I was just listening to the radio and heard something that made me deeply sad. Have you ever heard of Hell House?
If you haven't:
There's a guy named Keenan Roberts, an evangelical minister in Colorado, whose Hell House details the punishments in Hell that await all the different sins.
Each room is a different sin, or set of sins. So there's one for gay marriage, there's one for being a lonely geek, there's one for abortion, there's one for IV drug use, etc. (No, seriously. If you hang out alone and read novels and play D&D and listen to metal, you're going to slaughter your classmates and commit suicide, and go straight to hell.)
In Brooklyn, it's being put on by a small theater company, not because they believe in it, because they're devoutly secular liberals or at least claim to be, but for the technical challenge. They do a very good job, I hear. The abortion part is... the most disturbing, with the woman screaming and sobbing, "I made a mistake! My baby, my baby!" while being... operated on, or consumed, or something, by an industrial vacuum cleaner with surgical tools on the end. Or at least the thing is there as a fixture.
It's made even more disturbing, as the director of the company pointed out, when you realize that these people, who your natural reaction to would be to feel sympathy for, and to want to reach out to and help, are being depicted as people you should hate and despise and be satisfied in yourself because you're better than them.
WNYC's Studio 360 also had an Evangelical Christian professor from Columbia being interviewed about it. He pointed out that it's theologically very iffy, to start with, and besides, he said, Christians are tasked with bringing the Good News. Threatening people with damnation and eternal tortures... is not Good News.
But I have to say, threats and bullying are what we see - or, at least, what I see, coming out of Evangelical institutions, along with exhortations to politicians to do this or that in service of God, never mind that common sense, the Constitution, or human decency forbid it. It makes me very sad, as I know and have known many wonderful Christian people who I felt blessed to have met. Oddly enough, they're all either Catholics, Lutherans or Episcopalians; I don't know if there's any significance to that.
ANYWAY.
I do not grok this whole cast-people-into-the-flames idea. If you believed that gays, metalheads and women who get abortions are sinners, why would you demonize them? Shouldn't you approach them specifically and encourage them to turn to Jesus for salvation? Even better - share the Good News with everyone, regardless of who you think is a sinner and who you think is already in God's good graces, and that way all receptive ears will hear you and be reinforced in their faith in salvation through Jesus.
No?
I don't understand. Then again, I'm not a religious person, much less an Evangelical Christian.
[Sorry for the rambling. I did my best.]