Maybe I just need to stop thinking.

This is somewhat tied into my "See Who I Am" post and how a nonbeliever is viewed by evangelicals.

For a long time, Hell was presented -- or came across -- as a place where people would be tormented for all eternity. And it was a place where God sent you.

In recent years, that view appears to have been softened somewhat. It's no longer a place of torture, it's a place where there's simply no love, mercy, compassion, light, peace, all those good things. It's the absence of God, so it would be a place of darkness, despair, hatred, envy, rage, lust ... and God no longer sends you there. Rather, you send yourself there through your choice to not accept Him, and God loves you enough to respect your choice.

Okay. But when I start making the connections in this viewpoint, what it's saying, then, is everyone who goes there is someone who prefers hatred over love. Lust/greed over charity. Despair over hope. Envy over gratitude. The people in Hell prefer these negative things 100%.

My question to the evangelical would be thus: if your nonbelieving friend were to die tomorrow, s/he is only going to one place. Hell. And if you believe your friend is going to hell, then you believe your friend choose to go there because your friend wanted to go there. Thus, you believe that your friend 100% prefered hatred over love, lust/greed over charity, despair over hope, and envy over gratitude. Your friend wasn't attracted to anything good at all. In fact, your friend was a pretty ugly person.

A) Is this truly what you believe about your friend? After all, they choose to go to this ugly place, and since this was the place that attracted them the most, then obviously, there wasn't a lot of good in their life and B) why would you want to be friends with someone this ugly?