HELL

[Wyrd of Gawd]

And Boru, you hit the nail on the head. It is not meant to be about reward and punishment. That's why I always say that those Christians who act a certain way simply in order to be rewarded in Heaven, or in order to avoid Hell, are missing the whole point. God loves us and He wants us to be with Him because He loves us, not simply for "rewarding" purposes. We "go to" Hell not as a punishment from God, as the article says, but because we chose to be away from Him.

Very well.  If Heaven and Hell are not meant as reward and punishment respectively, then one may as well be good and loving for its own sake.  Atheists (by and large) already do just that, so it isn't so much a question of rejecting God as it is one of not needing God in the first place.

But I think that rejecting the idea of Hell as a punishment is pretty hard to sustain.  Not only Biblically, but the notion of punishing sinners is found throughout Catholic dogma.

If God truly loves us, then it isn't easy to explain why sin (in the sense of the rejection of God) exists at all.  This isn't even a question of free will:  God could simply not allow the births of people who would reject him.  Since there are people who reject not only the person of God but the whole notion of God in toto (Your Humble Narrator, for instance), a fair conclusion is that God either doesn't exist, or that he doesn't love us all that much, or that his desire for us to be with him isn't all that strong.  Sort of a disinterested God, wouldn't you say?

Boru

Remember the basic rule in the Bible and in the Koran:  a person must believe and obey without exception or else he will thrown into the lake of fire or hell.  It doesn't matter if a person is "good" and without destructive faults.  It only matters if he believes and obeys the deity.  All of the stories in the Bible and in the Koran are based upon that simple rule.