Snatched from the Maw of the Orphan-Crushing Machine

  

This is the sort of remark from Francis that won the hearts of many a non-believer, but I don't get the appeal.  

In the first place, while Jesus' teaching on eternal punishment was as inconsistent as the rest of his teaching, it was a theme he returned to often enough that I see no reason to believe it wasn't dear to his heart.  Some scholars have tried to get around it by pointing out that his teaching on the matter wasn't the fully-developed doctrine the later churches produced, but one could say the same of pretty much all his teaching.  He wasn't a theologian or a scholar, he was a back-country faith-healer and end-times preacher, and even if every word ascribed to him in the gospels were authentic (not likely!), we'd have a very sketchy set of doctrines just begging to be filled in by later followers.

A number of Christian apologists have tried to scratch out hints in the gospels of a more conciliatory doctrine that doesn't involve eternal torment, but hints are all they have.  (Yes, the second-century Christian thinker Origen of Alexandria was one such; but he was declared a heretic, and he lived in a notorious hotbed of Gnosticism, so not many would endorse his ideas if they weren't desperate for an ancient precedent.  For example: the evidence is dubious, but most scholars seem to accept a much later rumor that he made himself a eunuch for the Kingdom; should modern Christians follow him in that as well?)  If Jesus did believe and teach that no one would go to hell, that would count against the reliability of the gospels as a source of his teaching.

I've noticed that many of the same people who let wishful thinking be their guide will also denounce Christians with dogmas they dislike as ignoring the overwhelming two-thousand-year bulk of Christian tradition.  When they do it -- and Hell is part of that tradition -- it's suddenly of no account.  I understand why they do it, but I'm not obligated to respect their reasons or their conclusions.

One more thing struck me when I saw the post above, though.  I've seen numerous variations on this theme on the internet over the years:

Why would Hell exist in the first place?  Why would you need to pay to stay or get out of it?  I've written about this before too: faced with solid ancient tradition about suffering after death, people just invent loopholes to get around it.  When the Pope let slip his rejection of two thousand years of Catholic tradition about divine Justice, that's what he was doing.  I wouldn't expect an elderly cleric to reject that tradition, of course: he has too much invested in it to do such a thing. But for non-Catholics and non-theists who get all excited about his qualms is, to my mind, like rejoicing over a child's lemonade stand raising money to save a few* orphans from the orphan-crushing machine.  It's the mildest, safest objection to a horrible, inhumane doctrine that, on top of everything else, is pure invention. There is no hell, there is no heaven, and anybody who claims to know how to escape one or get into the other is a scammer.  "Yeah, but he's a nice, kindly scammer who wishes nobody needed his snake oil!" should be embarrassing, but a lot of people think it's a sign of their good judgment and character.

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*Remember that Jesus taught that only a few would be saved, and most would be damned.  So "few" is precisely correct here.