In support of those who say I'll burn in the lake of fire for all eternity
Everybody has their opinions - but not the right to give people's eardrums a painful and unwanted battering while they're minding their own business
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The Barrie Hudson Column
Barrie Hudson is a known quantity when it comes to writing words. Sometimes he even spells them correctly. In fact he has been writing words in the Swindon area for more than two decades. First of all for the Swindon Advertiser and then for Swindon Link and now for The Ink. Here are some of his words…
The borderline between sharing faith and being a bellowing nuisance when people are trying to do a bit of shopping
Some kind and loving religious folk took to social media the other day to kindly and lovingly say I would spend eternity in a lake of fire.
I’ve never encountered a lake of fire, but I shouldn’t imagine it’s very pleasant, especially if you’re a duck. Quite apart from the singed feathers around your most sensitive regions, there’d be the problem of every bit of bread thrown at you turning to burnt toast before you managed to get your beak anywhere near it.
Still, from what I gather, I won’t be short of company in the lake of fire. Quite apart from the people one would expect to suffer eternal damnation (murderous dictators; serial killers; war criminals; charity bosses on 300 grand a year; those people I was on about the other week who whistle tunelessly to themselves in book shops; people who habitually leave the lid of the tomato sauce bottle loose so that when you give it a casual shake the kitchen ends up looking like the interior of a badly-managed abattoir; the composers of hold music and so on), the kind and loving religious folk say there will be plenty of other people sharing my agonising eternal torment.
Members of any other religion apart from their own, for example, not to mention agnostics, atheists and members of their religion who happen to disagree on some aspect of scriptural interpretation. Oh and anybody of whose sexuality the kind and loving religious people disapprove. Apparently it doesn’t matter if you’ve devoted every minute of a long life to helping and nurturing others; nope, if the kind and loving religious people disapprove of you in any way, shape or form, into the old lake of fire you go.
And meanwhile, according to the kind and loving religious people, if you spend the vast bulk of your life bringing nothing but misery, heartache and fear to everyone around you, but happen to convert to their particular belief system seconds before carking it, you get an instant VIP pass through the Pearly Gates, with St Peter himself personally ushering you in and showing you to your luxury cloud of choice and politely inquiring whether you’ll be requiring harp lessons and when you’d like to book the fitting for your halo.
But I digress.
Apparently I earned my own place in that rather crowded lake of fire by writing about a street preacher who has been ordered by the council to stop using amplification in the town centre. I also wrote that while everybody is entitled to their opinions, no matter how horrible, unjust or unscriptural anybody else might find them, and while everybody is entitled to express those beliefs to anybody who cares to listen, there should be limits on their being able to make a nuisance of themselves in public places by bellowing their version of truth through a speaker at ear-splitting volume and being a thorough pain to shoppers, workers, residents and anybody who just happens to be passing through.