If You Give a Mouse Damnation

Yesterday I had someone accuse me of making little ones stumble. The accusation was made in the form of a little imprecatory threat you might see needlepointed onto a throw pillow:

I assume they meant millstone, but no matter. I’m not much of a swimmer, so casting me into the sea with a life preserver around my neck probably would have the same effect. It’s funny how differently this type of warning looks when you have the mindset of interpreting people’s language as a reflection of them instead of a reflection on you. There was a time when I would have needed thick skin to receive that comment and not take it personally.

But now, my immediate instinctive reaction is to think, “This poor person has arrived at a state in which they would sooner threaten someone with drowning than stop to reconsider their convictions.” And, just to be clear, this wasn’t one of those situations where they didn’t mean it to come across in a threatening way. This person doubled down and reiterated that the best outcome of my posts would be for me to drown.

So allow me to double down and reiterate that I do not take this personally. That comment has nothing to do with who I am. Moreover, the propensity to take it personally and allow it to hurt my feelings isn’t natural. That is a trained response I learned in the church, including lessons based on verses like the one this guy misquoted in my general direction. It took a long time to get to a place where someone wishing I was dead wouldn’t hurt my feelings, but here we are. Learning to see those statements as windows into the minds of their speakers disarms them completely. Death threat, where is thy sting?

But it does give me occasion to deconstruct the effects of believing in eternal hell. I’ve looked at this before with a focus on how believing there’s no crying in heaven affects our views about sadness but this time I want to analyze how a belief in hell affects the way we treat people every day.

To brighten things up, let’s look at it like an If You Give a Mouse a Cookie book. You know, if you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for some milk. When you give him the milk, he’ll probably ask for a straw, etc., etc.

Well, if you give a mouse damnation, if you tell him there’s a hell, he’s going to think he should tell people about it. And when he tells people about it, they’re not going to believe him. And when they don’t believe him, he’s probably going to wonder what God does when people don’t believe Him. And when he thinks about this, he’s going to realize that God gives up on people at some point. And if he thinks God gives up on people, he’ll give up on them too. And once he gives up on someone, he’s not going to mind causing them pain. And when he causes them pain, he’s going to see that person as the loser and himself as the winner. And when he sees himself as the winner, he’s going to feel better about himself and about his beliefs.

You see how this goes, right? Granted, people handle these situations in different ways. It takes a very tenderhearted person a lot longer to give up on people, but they still do it. They still ultimately believe that God’s undying love doesn’t overrule His undying wrath. They still believe at some point God in His sovereignty (?) is no longer responsible for what happens to people. His infinite power can’t change a person’s heart . . . except for the billions of times it supposedly does.

Not every Christian believes this, and this isn’t meant to be a referendum on Christians. I just want you to see a glimpse of how believing in hell the way church tradition describes it ultimately gives people license to inflict pain, to justify it, and to feel good about it.

There are times I still feel this way. There are people in this world I’ve wanted to cause pain. Imagining it doesn’t make me feel bad, quite the contrary. But when I reflect on what those impulses say about me . . . I don’t like what it says about me. I don’t want to be someone who gives up on people. I don’t want to be someone who thinks the solution is to hurt people or to destroy them.

I don’t have all the answers. I just want to be a person who always looks for a better way.