Why Take Offensive Doctrines Seriously?

Is religion something that connects to a human-judgment-independent reality, or is it something we make up for our own purposes? If the latter, then it is easy to cast judgment on certain doctrines. I will take for perhaps the strongest example eternal conscious torment. That is the view that hell is eternal and involves people being conscious of torment, which we should assume will affect some people.

Who would make up such a thing? Maybe someone who wanted to scare people. Or maybe there are side effects to belief in eternal conscious torment that are desirable. It might regulate people's behavior, motivate evangelical love, give purpose, or give life a welcome sense of gravity. We might think that none of these benefits would be worth frightening sensitive people, or worth giving us a view of God such that he would torture people for all eternity. If religious beliefs are made up for human purposes, what kind of person could be so cruel, to put that idea in children's minds, an idea that would rule their lives with fear? We could easily decide to suppress such a doctrine, since there would be no way it could be true if we didn't make it true by believing it (to whatever extent that that would make it true).

However, if God exists in a factual way, then it becomes important to consider the possibility that the things ascribed to God by people who believe in God might be true. And also, the things that we ourselves see, when we investigate. What we see has some connection with what really is, and that may be the case of any observer of life and the Bible. If we want to know the reality of God, then we want to know what he's like, and not just what we want him to be like. So we should look for the truth, and consider the points of view that we do not yet understand, held by other people. It may not be possible to understand God perfectly, just as it may not be possible to understand physics perfectly, but we should understand God enough for what is vital to our lives, like we understand the basics of how gravity works, or the dynamics of driving a car.