It SHOULD be? Lioness, are you telling me that IF (let's just say this for the sake of argument) you did not believe in hell as eternal torment, then you would not be motivated to believe in and serve Christ? To me that sounds an awful lot like submitting to a tyrant king who demands your love, so you force yourself to love him simply to avoid punishment. (And no, I am not calling God a tyrant in saying this.) How do you truly love a father who you are afraid is going to put you in a torture chamber of some sort where you to live in some kind of agony for eternity if you never submit? That's serving him more out of a loathing fear than love. I mean, it really sounds like you were saying here that you only love God to escape hell.
And as to comparing God's wrath in hell to the consequences He laid out for Israel in the Old Testament if they turned to other gods and did other forms of disobedience, yes, I agree with that. That is yet another reason I take the conditionalist stance of hell, because if the kind of punishment Israel endured in the OT for their sins can be at all compared to the fate that lies in store for unbelievers, then that more closely matches what we conditionalists believe will occur, than it does eternal torment. Did God ever say one thing in the OT about the Israelites going to a place to suffer consciously forever after they died on Earth if they turned from Him? Or anything that remotely sounds like it? Not that I remember. Every single time it was some kind of conscious punishment like war with their enemy nations, strife and confusion, constant fear, famine, ending ultimately in being put to the sword (i.e. death), albeit with few survivors He would eventually bring back from their enemies' oppression. If the disobedient Israelites had more to fear than a violent and dishonorable death as a punishment (which sounds more than scary enough as it is to me), as in they then go to hell after their earthly death to suffer infinitely, why wouldn't God bring this up also?
But I do not wish to argue with you at length, Lioness. We are flawed human beings prone to giving offense or too easily being offended when discussing subjects that are notoriously sensitive like this, and so it is not worth me possibly saying something mean or my mistakenly taking something you say as an attack by our continuing on, when we are friends. Many people in my position can answer your questions and challenges better than I do without the disadvantage of it becoming personal, if you are willing to investigate. If I may suggest the Rethinking Hell website or Edward Fudge's book "The Fire That Consumes".
But since you asked me WHY I believe the conditional immortality stance is correct and not the traditional hell view, I thought I had said it in some way or another before but please allow me to at least give a vague summary of my reasons: to me there are too many verses and passages in both the OT and NT of the Bible that use terms such as death, destroy, destruction, perish, be no more, consumed (by the fire), and so on when referring to the fate of unbelievers for me to in good conscience believe that the eternal conscious torment view is correct, because the above terms indicate the exact opposite of that.
