Quote:you'll find that the idea of hell gradually becomes less and less threatening,
That seems reasonable as it took the church centuries to develop the concept into the flaming pit of fundie rage that it is today.
http://30ce.com/developmentofhell.htm
Quote:The primary images of hell we have today came from the poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). In The Divine Comedy, Dante takes the reader through three realms of the dead: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The poet has developed places for every type of person, allowing him to editorialize about people's actions in the world of his day. In the process, he creates vivid scenes of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Those, then, became the basis for virtually all of the artistic depictions of hell in the middle ages and our modern conceptions of a hell with demons, torment, and fire. All of it is poetry; none came from the Bible.
