Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor, and my guest today is Michael Jones.

Michael Jones is the founder and host of the Inspiring Philosophy YouTube channel,

which covers the history and philosophy of the Christian religion. Michael, thanks for being here.

Yeah, thanks for having me. We've locked horns before. I think we've debated at least once,

maybe a couple more times. Twice. I think probably most recently was the Capturing Christianity

debate where we talked about the problem of evil, right? Yeah, we were on his channel twice,

first over the moral argument, and then the problem of evil. That's right. So we've done

what I think is probably the biggest philosophical objection that people have to Christianity,

but also theism in general, which is the problem of evil, I would imagine. But I invited you

on today to talk about what I think is, in many ways, the biggest moral objection to Christianity,

that is, people who are trying to make a critique, not of the truth of Christianity per se,

but of its sort of moral quality. We'll often point to a particular doctrine that throughout

the history of Christianity has been used and abused by many to scare the daylights out of

some of its adherents. Listeners will not be surprised to learn that I'm talking about the

doctrine of hell, something that you've produced a couple of videos on and have talked about in

the past. So I'm interested in learning what you think about hell, what you think the Bible says

about hell, and whether you think that the doctrine of hell can be justified. So welcome to the show,

and perhaps I can begin by asking, against the some would say caricatures, some would say sort of

metaphorical imagery that we see in the history of the church. What do you think is an accurate

depiction of what the Christian doctrine of hell is? Well, I think that's a pretty good question

to start with. It's a it's not something that I think is a simple answer. It's not like a jack

check track where you see this giant pit of fire and God is throwing people in and they're

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