Fear of hell, advice please

[Little Rik]

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.  

[Brian37]

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.  

Bullshit Rik.

First off, he is only a character, not a real being.

But to sit there and try to water down the interpretations of antiquity which are nothing like the interpretations today, is absurd.

BACK THEN, 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago the buyers of BOTH the Hebrews and Christians lived under rival authoritarian ruling families. Even prior polytheists did. BACK THEN religion was taken far more literally than today. BACK THEN, if you did not obey your local ruling family, if you were lucky, you got kicked out of the city. Most of the time however, if you raised a peep, and you were not part of the warrior class or ruling family, you were executed. 

I cannot get past the stories in either the OT or the NT and call that book moral. 

Your allegedly "all loving God" in the OT tells his followers they can take the captured in war as bounty, meaning slaves and concubines, or simply kill them. He murders the Egyptian firstborn males over a beef he has with an adult. Tell me what a toddler could have done in such a short life to deserve death over something they had no comprehension of because of something an adult king did? 

Would you find it moral, if I was a judge in a modern court today, and a jury convicted a bank robber or rapist, but I simply didn't punish them, I had his kids murdered on top of that, even though they were too young and not even involved in the adult crime? Then there is the fictional flood story. Are you going to tell me which had to be millions if not billions of BABIES and toddlers deserved to drowned and choke to death over a beef, again, that he had with adults?

In other mammals we also see this rivalry and unfortunate cruelty. Male Zebras and male Lions and even Arctic wolves will hunt and seek out any offspring that are not that of the Alpha male and kill it. 

Our human species has only evolved with a more complex language, and as such, can and has over time, learned to turn away from our evolutionary instincts. The reason those vile stories exist isn't that Ra or Allah or Vishnu exist. The reason those stories exist, the stories of conquest and power, were because most humans in every religion chalked up their success to their local rulers.

Even the ancient polytheists of Rome and Greece, held very little empathy for those they defeated in battle. 

"Hell" does not exist, anymore than you buy the Japanese version of their superstitions of being punished in their "underworld".

Humans evolved to be social, and unfortunately, even with that we also evolved to be violent. But neither are a result of a cosmic super hero vs a ground villain.

No heaven, no hell needed to explain reality.

[The Grand Nudger]

Here's an opinion you won't get on af very often.  I'm not sure what a lost belief in afterlives is supposed to do with atheism.  Why, if a person stopped believing in them, they would suddenly stop believing in gods.  It seems as if "god" is getting the short shrift in this exchange.  Does there have to be an afterlife for there to be a god?  Is the one somehow necessary to the other?  I don't see why.

Correct me if I'm wrong but in all religions, the god creates the heaven and hell, so they are linked in their fairytale world.

Creator gods are a miniscule subset of all gods (usually the smallest set in any pantheon). That the most popular current religions (each a derivative of the same faith tradition) demand this attribute for their god is an artifact of the articles of their faith..but, just like the existence of an afterlife, the accuracy of the articles of their faith is not required for a god to exist either.  As far as we can tell, the relationship went the other way round, in any case.  People believed in afterlives long before they believed in anything we'd recogize as a god.  They didn't consider one necessary for the other in either direction....even when they began to believe in both.  

In essence, a person is considering whether or not to continue believing in gods if they happen to stop believing in one of a great many other things in the periphery of their religion.  It's always possible that the one thing under consideration is untrue whilst the other is not. The colored stick theory of cattle breeding was wrong too..why should afterlives be the final straw?

Consider this.  Every morning I take a shit, this causes the sun to rise.  No need to thank me, yet another service I provide.  Now, suppose in addition to believing that my morning shit causes he sun to rise I also believe that the sun will rise tommorrow (because I know I take a shit every morning).  Well...I'm wrong about one thing, but being wrong about the one thing doesn't make me wrong about the other. My shits aren;t what make the sun rise, but it will rise. Perhaps there is no afterlife, but there is a god...or there is no god but there is an afterlife. This, ofc, humoring silly stories for the purposes of trying to get people who want to take them seriously to..you know, take them a little more seriously.

[Little Rik]

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.  

