The concept of Hell

[T.J.]

I wanted to take a minute to talk about something that used to be a legit fear of mine. Actually while I was indoctrinated burning in hell was my number one fear in life. The second were heights.

Basically when I was a kid I was taught if you're good you go to heaven, and if you're bad you go to hell. This was a controlling mechanic to keep people in the faith and not to perform certain behaviors. I even had my mom quietly implied before that my actions would insert me in hell, but I don't hold ill will against her (even though I consider this a form of child abuse) since she too was indoctrinated at a young age like I was. She just never fell out of the faith like I did.

The problem with this is what hell is. Hell is basically a place of eternal hellfire where people will torture you 24/7, so implying that any child would be going there for being bad when they die is extremely fucked up and frankly child abuse.

Now there are some misconceptions of hell even from believers. The popular belief is that Satan rules hell with his demons who does the torturing of damned souls. This isn't supported anywhere in the bible. Hell is mentioned several times, but it's never implied that it even has a ruler of any sort, and the bible also suggests that the devil's kingdom is Earth and he wanders between Earth and Heaven with restrictions put into place to keep him in line. Because our boy Satan is a dirty, dirty boy!

Now while I was a member of a baptist church I was actually told that Satan doesn't do the punishing. God does. So imagine that for a second. A supposed all loving and all powerful god doesn't just send you to hell if you don't accept Jesus into your heart, he actually tortures you there 24/7. To someone who actually believes this crap it's scary as fuck. To those who don't it's just absurd.

The problem with eternity is that it's eternal. You get used to it, so people in hell would just get used to being in a constant state of torment even if it is from an all powerful god. Therefore the point of hell becomes moot.

The reverse is true for Heaven. You get used to it and you'll become super bored.

Also I think Heaven is actually hotter than Hell. Go figure.

Discuss.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

I wanted to take a minute to talk about something that used to be a legit fear of mine. Actually while I was indoctrinated burning in hell was my number one fear in life. The second were heights.

Basically when I was a kid I was taught if you're good you go to heaven, and if you're bad you go to hell. This was a controlling mechanic to keep people in the faith and not to perform certain behaviors. I even had my mom quietly implied before that my actions would insert me in hell, but I don't hold ill will against her (even though I consider this a form of child abuse) since she too was indoctrinated at a young age like I was. She just never fell out of the faith like I did.

The problem with this is what hell is. Hell is basically a place of eternal hellfire where people will torture you 24/7, so implying that any child would be going there for being bad when they die is extremely fucked up and frankly child abuse.

Now there are some misconceptions of hell even from believers. The popular belief is that Satan rules hell with his demons who does the torturing of damned souls. This isn't supported anywhere in the bible. Hell is mentioned several times, but it's never implied that it even has a ruler of any sort, and the bible also suggests that the devil's kingdom is Earth and he wanders between Earth and Heaven with restrictions put into place to keep him in line. Because our boy Satan is a dirty, dirty boy!

Now while I was a member of a baptist church I was actually told that Satan doesn't do the punishing. God does. So imagine that for a second. A supposed all loving and all powerful god doesn't just send you to hell if you don't accept Jesus into your heart, he actually tortures you there 24/7. To someone who actually believes this crap it's scary as fuck. To those who don't it's just absurd.

The problem with eternity is that it's eternal. You get used to it, so people in hell would just get used to being in a constant state of torment even if it is from an all powerful god. Therefore the point of hell becomes moot.

The reverse is true for Heaven. You get used to it and you'll become super bored.

Also I think Heaven is actually hotter than Hell. Go figure.

Discuss.

The concept of an eternal hell is a Christin invention, along with the devil.  In Judaism the devil is the servant of god, not his enemy. Makes perfect sense; how could an omnipotent god allow any enemy to exist for more than nanosecond? The concept of a war in heaven makes no sense if Christian theology is followed to a logical conclusion. 

If you have not discovered him,  Anglican Bishop Kohn Shelby Spong has some fascinating lectures on YouTube,  as well as some best selling books:

[T.J.]

Ah, neat. I knew that Jews didn't believe in hell, but I didn't know what Satan's role was in Judaism. That actually makes a lot more sense.

[brewer]

It's been so long now that I don't recall if I feared hell as a youngster. I know I feared my german mother,............. hmmm, don't remember any horns, just a big wooden spoon.

I know that catholics get to buy their way out.

[Ranjr]

Hell was a concern, but I figured I'd get by.  Maybe run the place eventually.

[Angrboda]

Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

It's been so long now that I don't recall if I feared hell as a youngster. I know I feared my german mother,............. hmmm, don't remember any horns, just a big wooden spoon.

I know that catholics get to buy their way out.

 I was taught all about mortal sin and hell by the nuns when I was seven. Scared me shitless. 

Umm, Catholics could indeed literally buy their way out of hell. That practice was introduced by the first Borgia Pope , Alexander V1 in the fifteenth century. That  especially corrupt practice was one of the many reasons for the protestant reformation. 

Literally buying yourself out of hell with money has not been a Catholic practice  since the sixteenth century. 

Having said that;  Christianity is a highly legalistic, transactional religion. Imo it can be argued that Christians effectively buy their way out of hell by performing a bunch of rituals, ranging from prayer to the catholic Mass and by obeying a list of rules***. 

Believers of many religions have believed for millennia that they can influence/bargain with  their god(s), specifically by the performance of ritual. 


Thought for today " Religion: Man's attempt to communicate with he weather" (Graffito, Cambridge, 2000)


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*** Judaism is far more legalistic than Christianity. The  Law of Moses consists of not ten but 613 commandments (mitzvah) Collectively they are known as the mitzvot. They cover every aspect of life.   Jews have long argued that it was The Law  which kept them together as a people for over 1000 years. Today only orthodox Jews even try to keep the mitzvot. Below is link to all 613 commandments.


The 613 Commandments (Mitzvot) - Mitzvahs & Traditions (chabad.org)

[Paleophyte]

Ever wonder exactly what it is that's burning and why that would be a problem? It isn't as if combustion should be a problem for an intangible soul and all of your pain receptors are rotting in the grave with the rest of your corpse. This is the sort of rubbish you get when "theology" consists of looking at a volcano and thinking, "We should send everybody who we don't like there forever!"

[Fake Messiah]

Yeah, eternity of Hell. James Joyce also wrote about what priests were telling him when he was a kid about it in his book "A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man"

Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they are destined to last for ever. But while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

And few lines about the description of Hell

Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

...

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

Priests even explained to kids how Hellfire works

But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.

http://www.online-literature.com/james_j...ung_man/3/

[no one]

Hell is just a never ending biology class taught by Kent and Eric Hovind, Ray Comfort and his lap dog featuring Ken Hamm.

If you leave the class, you step on the fox news set, but they're all "singing" like Justin Bieber.