Sam Harris on The problem of hell
Harris treats hell as a doctrine incompatible with any recognisable conception of a good God and as a lever by which religion sustains irrational belief.
Sam Harris's argument against the doctrine of hell runs through both The End of Faith (2004) and Letter to a Christian Nation (2006). His approach is straightforwardly moral: a doctrine that consigns finite beings to infinite suffering for finite offences — often for honest intellectual disagreement, or for being born into the wrong culture — is not a rarefied theological subtlety but a direct moral horror.
Harris is particularly sharp about the epistemic function of hell. The doctrine is, he argues, one of the most effective pieces of psychological machinery ever devised for suppressing rational inquiry. If you genuinely believe that wavering in belief carries infinite penalty, you will not allow yourself to follow evidence that points away from your tradition. Hell is thus not only a moral problem but an epistemic one: it trains believers to treat doubt itself as dangerous.
He also objects to the asymmetry that hell produces between religions. Because the major monotheisms assign hell to most of humanity — Christians to Muslims and unbelievers, Muslims to Christians and unbelievers — the doctrine guarantees that billions of sincere, thoughtful people are regarded by their neighbours as damned. Harris treats this as a self-refuting outcome: whichever tradition is right, the doctrine convicts a near-universal majority of humans of earning eternal torment, which should itself count against the tradition.
“The idea that a benevolent God would consign the vast majority of human beings to eternal torment for holding wrong beliefs is among the most morally indefensible propositions anyone has ever put forward.”