One of my favorite shirts says, “There is no hell be kind anyway.” I like it because it expresses something I believe about our responsibility to one another. Kindness matters here, in the lives we are living and the encounters we are having. Occasionally, the shirt earns a remark, including the familiar suggestion that I am going to hell because I do not believe in hell. There is a certain philosophical awkwardness to that exchange. Someone reads a sentence encouraging kindness and responds by telling me I deserve eternal punishment. I sometimes wonder how much of the second half of the sentence they heard.
A recent encounter stayed with me and led my thoughts somewhere I had not expected: toward consent. We usually discuss consent in the context of our relationships with other people, particularly where intimacy, vulnerability, and differences in power are involved. Yet once I began thinking about it, I found myself asking whether the same concern should inform how we evaluate the relationships people describe between humanity and our idea of god. If love is supposed to be freely given, what happens to that freedom when refusal carries a threat of endless suffering?
Consider something we should have no difficulty recognizing. A man who sexually assaults a woman violates her bodily autonomy. His desire does not create an obligation on her part. Neither his confidence that she ought to want him nor his conviction that he deserves her affection changes the meaning of her refusal. Whatever he thinks of himself, her consent remains hers to give or withhold. We understand the wrongness of his actions partly because we understand that another person is never simply an extension of his wishes.
Sexual assault and a threat of damnation are different harms; I do not equate their experiences or consequences. The comparison concerns a particular moral logic: the powerful party’s claim that another person’s refusal has no standing. It asks whether someone’s supposed greatness entitles them to another person’s submission. If we reject that entitlement in human relationships, I think we should examine it carefully when it appears in our descriptions of a divine relationship.
Egotism is one word for the self-importance involved, although entitlement seems more precise. Egotism says that I am extraordinarily important. Entitlement takes the additional step of saying that, because I am important, you owe me what I want from you. Coercion enters when a threat is used to obtain it. A god imagined as demanding acknowledgment under threat of eternal torment raises all three concerns. The question becomes especially troubling when the demand is presented as an expression of perfect love.
I am thinking here of a specific claim: that someone can live with compassion, honesty, generosity, and concern for others, yet still deserve hell because they cannot sincerely believe in God. Under that claim, the decisive failure is disbelief itself. I struggle to see the justice in it. What would make an honest uncertainty worthy of such punishment? What moral injury does a person commit against an all-powerful creator by admitting that they have not been convinced?
Belief is also a peculiar thing to demand. I can choose to attend a service, read a sacred text, listen to an argument, or consider an experience carefully. I can examine my assumptions and remain open to being wrong. I cannot simply command myself to find something true. If the evidence and experiences available to me do not produce belief, repeating the right words does not solve that problem. It produces a declaration. An all-knowing god would presumably recognize the difference between a declaration made in fear and a conviction honestly held.
That creates a deeper difficulty. Imagine someone who wants to be honest and therefore says, “I do not know,” or, “I cannot believe this.” Condemning that person for their answer would make honesty dangerous. It would encourage them to conceal their actual thoughts and perform the certainty expected of them. I find it difficult to reconcile that arrangement with a god said to value truth. Surely sincerity should have some moral worth, including when its conclusions disappoint the person listening.
One response is to describe hell as something a person chooses by refusing God. I can understand how that explanation attempts to preserve freedom. Yet describing an outcome as chosen does not settle whether the choice was freely made or whether the consequence is just. If the terms are that I must love, believe, or submit, and that my failure to do so brings endless torment, the threat still shapes the relationship. Calling my refusal a choice does not explain why a loving creator would attach that consequence to honest disbelief. A profession of love obtained under those conditions would tell us very little about love.
Consent does not free us from every responsibility. We owe consideration to other people even when we would prefer otherwise. Someone who harms another person cannot make accountability disappear by refusing it. There are serious questions to ask about justice, responsibility, and the consequences of cruelty. But the case I am considering involves a person’s inability to believe, apart from the moral life they have lived. A failure to be convinced needs a different explanation from a failure to respect another person’s dignity. Treating both as grounds for eternal punishment obscures the difference.
I also want to be careful about the people whose faith I am discussing. People mean different things by god, salvation, and hell, and this argument should not be placed indiscriminately upon every believer. I can respect a person whose faith moves them to feed someone, comfort someone, or stand beside someone whom others have abandoned. I can recognize the beauty in a religious life shaped by compassion. My question is directed toward the demand that disbelief be punished regardless of how a person has treated others. A person’s religious identity alone tells me too little about their answer to that question.
Even convincing me that such a god exists would leave a further question unresolved: whether that god deserves my devotion. Existence, power, and goodness are separate matters. The ability to create a universe would establish extraordinary power; the treatment of vulnerable beings would still need to be considered when assessing goodness. When we call a god loving, just, or merciful, those words need enough recognizable meaning for us to evaluate the claim. Otherwise, we could describe any action as loving simply because the powerful being performed it.
Perhaps this is what unsettles me most about the threat of hell. It can require us to set aside the moral understanding through which we ordinarily recognize cruelty. We know what it means to terrify someone into compliance. We know that vulnerability calls for care and that overwhelming power brings responsibility. I cannot see why increasing the difference in power should make coercion more acceptable. If anything, the greater the power, the harder I find it to excuse a refusal of mercy.
I do not assume that everyone who warns me about hell is deliberately trying to hurt me. Someone may sincerely believe that they are offering an urgent warning. I can consider that intention while also asking what their words do to the person receiving them. Being told that I face eternal suffering does not help me understand their belief or give me a reason to trust it. I would much rather hear what they find meaningful in their faith, how it has changed their life, and why they believe it is true. A conversation leaves room for me to think and answer honestly.
My humanism begins with the conviction that another person’s life matters in its own right. Their pain deserves attention. Their joy has value. Their freedom to think, question, and decline deserves respect. We can disagree about religion while still recognizing those things in one another. That recognition also asks something of me: to resist turning my criticism of a belief into contempt for the person who holds it. I want the freedom to speak honestly, and I want to extend that freedom to others.
This is why I keep returning to the kindness on my shirt. There are reasons to care for people that are already present in our shared lives. A kind act can relieve fear, restore dignity, or make a difficult day bearable. Cruelty can leave wounds that outlast the encounter that caused them. Those consequences matter to me whether anyone records them in heaven or threatens to punish them in hell. I want to become more attentive to them, including in the moments when someone has irritated or offended me.
I will definitely keep wearing the shirt, and it will probably continue to invite the occasional remark. When it does, I hope I can remember the responsibility I have chosen to display across my chest. I can question a theology that threatens honest disbelief. I can refuse to call coercion love. And I can still treat the person speaking to me with care. They do not have to share my conclusions to deserve my kindness. That is, after all, what the shirt asks of me.
Link to the shirt: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1440930049/no-hell-be-kind-atheist-shirt