I love you unconditionally, but only if you worship me and abide by my rules (some of which I may or may not have revoked when my son who is also me came down to Earth)
Being raised in a Christian household, this was one of the things that I first picked up on as a kid, and the adults did not like my line of questioning about it. In my teens, I learned that hell isn't even a concept in any Jewish or "Christian" scriptures... it's purely a holdover from Hellenist Rome perpetuated by Ur-Catholic Roman cults monopolizing and institutionalizing the religion. You can imagine how pointing these things out went over in a religious household and circles.
God is either omnipotent and a dick for making you suffer anyhow, or not omnipotent in which case why would you believe?
I was born with a severe congenital issue that causes me constant pain.
Why would a benevolent god do this to me? It’s sadistic.
So I had a head start in thinking the Christian god is a sadistic bastard. The priests I encountered tried to tell me I was being tested for reasons. How do you explain testing a four year old for your faith? What the fuck did your god want me to learn?
My constant, unrelenting pain was part of what stopped me believing that bullshit. They could never explain my suffering to me, except to say I was chosen by god to endure it, like the saints. I was not a saint, and that was just cruel.
The more I learnt about it all, the more I understood it was all just bullshit. It was just stories made up by those in charge to stop regular people from questioning their rules. When your own story is used by the church to justify the stories of saints, it becomes painfully obvious.
This was one of my early questions and one of the first reasons that started pushing me away from religion.
At one point I asked my religion teacher in high school something among the lines of "So if a hypothetical person is the most good person on Earth from all the ways of looking at things, except he doesn't believe in God, does the latter invalidate everything else and he'd still go to hell?". She pretty much said yes.
Luckily she was chill about some of us in the class not believing. We just agreed to disagree, and while there were multiple debates on various religious subjects started by someone in the class questioning something she was saying, it never got heated.
I recommend reading The Origin of Satan. I read it recently after seeing a character (Janice) reading it on the Sopranos. Good scholarly work. I plan to reread it after I’ve let it simmer for a bit.
Hell isn't a place, it's an event --the idea of the immortal soul comes from greek philosophy and isn't biblical at all
(I'm a christian, I found this by sorting by hot:all) edit: with the title, it really is unconditional. Jesus loves the people who crucified Him. Some of His last words were "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" (luke 23:34). God finds no joy in hell.