Bullshit Rik.

First off, he is only a character, not a real being.

But to sit there and try to water down the interpretations of antiquity which are nothing like the interpretations today, is absurd.

BACK THEN, 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago the buyers of BOTH the Hebrews and Christians lived under rival authoritarian ruling families. Even prior polytheists did. BACK THEN religion was taken far more literally than today. BACK THEN, if you did not obey your local ruling family, if you were lucky, you got kicked out of the city. Most of the time however, if you raised a peep, and you were not part of the warrior class or ruling family, you were executed. 

I cannot get past the stories in either the OT or the NT and call that book moral. 

Your allegedly "all loving God" in the OT tells his followers they can take the captured in war as bounty, meaning slaves and concubines, or simply kill them. He murders the Egyptian firstborn males over a beef he has with an adult. Tell me what a toddler could have done in such a short life to deserve death over something they had no comprehension of because of something an adult king did? 

Would you find it moral, if I was a judge in a modern court today, and a jury convicted a bank robber or rapist, but I simply didn't punish them, I had his kids murdered on top of that, even though they were too young and not even involved in the adult crime? Then there is the fictional flood story. Are you going to tell me which had to be millions if not billions of BABIES and toddlers deserved to drowned and choke to death over a beef, again, that he had with adults?

In other mammals we also see this rivalry and unfortunate cruelty. Male Zebras and male Lions and even Arctic wolves will hunt and seek out any offspring that are not that of the Alpha male and kill it. 

Our human species has only evolved with a more complex language, and as such, can and has over time, learned to turn away from our evolutionary instincts. The reason those vile stories exist isn't that Ra or Allah or Vishnu exist. The reason those stories exist, the stories of conquest and power, were because most humans in every religion chalked up their success to their local rulers.

Even the ancient polytheists of Rome and Greece, held very little empathy for those they defeated in battle. 

"Hell" does not exist, anymore than you buy the Japanese version of their superstitions of being punished in their "underworld".

Humans evolved to be social, and unfortunately, even with that we also evolved to be violent. But neither are a result of a cosmic super hero vs a ground villain.

No heaven, no hell needed to explain reality.

Confusion, confusion and more confusion Brian.  

You wouldn't know why innocent looking little babies die in a violent way.
I also do not know.
At the same time I know that mass killers can not possibly pay their debt in one life time so it make sense that they will have to reborn again and again for paying their debt.
The karma law act like a bank.
Until you pay back your debt with them they will be after you even if you escape on the moon.  

By the way what all your whining has to do with whether the hell exist or not only Santa knows.  

[Brian37]

Bullshit Rik.

First off, he is only a character, not a real being.

But to sit there and try to water down the interpretations of antiquity which are nothing like the interpretations today, is absurd.

BACK THEN, 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago the buyers of BOTH the Hebrews and Christians lived under rival authoritarian ruling families. Even prior polytheists did. BACK THEN religion was taken far more literally than today. BACK THEN, if you did not obey your local ruling family, if you were lucky, you got kicked out of the city. Most of the time however, if you raised a peep, and you were not part of the warrior class or ruling family, you were executed. 

I cannot get past the stories in either the OT or the NT and call that book moral. 

Your allegedly "all loving God" in the OT tells his followers they can take the captured in war as bounty, meaning slaves and concubines, or simply kill them. He murders the Egyptian firstborn males over a beef he has with an adult. Tell me what a toddler could have done in such a short life to deserve death over something they had no comprehension of because of something an adult king did? 

Would you find it moral, if I was a judge in a modern court today, and a jury convicted a bank robber or rapist, but I simply didn't punish them, I had his kids murdered on top of that, even though they were too young and not even involved in the adult crime? Then there is the fictional flood story. Are you going to tell me which had to be millions if not billions of BABIES and toddlers deserved to drowned and choke to death over a beef, again, that he had with adults?

In other mammals we also see this rivalry and unfortunate cruelty. Male Zebras and male Lions and even Arctic wolves will hunt and seek out any offspring that are not that of the Alpha male and kill it. 

