(February 28, 2018 at 8:50 pm)orthodox-man Wrote: Hello,
I am not an atheist myself (I was raised heavily Greek Orthodox) in a Ukrainian-Romanian family. We are incredbily religious, and my grandfather in fact is a Priest. My parents are hoping I will be the same. For those who do not know, Orthodox priests are allowed to marry, so I am also expected to have children and raise them religious, etc. Recently, I've been having doubts about religion, but fear of hell makes it difficult to let go of the religion.
Everytime I show any signs of skepticism, my friends and family try to prove Christianity at the bear minimum to be correct. I get emails all the time from people showing me how Jesus is the way to eternal pleasure and not following will lead me to torture forever. I recently viewed a few Near Death Experience videos, and they come from Christian sources, they have testimonies of people who went to hell when they were close to death. One Near Death Experience of a woman who crashed her car into another scared me: she had a head on crash, suddenly, felt a feeling of falling, and saw complete blackness. Then she saw these tall demonic looking monsters who took her to some waiting room where she saw them torture other people, beating them up, mocking them, throwing spears at them, and her hands were bleeding. Suddenly, she found herself in her car, she said she could see the blood on her hands from the hell for about 10 seconds. There are a whole plethora of these testimonies, and the similarities are uncanny. The most common sequence of events: the person having the experience sees darkness, then they see flames and fire, then demonic creatures come who look like reptiles with horns and mock them, beat them up, swear, and they can hear other screams. Then, sometimes the experiencer calls out to God, and a huge hand comes down and pulls them out of the hell, and back to their bodies. I know that these people never actually died, because a near death experience isn't a death experience, I also know the brain is not reliable as a source when it is super stressed and malfunctioning. Not even all of these people were near death during these experiences. Some were on drugs, others were not. You would think different situations would trigger different experiences. It's just that the good majority of hell Near Death Experiences occur in the order I put out. Growing up, I never expected to see demons torturing people in hell, and it seems many people report that. I can't fully explain it. The church and bible do not teach about seeing demons in hell, yet somehow all these people hallucinate that? Anyhow, do these similarities amongst accounts scare any of you? I would just really like to get rid of this whole hell fear. People in my communities act ad though I should be following these experiences, do you guys think I should be putting this much stock into the experiences?
I have seen religious people time and time again that tried to scare atheists with the hell story so they would become believers and right now you may well be one of them.
If you are you are doing a terrible disservice to God but suppose you are honest in your belief.
Even in this case you fail badly because God can not possibly create something that at the end will be discarded in the rubbish such as a hell.
There can not be a hell because God being perfect can not create something imperfect so please stop dreaming about something that doesn't exist.
Corrupted priests invented the hell for their own selfish reasons.
Nothing to do with God.
