I don't think this is a refutation, just a bad answer. What do you all think?

So what we are being told in this video is that people who have never been told what God's laws are, will still suffer eternal punishment in hell for violating them. And this must be the case because if ignorance of the law was an acceptable excuse then it would be a disservice to people if we even tell them what the law is, thereby placing them in danger of going to hell for breaking the law, which would become binding upon them when they hear it. This is a quasi-logical argument but it does not address the real issue, which is that the human race existed for a long time before Christianity, and all those people who had no chance to learn about Jesus, who had not been born yet, were therefore doomed to go to hell through no fault of their own. This seems to be obviously very unfair. And even the claim we are given, that there are no innocent people (in Africa we are told, as if Africa is an unusually sinful continent, but it could be anywhere) who even without the benefit of Christian education still do not sin, cannot be true. Some people die as babies, even within minutes of birth. What sin could they have committed? Babies do not sin.

There are many different varieties of Christian thought, and there are other ways to approach this issue. Aside from heaven and hell, there is also the afterlife realm of purgatory, where the souls of the departed can go who are neither damned nor saved, and can still go either way. Some theologians have suggested that people who were never taught about Christian theology would necessarily go to purgatory and might learn about Christianity there, so that they could accept Jesus as their savior even after death, and still go to heaven. This is a more reasonable approach. The people in this video are giving you a rather hard line type of approach which implies a very cruel and inflexible God. God in theory would not have to be that inflexible.

Personally I think it is all a fantasy. There is no afterlife. But if there were, then we could reasonably ask why Jesus did not show up earlier in human history, to save all those generations who were supposedly damned by their own sin or by Original Sin or whatever. Strictly speaking, God should have been keeping an eye even on Adam and Eve, so that they did not fall into Original Sin and all this suffering could have been avoided. God could simply have placed the forbidden tree on Mars, rather than in the Garden of Eden, so that Adam and Eve could never have reached it. So there are a lot of questions that can legitimately be raised about God's supposed benevolence.

/r/TrueAtheism Thread