Christopher Hitchens on The problem of hell
Hitchens treated hell as evidence that Christianity is, in his phrase, a celestial dictatorship — morally and politically indefensible.
Christopher Hitchens returned to the doctrine of hell again and again, treating it not as an embarrassing theological leftover but as the clearest expression of what he considered the totalitarian logic of organised religion. In God Is Not Great (2007) and in countless debates, he argued that a God who creates conscious beings knowing most will suffer eternally is indistinguishable from a tyrant — and that the Christian tradition had built a vast machinery of threat around this single doctrine.
Hitchens particularly objected to the idea that Jesus had introduced hell into Western religion. The Hebrew Bible, he noted, has no developed doctrine of eternal conscious torment; it is in the Gospels that the furnace, the weeping, and the gnashing of teeth appear. For Hitchens, this meant the New Testament was in one important respect morally worse than the Old — it added an eternal dimension to punishment that had previously been bounded by death.
He framed the problem as one of consent and proportion. People are born into the world without their permission, given limited information, placed under temptation, and then, on one reading of Christianity, consigned to unending torment if they fail to believe the correct propositions about events in the Near East two thousand years ago. Hitchens treated this as the moral reductio of the entire scheme.
“The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey. The resulting dictatorship of guilt is more than a metaphor when applied to the Christian doctrine of hell.”
“You are created sick, and commanded to be well. And over you, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship — a kind of divine North Korea.”