The "objective" truth about hell

Faith Through Fright: Depictions of Death and Hell Aim to Save By Karin Brulliard. The display includes sights like this:

...bodies spill out of the wreckage of a grisly car crash, a young woman is laid to rest and a lashed and bloody Jesus Christ hangs on a cross.

...the show known as Scaremare is part haunted house and part sermon. In its 33rd year, it is also the more tempered ancestor of a growing Halloween-time tradition for evangelical Christian churches: elaborate performances -- some graphically depicting the consequences of abortion and homosexuality, others death by terrorist attack or cancer -- that aim to literally scare the hell out of nonbelievers...

"It makes them think, if they die tonight, where will they go?"

There's an idea--give people a lie to believe in.

"There's no question that people need to fear what is their eternal destiny," said Steve Vandegriff, a professor of youth ministry at Liberty who directs the project. "So here's the objective truth about hell, and there is a very simple . . . answer to not going there, and that would be faith in Christ."

The "objective" truth, eh? The one for which the only evidence is hearsay?

Cashman [a student] asked those who were accepting Christ for the first time to make eye contact with him. In the first two weekends of Scaremare 2004, about 10 percent of visitors made that commitment, Vandegriff said.

Eye contact? Whoops, I looked at him by mistake! It sounds like a cheesy amusement park to me.

I suppose paranoids could claim that this is a veiled attack against Bush's religiosity, and his use of terrorism to frighten us. Or is it a veiled attack against the terrorists' use of terrorism to frighten us? Not that it doesn't exist, but being frightened by it is yielding to it.