Short argues that the typical portrayal of God - and the ideas of heaven and hell - by mainstream churches is incorrect and not in line with Biblical teachings, and the concept of a heaven that only some can enter, and the alternative of a burning eternity in Hell, presupposes God not as a being of love, but an entity who torments people out of pure sadism, and as such, is more likely to drive people away from Christianity. Short points out that the idea of hell as a place of burning torment is not an idea derived from the Bible, but from the literary device in Dante’s Inferno. Short argues that the Bible provides that all persons get into heaven (not just a select few), and the hell the Bible speaks of is not a place one goes to after one dies, but the suffering one goes through while alive if they become separated from God. This misreading of the Bible is the type of error, Short argues, that for those who believe in the goodness of people, would therefore be more likely to encourage them to choose atheism. “If I had to believe in that sort of monster God that most mainstream churches are proposing, I’d still be an atheist, too.”
Short also argues that, atheists tend not to focus upon the concept of the afterlife, because, if one dies with nothing beyond one’s life, then whether someone is good or bad, they get the same result, annihilation, and the only logical course of action for any person in such a state to live would be nihilism, to live for oneself without regard to how it affects others. It would mean that someone like Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin would, at the end of their life, receive the same result as Mother Teresa; no matter how bad or rotten you were, you get the same result as someone who was the holiest of holies. Also, he points out that if human beings have no existence beyond this life, “then the murder of six million Jews during The Holocaust is of no more significance than the killing of six million cockroaches when a tenement building is fumigated.”
He quotes a speech by a priest in the book The Brothers Karamazov, who makes the point that morality cannot exist without immortality, because if there is nothing beyond this world, then human beings are the same as animals (we do not have a soul), and as a result, anything is permitted.
