Evangelical Christians, who would (normally) deny the Biblical doctrine of annihilationism, tend to believe that God is omnipresent, and also that part of the punishment of hell is separation from God. There is a great irony to be uncovered here. On one hand, they hold that God will not totally destroy--vaporize--any unsaved beings, but on the other hand they say that the people who end up in hell will be separated from the deity they describe as omnipresent. The only way to literally be outside of the presence of an omnipresent being is to not exist in any form at all!
Thus for evangelicals to be simultaneously right about 1) God being present everywhere and 2) hell being separation from God, every being in hell would have to cease to exist. Indeed, the Bible does teach that I, if I were to die unsaved, truly would be reduced to a state of nonexistence (Matthew 10:28). But the Bible teaches that hell is an actual realm (Matthew 18:8), not merely the absence of unsaved beings, also teaching that the unsaved will actually go there, and that the destiny of the general unsaved is to be burnt to ashes (2 Peter 2:6). There are some specific exceptions to the total destruction (Revelation 20:10, 14:9-11), but the majority of God's enemies are described as eventually having their bodies and minds destroyed with permanence.
The fact that evangelicals denounce annihilationism as a perversion of Scripture while also saying that the wicked will be forever separated from an omnipresent deity can be quite amusing! Clearly, they either do not understand what they are actually saying, or they are redefining the concepts their words refer to, just as by eternal life they do not really mean eternal life, but a specific quality of eternal life in a certain realm. That the cognitive dissonance people can plunge themselves into when they refuse to be rational can be so blatant and yet so common is an unfortunate testimony to the intellectual inability of some people. If evangelicals actually exegeted the Bible with the same care that they might pretend to aspire to, they would discover the Biblical flaws of many beliefs absorbed into evangelicalism. Constructs of tradition are held up as truths, while truths are called constructs.
Even within the frameworks evangelical Christians use, they are often inconsistent. They assert that God is in all places, but still believe that every unsaved being will eternally suffer conscious torment, all while separated from God. And their inconsistencies do not stop here! They proclaim that God is immutably righteous, then shun Mosaic Law as outdated. They insist on individual moral responsibility, then engage in victim blaming with modesty teachings and the Billy Graham rule. They claim sexuality is a beautiful, good thing, then show by their actions that they deeply fear it. Their hypocrisy runs deep.
Of course, nothing about the inconsistency on hell is surprising, considering that evangelicals are often philosophical imbeciles incorrigibly committed to fallacies of their preferences, hesitant to even challenge the stupidity they have long accepted as indisputable truth. When Christian evangelicalism dies as an ideology, rationality will have fewer obstacles to overcome in order to take hold of American public consciousness. May it die soon. But, until then, evangelicalism will remain one of my favorite targets to intellectually dismember.
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