Responding to Disturbing Claims that God Created us for Condemnation
Foreword, to Clarify:
The 'we all deserve Hell' mentality comes from either completely twisting what original sin actually means, or denying it outright. Original sin isn't a cosmic ledger where God writes us down as guilty and inherently offensive to Him from birth. It's a tragedy we didn't ask for. We live in a fractured Heavens and Earth. Adam's fall broke our human nature, leaving us spiritually shipwrecked and legally trapped in Satan's principality. God isn't the angry, alien judge demanding our damnation; He is the rescue party breaking into the prison to take us home.
Responding to the Claim:
A user's comment in response to another post about whether or not it's fair for God to sentence someone to eternal torment perfectly distills the spiritually and psychologically unsettling framework that comes from a very particular error:
"Nope. None of us deserve heaven. We all deserve hell. Mercy and Grace wouldn’t need to exist if fairness determined our destiny"
This is incorrect fundamentally.
God doesn't say we deserve Hell. Satan had a legal jurisdiction to keep people in a state of permanent death because of original sin being passed down via our blood (sin entered the world through Adam and Eve, per St. Paul's quote).
This new, wrong understanding expressed here is the byproduct of denial of the dogma of original sin.
This is also where we get the error of "penal substitution," which claims God the Father punished Jesus in place of us... Not at all the case, and this error causes resentment and confusion towards God whether one knows it or not.
In reply to this, a guy put forward "we didn't ask to be created," and he is right in his psychological venting despite receiving so many downvotes. We intuitively, deeply, cannot accept God created us to go to Hell, because He didn't, and it would betray His whole character.
The New Testament, Christus Victor: Satan took the bait and tortured a perfect God-Man Jesus. So, Satan overstepped his own jurisdiction, and in doing so, lost it all. Jesus flipped the script. Because Satan convicted, tortured and crucified a perfect Person, Satan forever lost the claim to torture and detain ANYONE. [Also see Our Lady of Fatima; she asks the children to tell the world to pray to her Son to save all souls, especially those in most need of His mercy].
Satan, however, at the end of someone's life, can convince a soul that they belong to him via the state of their conscience and behavior when they are apprehended by being outside of time and space.
Intercession and the Sacraments defend humanity against this fate. See Second Maccabees; Judas Maccabeus intercedes for God to place his brethren who used magical amulets to be placed in waiting for Resurrection, and not the place of contempt; God is obedient to love because He is Love.
God's Love IS His Mercy, IS His Justice- this is fulfilled by Purgatory, which is called by the angels "God's Mercy." Every prayer of intercession for a soul said IN TIME, is present at the Lord's Tribunal the moment a soul dies in the temporal world and shows up outside of time space.
Jesus died for everyone. The Catholic Church provides strength to all souls via the Eucharist to choose Purgation over Hell at the end of life. God doesn't condemn, but Satan awakens the sleeping conscience of the dead and makes them believe they are their sin. Good deeds offset the pain of sin that was never felt in life on Earth. Truth, which is God, feels painful to those convinced they are their own sins and behavior pattern. There are also those who consciously love their sins- yes, those people are condemned.
God factors in every aspect of one's life in His effort to sustain that person from running away from the light. The essence of the Final Judgement is even the worst sinner is seen universally by all of humanity in light of all of the bad things that happened to them that contributed to why it is that they themselves became sinful. God, being God, sees everything, God is empathy, but He is also Justice. One whole.
None of us "deserve Heaven" because we were never meant to die to begin with. Heaven is not a place, it is the pattern and the material universe is the design.
Disembodied souls are waiting to get their bodies back in the bliss of being part of the immaterial realm which is supposed to perfectly network with this one. Condemned souls aren't being tortured by God, it's that they are tortured by the Love of God, which they are constantly running away from and getting deeper into the concept of the darkness; the deeper they go, the more they hate themselves, the devil, and God- as well as the living. Jesus bless us.
Those who go to Purgatory have the courage to burn off what is not of God and also heal, they're healing from the damage done to them by having to pick up rationality of the corrupted world- it's not a fire, the cleansing fire is a spiritual allegory for the Love of God. Souls that go to Hell simply didn't have the courage or love inside themselves to accept the pain of sin in a constructive way.
New Heavens and New Earth are coming; the current Heavens are broken and missing a third of the angels- we are replacing them with our specific cocktail of virtues as LIVING STONES of the NEW JERUSALEM, which is a spiritual allegory.
On the Eucharist:
I highly recommend the testimony of the Church approved missionary and mystic (who has been to 120 countries) Marino Restrepo. If you search "You can rescue souls from hell through every Holy Communion - Marino Restrepo" [really should be titled (he didn't upload this) you can rescue souls from *choosing* hell through every Holy Communion] on yt, you'll find a pertinent 4-minute video.
Summarization:
- We are hostages, not criminals.
Pop-culture Christianity often says, "You sinned, God is an angry judge, and you're going to jail unless Jesus pays your fine." In actuality, humanity got kidnapped by evil. We are trapped in a prison we didn't ask to be in, and Jesus is the SWAT team breaking in to save us. The material world is fundamentally good but broken because a third of the angels fell. Human beings are replacing the stones of reality, and those evil spirits want to trick us into staying here forever like themselves. God came down so we could go up; He gave us coordinates.
- Hell is just God's love, rejected.
God is pure, blazing love. If you love Love, His presence feels like a warm fireplace (Heaven). If you have spent your life becoming hateful, selfish, and bitter, being forced to sit in pure love will feel like you're burning (Hell). You are torturing yourself by refusing to accept it.
- Purgatory is just spiritual rehab.
It's not a punishment; it's a cosmic decompression chamber where you learn how to handle the light of God after living in a dark, broken world. This change involves feeling the pain of forgotten or unknown sins, times we hurt people, etc., all of the missing steps of love (this world being a school of souls). In that state of awe, it can be painful, but it is an ascending state.