my mind.
People have told me that this should motivate me to evangelize but
every time I have tried to I make myself look like an absolute nut and
push people away from the faith. I think my mental health makes this
very difficult and I have come to think that maybe I have no purpose in
life. Maybe God just created me to suffer.”
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