The best lesson is caring, not scaring.

Let me tell you a tale of two signs.

I’m talking of the sort of signs found outside of churches, with changeable letters– often displaying sermon themes, Bible passages, or invitations to bake sales. Where I live, you can hardly drive down a road for long without seeing one, although the church denominations are at least diverse– and display some quite different angles on religion.

The first sign I want to mention, on a wooden mailbox across the road from a church, stood by a beautifully painted house. Its message: JESUS HAS THE RECIPE SO YOU DON’T BBQ FOREVER. I did a doubletake when I saw this sign. Perhaps it was because of the sinister implication I thought of first: that Jesus had a recipe to make something better than BBQ when he eats you. But aside from that disturbing misreading, there was still something that made me read it as a threat. The full thrust of this sign was fear, making Christians afraid that if they don’t follow the exact steps in the recipe, they would be tortured for all eternity.

I thought: surely this sign is not going to make anyone happier. It can’t be comforting to be reminded that God is judging you and that one false step, one little substitution in the “recipe”, means eternal agony. It brings up the looming threat of hell, by way of mentioning that, oh, if you’re super-careful, it won’t actually happen. Although it talks about how not to go to hell, its only offer of consolation is to perhaps make you a little less afraid of the very thing that it just reminded you about. If it hadn’t reminded you in the first place, you wouldn’t be thinking about hell and you wouldn’t need the consolation. All in all, it’s a pretty scary sign, reminding people of the most negative aspect of their religion, reinforcing their fears.

The second sign was outside a plain brick church, one which frequently updates their sign with optimistic messages about helping one’s community. This sign read: GOD IS MORE POWERFUL THAN YOUR WORST FEAR. Assuming of course a benevolent god, as Christianity does, this is a reassuring sort of message: whatever happens to you, God is still even greater than that. It doesn’t remind you of anything to be afraid of; rather, it tells you that anything you already are afraid of, don’t worry; there’s something bigger and better and more important than it is.

I couldn’t help but think that I wish the person responsible for the BBQ sign would take a lesson from this hope-giving church. I’m not Christian, so perhaps I shouldn’t speak for Christianity, but I was always told as a child that Christians believe in a benevolent, loving, forgiving god; someone to comfort you, not to instil fear. Wouldn’t a good god want you to feel secure and happy, rather than constantly looking over your shoulder for Satan and worrying over whether you’re following all the proper steps to the letter? Wouldn’t he love you and let you trust your judgment a little to know how to do the right thing, instead of giving you a laundry list of “how to stay out of hell”? If anyone in this picture would want you to fear, it would be Satan, who is said to take pleasure in people’s suffering, not God, who is supposed to love you so much.

No matter what you believe about God or Satan or heaven or hell, my question for you is: would it make sense for a kind and caring god to want you to be afraid all the time? I, for one, don’t think so. Even if he has rules, he wouldn’t want you to tiptoe about your life, terrified of the consequences of breaking them. He would want you to follow them cheerfully and gladly, not with paranoia and anxiety. Because surely he wouldn’t want you to spend your life constantly being upset like that, not if he loves you even a little, and Christianity holds that he loves you a lot.

I also don’t think it makes sense to worry about hell nearly as much as people do. If God is indeed loving and kind and good, and if he knows all about you, then surely he knows what the world looks like through your eyes, and understands why you do the things you do. Even if he doesn’t like them, even if he thinks they’re wrong, he’s got to have some empathy for you because he knows your reasons. If he loves you and understands you, and if he is merciful as he is said to be, then surely he would not punish you as severely as that. Surely he would try his hardest to forgive you, and even if he couldn’t forgive, could he really bear to cast someone he loved so much into eternal torment? Why would he want to do that?

So many people seem to have this image of God being both supremely loving and willing to consign people to hell for breaking the rules. I think that anyone remotely as loving as Christians say he is would forgive everybody, easily, gladly, because he would want to, because he loved them. Yet I know a good many people who are less punitive than God is expected to be, people who wouldn’t inflict hell on anyone, let alone someone they cared for at all. It’s hard to imagine a god who is supposed to be completely good and completely loving and yet less merciful than many humans I know.

Regardless, even if you disagree with me on the above points, please remember your neighbour’s feelings, their worries and insecurities, and take care with their hearts. There’s no reason to scare people by reminding them of the possibility of hell all the time; if they believe in it at all, then they are surely doing the best they can, and fear won’t help them become better people. What they need to become better people is love and understanding and reassurance, so that they can come to feel safe and so that they can reflect it back to others. That seems like what a loving god would do, and what he would want humans to do, as well.