Our human species has only evolved with a more complex language, and as such, can and has over time, learned to turn away from our evolutionary instincts. The reason those vile stories exist isn't that Ra or Allah or Vishnu exist. The reason those stories exist, the stories of conquest and power, were because most humans in every religion chalked up their success to their local rulers.

Even the ancient polytheists of Rome and Greece, held very little empathy for those they defeated in battle. 

"Hell" does not exist, anymore than you buy the Japanese version of their superstitions of being punished in their "underworld".

Humans evolved to be social, and unfortunately, even with that we also evolved to be violent. But neither are a result of a cosmic super hero vs a ground villain.

No heaven, no hell needed to explain reality.

Confusion, confusion and more confusion Brian.  

You wouldn't know why innocent looking little babies die in a violent way.
I also do not know.
At the same time I know that mass killers can not possibly pay their debt in one life time so it make sense that they will have to reborn again and again for paying their debt.
The karma law act like a bank.
Until you pay back your debt with them they will be after you even if you escape on the moon.  

By the way what all your whining has to do with whether the hell exist or not only Santa knows.  

Yes I do know why innocent babies die in a violent way. Bad shit happens. It isn't that compassionate humans want it to happen, we don't. But it happens, just like one day you might slip in your bathtub and split your scull, or go hiking and slip and fall down a cliff, or you reach for your cell phone while driving and get smashed by an 18 wheeler. 

Bad happening does not make that bad some product of a Sky Wizard punishing you, or a ground villain. Why are you so desperate to have life be some comic book super hero movie?

My debt? Holy crap dude, so life is an ATM machine and all off us are borrowers? Your metaphors are nonsense.  I know you are trying to make life grand with your words, but you sound as romantic with your religion as Mystic tries with his. 

Reality isn't some grade school or High school play where the jock gets the cheerleader 100% of the time.

If you want bad shit to be reduced in life, stop trying to make garbage mythology the gap answer as to why.

If it is a crime, study behavior.

If it is a disease, study medicine.

If it is war, study diplomacy.

If is nature, study evolution, geology, meteorology, astrophysics. 

We do not need Jesus, or Allah or Yahweh or Buddha or Brahma to understand why either good or bad happen in life.

[haig]

I gotta say I have only been here a short time, but I have come to realize that having any meaningful discussion with Lil Rik is a waste of time.

[LastPoet]

Heh, it only takes a couple of interactions... dude is

[haig]

Correct me if I'm wrong but in all religions, the god creates the heaven and hell, so they are linked in their fairytale world.

Creator gods are a miniscule subset of all gods (usually the smallest set in any pantheon). That the most popular current religions (each a derivative of the same faith tradition) demand this attribute for their god is an artifact of the articles of their faith..but, just like the existence of an afterlife, the accuracy of the articles of their faith is not required for a god to exist either.  As far as we can tell, the relationship went the other way round, in any case.  People believed in afterlives long before they believed in anything we'd recogize as a god.  They didn't consider one necessary for the other in either direction....even when they began to believe in both.  

In essence, a person is considering whether or not to continue believing in gods if they happen to stop believing in one of a great many other things in the periphery of their religion.  It's always possible that the one thing under consideration is untrue whilst the other is not.  The colored stick theory of cattle breeding was wrong too..why should afterlives be the final straw?  

Consider this.  Every morning I take a shit, this causes the sun to rise.  No need to thank me, yet another service I provide.  Now, suppose in addition to believing that my morning shit causes he sun to rise I also believe that the sun will rise tommorrow (because I know I take a shit every morning).  Well...I'm wrong about one thing, but being wrong about the one thing doesn't make me wrong about the other.  My shits aren;t what make the sun rise, but it will rise.  Perhaps there is no afterlife, but there is a god...or there is no god but there is an afterlife.  This, ofc, humoring silly stories for the purposes of trying to get people who want to take them seriously to..you know, take them a little more seriously.

OK to be honest I have no idea what you are talking about. If god did not create heaven for the afterlife relgious folks and hell for the bad non believers, then who did?

[Succubus]

John Milton. Mostly.

[haig]

John Milton. Mostly.

OK...It's all perfectly clear now