Except that I was talking about uncomforts and inconveniences that might be intense, too, even intense to the extent of being (in one or more senses) fatal. And whatever we decide to do with it, the textual fact of the matter is that Jesus Himself by report used a term for “torturer” when describing someone being handed over into prison until he should pay up the final cent.
I fully acknowledge and insist that we’ve dangerously misread the point of that (and several other related) judgment parable, if we try to make the punishment hopeless (such as by regarding the get-out condition as being an impossible sop to legality mocking the fate of the prisoner), or if we try to make the punishment about being an embezzler instead of being about being unmerciful and insisting on punishment for someone else. (“Was it not required of you to be merciful?!”) The point is lost if there is not really any threat of punishment to those who are unmerciful, though.
Is it the intensity of a condition that constitutes “violation” and “abuse”, or is the goal of the infliction of the condition? A child could easily regard being required (or outright made) to stand in a corner or to go to his room, as being an “abuse” or “violation”; there are adults who claim such a thing, too, for all practical purposes! What about light spankings?
If the child likes or doesn’t mind the punishment (YAY, I GET TO GO TO MY ROOM AND PLAY!–my own attitude as a child when told I had to go to my room --what bothered me was that my Mom or Dad was unhappy with me), then what has been accomplished by inflicting the condition at all? And it is still technically an “infliction” and a “coercion”. So would be the “uncomfortable experience of being confronted with love” (aside from whatever the particular psycho-physical conscious sensastions of that experience would be).
What you proposed was “that Hell is not ‘redemptive’ and neither is any other kind of pain or suffering.” If by “redemptive” you meant that so much pain somehow weighs or pays out against so much injustice, then I agree; but that kind of thing isn’t what redemption usually involves anyway. What redemption does usually involve is repentance for injustice, insofar as we’re talking about moral redemption and the immoral person’s cooperation with it. But the redemption itself is inflicted on us by God whether we want it or not, too. Without God inflicting something on us we don’t at the moment want, we wouldn’t be healed enough to want to repent or even to have the capability of doing so.
I am not sure what the strict technical sense of “abusive” is, but I do know that the strict technical sense of “suffering” and “inflicting” involves God acting to bring about (or authoritatively permit) and maintain (for any duration) any experience we are compelled to react to whether we want to react to it or not. Even if we want to react to it, that infliction could be abusive: that’s why it’s still morally wrong to aggressively seduce someone sexually until he or she can’t help but respond to the pleasure in a particular way, or to use drugs to render someone pliable to suggestion in various circumstances. But the moral issue of abuse has to do with the selfishness and the goals of the person inflicting the suffering. As the old maxim says, abuse does not abrogate the use: we cause suffering (strictly speaking in a technical sense) when we please each other in making love (and very intensely, too, if we’re doing it right!), and we use drugs with psychosomatic effects in therapy to help heal a person or protect them from pain during a procedure. But the relevant moral differences involved are not reducible to pain or pleasure or the intensities of either. A drill sergeant trying to prepare soldiers for rigors of even non-combatant duty during a time of involuntary war (when circumstances dictate there isn’t a choice about resisting the opponents in some dangerous fashion), may have to inflict some rather intense suffering but he (or she!) is intending to help the other person. A broken leg may have to be set or even rebroken and then reset without aenesthesia.
"]"I didn’t want to face the possibility that perhaps the self that I was protecting was pestilent, deformed and malnourished from trying to feed upon myself in my pride.
"Sometimes a bone that has been broken, by foolishness or by fate, heals wrongly, crippling the shape and the function, destroying the joy that could be had, that still could be had again… if only the bone can be rebroken, and properly set to heal.
"But, it hurts to break a bone. And it hurts, beyond comprehension, beyond the bearing of consciousness, to break a bone that has badly been set, swollen with infection… infection that sooner or later will spread to corrupt and destroy.
"It hurts so badly sometimes to heal, that only trust will allow the healing to start.
“And no broken bone can be rightly rebroken and set, without some co-operation, some willingness to face the pain, some willingness to find someone to trust, some willingness to take such a risk.
“How much harder it is to heal, when one’s self is what has been broken… by foolishness or by fate…”
I think the danger in inflicting intense inconveniences in order to try to lead people to repentance is that, due to very real practical concerns, we often can’t ensure (against our own selfishnesses, and in favor of witnessing to our intentions) that we share the experience with the one who is being inconvenienced. The rabbinic tradition of YHWH going into exile with Israel, sharing her suffering, is a type of this: it helped Jews remember God’s actual intentions and goals in inflicting the exile upon them. It’s hard for a child being spanked to believe that it really does hurt the parent more than it hurts the child (and of course there are examples where this is not true, even though stated, or even when the punishment shouldn’t be done although it really does hurt the parent more).
But the child often grows up to learn that his mother and father were telling the truth: it really does hurt the parent more in sympathizing and grieving with the child, because the parent loves the child that much.
It’ll take me a while to catch up on later comments in this thread. Hopefully tonight!