RE: An odd question
June 21, 2021 at 4:48 pm
(This post was last modified: June 21, 2021 at 4:49 pm by Fake Messiah.)
(June 21, 2021 at 4:18 pm)dudeabides Wrote: If the bible isn't true and I believe it's not, it has some historicity to it but not true. My question is this, how did those goat herders in the desert know the center of the earth was hot? I know it's not Hell but they believed it was and it is the hottest place around in the center of the earth.
Maybe because they saw vulcanoes vomiting fire?
But if you are talking about hell then it's a different story. In OT they just had Sheol, very much like Greek Hades which is kind of like a cold cave; while the Hell of the NT was based on Valley of Hinnom. Valley of Hinnom was a place near Jerusalem where people sacrificed their children to gods. By the early first century, the Valley of Hinnom was well-established as a cursed place just outside Jerusalem with a constant fire burning. By then, people mostly disposed of their trash there, and Roman soldiers would also throw the bodies of criminals executed by crucifixion into the infamous pit.
Over time, in Hebrew, the name for Hinnom evolved from Ge-hinnom to simply Gehenna. GEHENNA is the word that Jesus uses. He refers to Sheol in the Gospels as a place for the dead, but he also does Sheol one better when he makes reference to the notorious Gehenna as a destiny to be feared.
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"
