I give you points for apparently trying to make your argument more forceful by including heaps of drama.
No one was “created to burn forever”, and that position is heretical. That view is held by Calvinists, and not by Catholics.
Moreover, the suffering of the souls in hell is not pointless: it fulfills their desires. Those who are damned are those who have rejected God *with sufficient knowledge to make the opposite decision. *Therefore, the pain of being separated from God was precisely what they willed.
Why doesn’t God just destroy them? For the same reason He doesn’t just destroy the demons: God loves them, and He therefore wills their good. Ultimately, the state of their existence is a greater good than their non-existence. But moreover, He is just. He gives everyone the sufficient grace to be saved and to choose Him, but He still desires folks to *actually *choose Him. If they do not choose Him, He doesn’t override their decision. He judges that they were given sufficient means to make a particular decision, and then He permits them to have the consequences they willed on account of His justice.
Does this imply that hell only exists in order to give people free choices? No, because the same could be accomplished by annihilation.
I would recommend you listen to some lectures by a Jewish philosopher on this subject:
hebrewcatholic.net/15-beatitude-and-the-last-things-part-2/
Incidentally, like you, I was once intrigued by the “Noachide” movement, and by Orthodox Judaism in general. (The Noachide movement is certainly a lot easier to follow than Christianity, with far lower standards in terms of dogma and discipline.)
But I hope you’ll hear the other side out more than your tone might suggest, because the Orthodox Jews are quite mistaken in their views on the Messiah. I think their critiques of the New Testament especially are incredibly outdated, and they seem to rely on 19th century hyper-skepticism to get around the clear evidence for Christ, His resurrection, and why all this Christianity stuff just “accidentally” occurred one generation before the final destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Their interpretation of the Tanakh/Old Testament is rooted in the Talmud, and ours is rooted in the New Testament and in Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium. I would suggest you compare the two lenses a bit more, especially since Orthodox Jews will insist you have no right to even study Torah or the Talmud, and to therefore get a better grounding in where their interpretive presuppositions even come from. (For example, they could prove from the Torah that an Oral Tradition would be
useful, and perhaps even
necessary. But I’m not sure that you could make a scholarly case that we know without doubt
what was contained in that Tradition before the Talmud was compiled, which was after Christ. The nature and content of Tradition is the biggest dividing point in Judaism, with only a minority holding to the view of the Orthodox. Moreover, it is authoritative dogma from the Talmud that the world is some 6,000 years old. This is beyond contention, and it alone should cast serious doubts on the infallibility of the Rabbinic tradition. I’m sorry, but this is a much bigger problem than hell.)
Judaism was nothing more than Catholicism before the Jewish Messiah; and Catholicism is nothing more than Judaism after the Messiah came. Don’t be fooled by a tiny minority who need and deserve their own Jewish Messiah even more than you or I do.
…son is calling…
