Hello and question about hell

[The Valkyrie]

Hugs,

Nobody is saying this guy didn't experience something. But the experience itself proves nothing about the existence of an afterlife.

It's proof enough to him.

Truth is a personal fact that cannot always be demonstrated.

Plenty of people that experience NDE have no question that their experience was real.

How many people do you know that claim their dreams are real?

That’s just it, though.

Many theists claim to have had “personal experiences” and want the rest of us to accept that as proof.

Personal experiences are only truly “proof” to those who “experienced” them.

Once while working A&E I had a patient brought in who was adamant he was being chased by a small man with big teeth and red skin.

That was proof to him. The fact that he was higher than a kite at the time didn’t matter. Should I have believed him just because he was so certain and wanted me to believe?

[JairCrawford]

It's funny, I wanted to create a thread about Hell

Is hell mentioned anywhere in OT?
Is Christian hell another thing "borrowed" from pagans?

Sheol is translated as Hell in some English translations, but it was not the same concept.

In the New Testament, Hell is translated from Hades, Gehenna, or Tartarus. Also note that Hades was typically used to translate Sheol in the Greek version of the Old Testament.

[Minimalist]

Correct, also Hades was not conceived of as a place of punishment.  It was a place for the dead to hang out.  Later on they developed the concept of Tartarus where wrong-doers were actually punished.

[JairCrawford]

Correct, also Hades was not conceived of as a place of punishment.  It was a place for the dead to hang out.  Later on they developed the concept of Tartarus where wrong-doers were actually punished.

I think it was Gehenna where the wrongdoers are punished. Tartarus is only mentioned a few times and it's pretty ambiguous.

[Minimalist]

The Greeks really didn't give a shit about the jews, though.  There was great friction between hellenized jews and the hasids of the day!

[ignoramus]

Hugs,

Nobody is saying this guy didn't experience something. But the experience itself proves nothing about the existence of an afterlife.

It's proof enough to him.

Truth is a personal fact that cannot always be demonstrated.

Plenty of people that experience NDE have no question that their experience was real.

How many people do you know that claim their dreams are real?

Which is exactly why God is a personal God.
Which also explains why we've had 3,500 of them.

Good news Huggy, you ain't going to hell! I promise.

[Graufreud]

But if Jews didn't have Hell (Sheol not being hell as we know it), then why it became important to get it?

I mean they managed to do without it before Christ....

(They also managed to do without Christ too and some still do)

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Hugs,

Nobody is saying this guy didn't experience something. But the experience itself proves nothing about the existence of an afterlife.

It's proof enough to him.

Truth is a personal fact that cannot always be demonstrated.

Plenty of people that experience NDE have no question that their experience was real.

How many people do you know that claim their dreams are real?

No one is questioning the experience, but what the experience means.  People on psychedelic drugs often report experiences that seem either blissfully or horrifically real to them.  But that doesn't mean that trees actually melted or that cockroaches in tails and tap shoes actually danced a buck-and-wing on a platter of oatmeal flambé.

Not questioning whether a particular experience was real doesn't make it 'real' to anyone but the person who experienced it.  In other words, if the story above is correctly reported (and I have my doubts), the patient is probably honestly reporting his visions of hell. But such honesty has no bearing whatsoever on whether hell actually exists.

Boru

[Fake Messiah]

Yeah, so many people speak with Jesus and to some he tells that one denomination is right over the other while to the others he tells the opposite; to some people he says that Earth is flat while to others that it is round; to some that evolution is true while to others that 6 day creation...
And it's my fault for not believing.

[Angrboda]

My ILS worker noted how talking of alternate facts was something of a misnomer, because something is a fact or it is not. There are not multiple facts of a specific matter such that there can be alternative ones. It's an alternative opinion, assertion, or belief. Not an alternative fact.

Likewise with truth. The commonly accepted definition of truth is that something is true in so far as it corresponds with a state of affairs in the world. This is the correspondance theory of truth. Under this theory, it is meaningless to say that "it's true for him" because that doesn't fulfill what we mean by truth as in that case, it's possible for their to be multiple such personal truths, and it's a violation of the law of non-contradiction to say with regard to one person's "truth" that it corresponds to a state of affairs in the world, yet according to someone else's personal truth, that state of affairs does not hold, but instead a different one does.

It's possible to have other theories of truth and so theoretically it may be possible to find a meaningful interpretation of the phrase "it's true for him," but I rather doubt that is what people are proposing. Especially given such people are opposed to the idea of the social construction of truth. Rather I suspect people like Huggy are just talking nonsense in an effort to rescue the rationality of a proposition which on its face presents problems for the view that it is a rationally justified belief.

I must also say that one is equally abandoning agnosticism if one attempts to argue that a particular person's experience is veridical. Suggesting that there may be alternate explanations for a person's experience is not the same as asserting a specific explanation of the cause.