After first reading Ingersoll in college, I wrote an essay on the concept of hell.
I never saved the writing, I hardly do save my writing, but I think I could do a better job recreating what I knew back then but adding the wisdom I have obtained today.
I am certain there are elements of what I am going to share in the Ingersoll article above. After all, the man was a great influence on me. A much better influence than anything in the bible.
Hell.
Hell is just ancient man's attempt to make people behave. Hell is a concept that only ever existed in the mind of man. Hell is a concept that certain men took advantage of by incorporating it into a religion only to further control humanity.
The average man was never sick, and the average man is not sick today. Certain men decided that other men were sick, and they decided that by way of their religious delusions.
Religion has always been the sickness.
Making people think they are sick due to an invented concept known as sin is deplorable.
Furthermore, making people think they will burn for eternity is a symptom of the religious sickness.
Hell was never about a real place. Sadly, Hell was always about certain minds incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality.
I daily fantasize about how I wish the world could be, how there was no suffering, no war, no poverty.
I live in the real world and I am a writer. I write fiction about situations that cannot possibly exist.
At least I know that what I write is fiction.
Moreover, perhaps in the future my writing might be categorized as mythology. Not religion, goodness forbid, but a mythology that future people are not too bright in distinguishing from history.
I never saved the writing, I hardly do save my writing, but I think I could do a better job recreating what I knew back then but adding the wisdom I have obtained today.
I am certain there are elements of what I am going to share in the Ingersoll article above. After all, the man was a great influence on me. A much better influence than anything in the bible.
Hell.
Hell is just ancient man's attempt to make people behave. Hell is a concept that only ever existed in the mind of man. Hell is a concept that certain men took advantage of by incorporating it into a religion only to further control humanity.
The average man was never sick, and the average man is not sick today. Certain men decided that other men were sick, and they decided that by way of their religious delusions.
Religion has always been the sickness.
Making people think they are sick due to an invented concept known as sin is deplorable.
Furthermore, making people think they will burn for eternity is a symptom of the religious sickness.
Hell was never about a real place. Sadly, Hell was always about certain minds incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality.
I daily fantasize about how I wish the world could be, how there was no suffering, no war, no poverty.
I live in the real world and I am a writer. I write fiction about situations that cannot possibly exist.
At least I know that what I write is fiction.
Moreover, perhaps in the future my writing might be categorized as mythology. Not religion, goodness forbid, but a mythology that future people are not too bright in distinguishing from history.
"What a little moonlight can do." ~ Billie Holiday
