If you read it, you don’t seem to have understood it. No, I’m not starting from the axiom that Christianity is false. Can you not see that I began the article by laying out Perez’s defense of the Hell doctrine? I start from the Catechism’s affirmation of that doctrine, and from Perez’s legalistic analogy which is supposed to make Hell seem reasonable.

My argument proceeds by fixing that analogy, strengthening it to make it more in line with the rest of what Christianity posits. I infer that, far from making Christianity seem reasonable, the strengthened analogy reduces Christianity to absurdity, or to a Kafkaesque dystopia that contradicts the image of Christianity as “good news.” I also show how that conclusion is consistent with related Christian doctrines such as original sin, the Incarnation, and the notion that Jesus’s death was a ransom paid to the devil.

So, you’re mistaken. I don’t beg the question against Christianity. I do indeed aim to show that Christianity is absurd, just by working within the Christian theological framework, by laying it on the table in all its Kafkaesque fullness.

You ask, “If Catholic theology is correct, what do you, as an atheist who finds the Catholic God abominable, gain if everyone is saved?”

That question is loaded six ways from Sunday. If Christianity is correct, nonbelievers deserve hellfire (according to the dictator’s whim), so who cares what they think? Jesus compares them to “chaff” burned up by an unquenchable fire. Would you ask a husk of grain what it thinks about the farmer that burns it up? Of course not. Thus, your question is self-contradictory since it makes no sense on the assumption that Christianity is true. Why, though, are you begging the question by assuming that Christianity is true?

I don’t find the Catholic God abominable since I don’t believe that that deity exists. I find the Catholic myth abominable. Do you understand the difference between a referent and a representation? God’s one thing. The Christian narrative about God is another. What’s up for discussion is that narrative, not the deity himself. Whether the deity exists or exists in one way rather than another is the very question at issue, so you’re just forestalling debate by presupposing an answer to that question. That’s fallacious.