(June 5, 2017 at 9:41 am)Rhondazvous Wrote: Because modern society no longer condones the idea of people burning in hell, the church today describes hell as simply eternal separation from god. Sounds good to me.
Yeah I guess you could call it Oprahfication of Christianity, meaning everybody is going to be OK; all roads lead to heaven; God is love, therefore he would never send anyone to a place of never-ending pain - regardless of what the Bible actually says.
But there will always be tough, hard-nosed sort of Christians who are happy to talk about all the suffering and screaming of the damned. Because they know it's an effective way to scare people and get them to pay attention to Jesus's message of love and forgiveness.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
