Check out the sadistic smile on the cretin
That's disgusting and it's not christian, it's anti-christian in it's presentation of emotion and content.
I'm Christian and the reality of Hell (I don't want to debate it's existence in this instance if it's all the same.) is, when properly apprehended as can be apprehended, an unimaginable place and a place no properly formed Christian would wish any human being to go to. Not a single person, irrespective of the crime, irrespective of the worldview the person leaned towards. That says nothing about the need for justice and nothing about endorsing the disparate worldview, and everything about the nature and reality of Hell and it's incomprehensible composition.
"He just found out today, the hard way."
I'm left almost speechless at the barbarity of that (apparently wishful!!!???) comment. So much so that I question this person's motives and claims as a christian. Were I to apologize for this person's comments, I don't know if I would be apologizing for an actual christian given how uninformed and uncharitable his comments are.
What a Christian should say is something to the effect,
"May God have mercy on his soul. Even though he professed his position consistently throughout his life, certainly he was a loving man and father and husband and created in the image of God.
And in his final moments, I hope that a part of his brilliant mind at least thought out in desperate possibility, 'What if? Lord, please...' into which, God who IS Love Itself and Mercy Itself, surely would have ran to him as any loving father would run to their child.
I believe that since all good things come from God, including the love Stephen Hawking had for his family, friends and the talents God gave him, that his love willed to exist past the existence he believed he could measure into one perhaps he knew but never publicly proclaimed that he couldn't measure. If for any other reason than the patently apparent one in which his body carried a cross few imagine and even fewer can comprehend. Mindful that what's impossible for man, is possible for God. So I pray that his suffering ended here and that in God's Love and Mercy, that his presence in the Lord is one where he's able to stand in it. Amen."
That doesn't dispense with the Christian commission to spread the Gospel into the world and to apprise listeners and remind believers of the reality of Hell. But what a statement like that does is provide appropriate context to the consistency of Christian hope and love for everyone, however crooked and bent they may be in body (and/or soul) in this world, that they are made in God's image and destined for unimaginable joy in the next world.
Hell is the absolute mirror of Heaven. And there is no Christian love in expressing want for any person to end up there. It's the opposite. Christian love is this above everything else: "
The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." (Galatians 5:6b.).
And that means, always and even when the person has passed on. That we believe in God's unimaginable goodness and mercy and the hope against hope that Stephen Hawking with his last thought even, has been made whole and is experiencing unimaginable joy and love and laughter.
If this person understands the near and proximate reality of Hell, he couldn't possibly smile as he does. My suspicion is, he's not smiling because he understands the reality of Hell. He's smiling because he has a sadistic streak yet unresolved and perhaps because he's attempting to convince himself that he's saved simply because he believes (without the heart's ascent apparently) in God. And the newsflash is:
"Even the demons believe that--and shudder." (James 2:19b)