The Nature Of Destruction

All destruction involves the total loss of something.  What does this mean?  Does destroying the roof of a car but not the rest of it destroy the entire vehicle?  No, but the  roof of the car no longer possesses its former shape, appearance, or its very existence on a macroscopic scale depending on what was done to it.  In certain ways, even slight destruction always entails the loss of one quality or another.  It is impossible for this to be any other way.  Otherwise, nothing would be destroyed.  Nothing would have or could have been changed.  There would be no difference between an untouched, intact item and its marred counterpart.

A good reputation being destroyed literally requires the nonexistence of the former positive reputation (though reputation is only a pragmatically useful illusion or irrelevance that many people actually take seriously while not recognizing it for mere hearsay).  Peace in a relationship being destroyed means it has been lost, that it was annihilated by some event, mental or physical.  When a business has its financial viability destroyed, to the extent that its economic flourishing ended or reversed, its profitability was destroyed.  The word destroyed might not always be the term widely used in some contexts, but it is applicable because the concept behind the word is relevant.

Even the partial destruction of something, the perishing of just one of its aspects, really involves the total loss or annihilation of that element.  How, then, could people be destroyed in hell while never actually reaching a state of nonexistence of the mind?  The mind is the self, and the Bible clearly says it will be destroyed along with the body in hell (Matthew 10:28).  It more plainly says that the soul will die (Ezekiel 18:4) and that death is the deserved and looming fate contrasting with eternal life (Romans 6:23, John 3:16), and still so many Christians and non-Christians, in their and assumptions and cultural conditioning, think that it teaches a hell of eternal conscious torment!

Words mean whatever is intended by them, yes, but destroy as even evangelicals use it refers to the process/act of eradicating something.  Just like no one rationally thinks the concept of death is that of being tortured forever, not that the word itself matters, no one can rationally believe that the nature of destruction is that of remaining in existence forever.  A thing that is being even slowly destroyed would at some point by logical necessity cease to exist, for every being or object is finite in this regard.  One could not eternally destroy a person without eventually rendering them nonexistent.  The Bible does not say this, but this is an independent, logically necessary truth that the real Biblical doctrine of hell is entirely consistent with.