(June 29, 2015 at 12:10 pm)SteveII Wrote: While I am no theologian, it seems hell is a real place, burning, lasts forever, and there will be "weeping and gnashing of teeth". While those that go to heaven are promised new bodies, I know of no such mention for those that do not go to heaven--so it might be just the soul that exists. I do wonder how much of the experience is a direct result of separation from God and how much is a overt attempt to make it more uncomfortable--I lean toward the former.The Bible itself doesn't make this clear. The OT seems to describe death as the end of existence for people, not a gateway to an afterlife. And the NT speaks of heaven and hell, but the latter is poorly-defined. It may be a metaphorical description of the cessation of existence (one of the qualities of fire is that it consumes and destroys, indicating finality). It may be a literal place of endless suffering, with a person's soul kept alive for no other reason than to torment it. For a couple of reasons, I find that unlikely, but all in all it's too vague.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
