Josh Powell is In Hell

Josh Powell. source: http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2012/news/120220/josh-powell-300.jpg

Probably.

Anyone who knows me and/or follows my writing both and on my hubpage account, knows that I was reared in a very Christian home and am now, in my thirties struggling with many common and widely held beliefs that the modern Christian church teaches. The most alarming of these is the concept of hell. I question how a loving God, a Creator who refers to Himself as “Love” would create creatures that would end up in a placed of eternal anguish called “hell”.

Thankfully, because of Josh Powell, I’m clinging to the idea of hell—and of heaven—and some sort of comfort.

Josh Powell was a person of interest in his wife Susan's 2009 disappearance. She is most likely dead and he is almost positively the reason for it. Killing your wife is bad, killing your children is worse and incomprehensible even to me, a lifelong non-parent.

Last week, Josh Powell lost custody of his two boys and they were sent to live with their grandparents, the parents of their dead mother. However, in the brilliance of our judicial system, he was still allowed visitation.  On Super Bowl Sunday, his boys—who, sources say, didn’t want to go visit there dad—were dropped off at his home by a social worker. He then proceeded to attempt to kill them with a hatchet before blowing them, himself and his house up.

He couldn’t have his boys, so no one else could.

Not only is the idea of hacking your child to death incomprehensible, he also didn’t leave any kind of notification about where he left his wife’s body. He killed his wife and then left the grandparents in perpetual limbo about her fate and without their two adored grandbabies.

Believing that there is a hell—whether it’s eternal or temporal—for selfish, cruel and evil people like Josh Powell makes this situation bearable. The idea that when he died he simply ceased to exist or, worse yet, entered into an eternal state of bliss, makes me very angry and, if that’s true, then let me be ignorant. The idea of him suffering and reliving his sins over and over again for an unending amount of time makes me feel some sense of justice in this world.

More than that, believing that his boys went from a place of pain and fear to a place of eternal pleasure and peace—and into the arms of their mother—gives me some measure of comfort. Again, if this is not true, I’d prefer not to know.

So, thank you Josh Powell. You’ve made a believer out of me.