Hell

[Matthew]

I can't speak for other non-believers but I take the view that scripture says whatever the reader wants it to say by process of selective reading, selective contextualizing and other tactics to support their own bias. Read cover-to-cover, it's a long, rambling and self-contradictory book. It provides no clear picture as to what the afterlife is going to be, what you have to do to achieve what fate in the afterlife, or even if there is one.

I agree with you that there is a grave danger when reading Scripture (as with any literature) of being swayed by one's own biases and personal circumstances. But once we are aware of that danger, we are able to apply principles which help us to understand the text as it would have originally been understood. For example, we ask questions about the genre, the audience, the nature of the language and how it would have been understood by them, the historical context, etc. And we can ask questions about ourselves - the assumptions we bring to the text because of our beliefs and opinions, the traditions we associate ourselves with, 21st Century culture, values and modes of thought.

You say that Scripture is a "long, rambling and self-contradictory book", and seem to be under the impression that it should be read cover-to-cover (Genesis to Revelation). These are assumptions that you are bringing to the text. Scripture is not a "book" - it is a collection of writings of many different genres written in different times and places by different kinds of people. If there is unity to the whole of Scripture it is not a literary unity but a theological one. The whole idea of reading the Bible from the beginning to the end is a modern Western conception and not an ancient one. Scripture consists of literary units which individually were intended to be read as such. While reading the Bible in its historical sequence is a valuable activity (and even then not all the writings of Scripture make historical claims), making the judgement that the Bible is long and rambling is to rather miss the point of what the Bible actually is. [I wonder whether you would come to the same conclusion about the consistency of Scriptures teaching if you took into account the points that I've made in the last two paragraphs when interpreting it.]

You say that Scripture provides no clear picture of what the afterlife will be like. Why is this an objection? Shouldn't we actually assess the clarity of Scripture based on the questions that it is answering, rather than the ones we are asking? You assume that the questions you have about the afterlife are somehow relevant to the intentions of the writers of Scripture. As to your questions themselves; I agree with you that Scripture is not clear about exactly what general resurrection will be like, and the writers did not intend to be; your second question is flawed in that it assumes that the afterlife is something which is achieved; and your third about the very existence of an afterlife is simply absurd, as there is no text that teaches that there is no afterlife whatsoever for all people.

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@ Matthew, lets assume, for the arguments sake, you are correct. And people did misinterpreted those verses, including me. You can't deny that those verses can easily be misinterpreted. Why would god send his messages through such fucked up way?

Perhaps God wants us to think.

What's that first commandment again? "Love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength."