Punishment is a malfunction

This is my mantra for the day. I'm acutely aware of the fear of hell at the moment, because of the mini-vision I had a few hours ago. I was just sitting here trying to think of a way to talk to myself about it, and out popped the idea that love and hell can't coexist. I started with a thought about how god can't exist, because a real god who is loving would not put people into hell. That's a good one, but it's a little tired; I've heard it before and it has never managed to move me, perhaps simply because it was given to me by someone else rather than being my own.

I have recently discovered some new clarity on Yahweh's brand of morality. I find that the concepts of sin, evil, punishment, virtue, etc. (the morality accepted not only by Christians but by most people throughout time, from what I can tell) are totally repugnant to me. I realize now that when a parent punishes a child beyond what is helpful to the child, or in a way that harms the child, the parent is failing miserably in his duty. Thus, a punishing god is a malfunctioning god, not worthy of any praise whatsoever. That alone gets me only so far as to say that Yahweh is a terrible deity. But I look at the bible, the only source of "information" we have about Yahweh, and see that he claims to be loving and merciful. That makes him a liar at best, more likely a psychopath.

The good part here is that I see that such a god must be an invention of tormented, malfunctioning humans. No way would a being that far above us have such sick concepts rolling around in its head. Well, I was more confident of this when I first started writing this entry. Damn, it slipped away again.