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I recently had an email exchange with someone (on a pretty good and amicable level, fear not) on the topic of religion. One thing that came up was the common Christian theme of free will , which supposedly justifies Hell. Humans, the argument goes, enjoy the privelege of free will. We may freely choose to believe in God and go to heaven and enjoy eternal bliss; or we may freely choose to reject God, in which case we will go to Hell. (I disagree that belief is a simple matter of choice, but this is tangential to the topic du jour.) I responded to this with an analogy:
Suppose I am the supreme ruler of a kingdom. I make a royal decree: You may wear any colour of clothing you want. You have a totally free choice in the matter. Your will is unbonded by mine. The only catch is that if I catch you wearing anything but green, I'll throw you in the dungeon, pull out your nails with pincers, and crush all the bones in your hands and feet. Still, you're free to choose that.
The analogy should be pretty obvious. The law of the land does not, in effect, say that you are free to choose what clothes to wear. Rather the law (whether we call it such or not!) demands that you wear green, and enforces it with a grisly punishment. If I tell people you're free to choose , that is merely a cruel mockery. Free will is not applicable under coercion.
The chief differences between my analogy and the biblical version is that the crime being considered is of a much more totalitarian nature in the Bible: Not a matter of doing, but a thought crime—I am, in this view, to be punished for the crime of not believing in a story that reason and evidence do not (in my view) support; and that the punishment is much worse—my hypothetical king merely tortured you for a little bit, while the Christian Hell is eternal torment! (Mark 9:43, Luke 16:19–28, …)
As an aside, I think that this issue is morally important. I consider any mainstream Christian who believes that I will go to Hell for my views malicious. I am of course personally quite untroubled by thoughts of Hell, being very skeptical indeed of its existence. However, if a person believes that I: God exists; II: God is all-powerful; III: God is perfectly just; IV: I will go to Hell for my unbelief, then I think that said person bears me malice. The reason is simple: If you believe that God will send me to Hell for my unbelief (IV), and God is all-powerful (II), then clearly (you believe) he has a choice in the matter and chooses to subject me to eternal torment. (I do not believe in any gods at all, but I assure you I would not make the choice of eternal torment, so this is not a simple free will issue.) As per (III), his decision was, in your opinion, a just and fair one. Ergo, you think it is fair that I should suffer eternal torment for not believing.
I've actually had someone tell me that they hold all of the aforementioned beliefs, and this person had the gall to take offence at my reacting unfavourably.
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