It should be no surprise by now that I do not believe in heaven or hell. I wrote about that very topic here.

It amazes me how many evangelical Twitter Christians, when they run across an atheist, LGBTQ+, liberal Christian (lay person or pastor), or anyone they disagree with, jump straight to the “YOU’RE GOING TO HELL!” card. The only way to avoid hell is to read the bible and “get right” with (their version of) God who just so happens to hate all of the exact same things as the person tweeting the message.

I have heard hell described in a few different ways. There’s the usual, cartoonish hellfire and brimstone, being held in a cauldron of hot lava and poked and prodded by red devils with hooves and pitchforks. If you watch enough classic Tom & Jerry, you know what I’m talking about. There’s the version where sinners are separated from God for all of eternity. As an atheist, this seems like a continuation of life, so whatever. One other version I’ve heard of is the idea that sinners would be subject to the absolute worst thing they could possibly imagine and beyond. In that case, I’ll be going to heaven and forced to worship at the feet of an evangelical god. Either that or I will go to a place where the only music is John Mayer and Coldplay, which would be downright evil. Luckily, I don’t believe any of this, but there is one thought that horrifies me.

I have always considered myself a supporter of rights for marginalized groups such as LGBTQ+, women, minorities, and the disabled. This is a big part of who I am and a part of my core being. In order for me to conform to the evangelical god, I would have to stop all of that, becoming a different person altogether. Instead of embracing the people I’ve come to respect and admire, I would have to try to convince them that they are filthy and sinful and are going to hell unless they change who they are and conform to a way of life prescribed by a supposed authority who pretends to have knowledge that he can’t possibly have based on his, and only his, interpretation of an old story book that has been written down from oral traditions from a decades or centuries-long game of telephone, translated from dead languages into newer languages with only-approximate equivalent words, rewritten by scribes who likely had their own agendas, compiled, edited, debated in committee, translated again, interpreted, recompiled, misprinted, and finally declared to be the absolute truth by a man who was elected by other men and said be chosen by God. How could it possibly be wrong?

No, I’ll stay who I am. If the evangelical god is the one true God and he doesn’t like who I was in life, then he doesn’t deserve to have me in his presence. I’ll take hell…and hope that I don’t have to hear “Your Body Is A Wonderland”.