Is it just me or is hell used as an argument? The Quran constantly tells people to believe or fear hell. is this an argument? if so, this is what is called appeal for force or appeal to the stick.
Why does god need to use force and propaganda to convince us? was there no other way?
I theorize that the antecedents of Hell arose among primitive hunter-gathers for very specific reasons.
I believe that authority and social order were neccesary to prepare for the future, with a specific example being storing large supplies of food for the winter.
If everyone was good and selfless, then the community had a better chance of surviving the winter in ease and comfort. If everybody defies authority and only cares about themselves, then winter means starvation, disease, and death.
It seems–at least to me–that there are paralells between planning for a future of ease, health, and harmony when the year “dies” with winter and an afterlife of paradise if one is “good.”
When humans became aware of our own mortality, and this was coupled with the need for co-operative behavior with seflessness and authoritative leadership to survive winter . . . then this morphed into an afterlife predicated with heaven and hell based on one’s behavior in this life.
In many ways, we are still cavemen.
Please note that these are only my ideas, and–not being an anthropologist–I only claim that this is something I believe, and not something I know.
I don’t believe in any gods but I think people use the notion of hell to get the behavior they want out of others because it’s and easy way to do it and they are lazy.
There are plenty of other ways. I was taught how to behave as a decent person without any gods or hell and I raised children without gods and hell and they are decent people.
Which god? Which version of hell?
When I see independently verified data on how hot and big hell is, and how many demons are torturing me for eternity, and where it’s located, I might then accept it as a terrifying argument.
You may mot be an actual tenured anthropologist, but my first reaction upon reading this was “wait, this makes much more sense than the guff mythology fanboys come up with on the matter”. 
I would even venture that it’s worth tracking down an actual anthropologist to run this by, and see if it makes sense to a professional - more kudos to you if it does of course!
It’s also worth tracking down the recent writings of Francesca Stavrakopoulou, to see if this thought of yours meshes with her ideas, as this sounds to me like just the sort of idea she would devise as an explanation for the “hell” meme, though to be fair, the exact details connected to the concept of a post-death difference of destinies based upon moral judgement are wildly divergent even across ancient civilisations. I’m pretty sure the Ancient Egyptians, for example, had a significantly different take on this.
Indeed, if memory serves, contemporary Jews themselves had a different view on the matter to the frankly diseased picture painted by American Christian fundamentalists. Again, I suspect Stavrakopoulou would subject their witterings to a well deserved hosing with the discoursive flamethrower. I’d pay for ringside seats for that spectacle. 
IMO religious beliefs serve primarily to explain the observed world in an age of technological illiteracy (they just happen to be wrong) and for the rich and powerful to control others. The idea of a hell would fit very nicely with such a control idea.
UK Atheist
Thank you very much for your kind words and the validation.
I have started to look into the works of Stavrakopoulou, and I will follow up. This may take a while, because I am about halfway through my BSN degree, and I never have enough time for everything.
Thank you again.
Damn, Kev… 
That was pretty friggin’ good. Very interesting and fascinating angle you presented there. Gonna have to remember that for future reference should I ever get the opportunity to use it. Cool. 
Thank you very much.
How are you doing, BTW? Keeping busy?
Oh, doin’ fair to middlin’ 'round these parts.Trying to keep up with a four year old grandson several days a week, while still having to help care for my Uncle in the assisted living home. Also working quite a bit in my “wood shop” making gifts for the upcoming Christmas holidays. (That’s not counting the couple of rocking chairs I made for my Uncle over the last few months. Even starting on one for my wife now.) A couple of concerning matters with my grandson’s (useless) “father” recently, but only time will tell how that will work out. Meanwhile, just taking it easy as much as possible. Good to be back on here, I must say, after being away for quite awhile. Gonna be hit-n-miss on how often I can pop in, but a little bit is better than nothing, I suppose.
If for some reason you are inclined to believe in Hell, the natural reaction (after a while of having accepted that God can send anyone there for any reason) is to ask oneself: can I escape Hell and if so how?
And the answer is “no”. You can try the various routes. The path of moral goodness. The path of penance. The path of self realization. The path of grace. The path of merger.
The problem with the path of moral goodness, penance and grace is the lack of reassurance. At no point will you have achieved any level of goodness or absolution to give you any level of certainty that you’ve avoided Hell.
“I’m too good of a person to go to Hell!”
Yeah, well … humility obviously isn’t your strong suit.
“I’ve atoned for all of my sins!”
Yeah well … that doesn’t erase the pain you’ve inflicted on others, so …”
These are just the interesting parts about Hell that call for a spiritual system to avoid it. The existence and belief in God may in fact be a reaction to an innate fear of punishment.
The Self realization path depends on what system of philosophy you’re following. The Buddhist path preaches salvation by letting go of craving. To my knowledge, following the Buddhist path to its end does not result in knowledge and vision that Hell has been utterly avoided. Maybe I haven’t taken it to the end, however … idk
Grace is also difficult because Jesus (the redeemer) doesn’t exactly give you any assurances that you’re “saved” outside of the dogma that believing in him guarantees just that.
As far as I can tell, for the believer in Hell, the best way to avoid it is to cling to the hypothetical God who sends you there in the first place. Ie. He cannot send you there if you’ve merged your being with His.
Ultimately, if you’re a sober, seasoned believer in Hell, the outcome of your eternal soul living or perishing is up to God. There is some reassurance in the idea that a loving Gid would not send a basically moral person to Hell, but it may be the case that all humans are simply destined for the furnace by design (and there’s no avoiding it).
At this point it becomes helpful to just not think about it. What’s the point? Live a good life for the sake of it. Don’t penance too much, cause it won’t do you any damn good outside of some psychological unresolved parent-child reward dynamics.
Realize the “ultimate” as much as you like and if it makes you happy then go as far as you can with it.
Grace? How do you know you’ve received grace? Can any Christian explain grace outside of dogma? What does it feel like to be given the kind of grace that saves one’s soul from Hell? I don’t know. I’d be interested in the answer.
Outside of just discarding the notion of Hell as pure rubbish, the task of avoiding it (for believers) is a multifaceted array of possibilities and tactics. These things in and of themselves have some appeal from an outsiders point of view - merely in terms of what the tactics are, how the premise of the theory supports the conclusion of the escape, and why diffferent people adopt one or the other, etcetera.
Lacking a better explanation/model, I’ll go for this.
I’ll just add that religion, in the form of fear of the anger of the gods, and the threat of a miserable existence in the afterlife is a very powerful control mechanism. I find it reasonable to hypothesise that as soon as people in power discovered that this fear could be used to control and alter people’s behaviour, it became a thing of its own. They could therefore actively use it to keep people in line, and to use it as a common cause to promote internal cooperation. This cooperation could then be exploited to get – among other things – better internal structure to improve the survivability of the tribe, to mobilise better and stronger defense against external threats, and of course to bring riches to the tribal leaders/the men in charge of the tribe. Similar mechanisms can be seen at work also in non-religious contexts these days.
You know when parents tell their kids: “Do as i say or else Santa Claus will give you coal for Christmas”? It’s the same thing but instead of Santa Claus you have God and instead of coal you get eternal punishment in hell.
Some people find out that Santa Claus doesn’t exist at the age of 6, some other people believe in him even when they are adults.
I have no such reason of course, but perhaps someone can give their best one? So we can examine the rationale.
“Well the strongest argument often cited against moral objectivism is the argument from cultural relativism, which points to the vast and persistent differences in moral values across cultures and historical periods, suggesting that if morality were truly objective, there wouldn’t be such significant variations in what people consider right and wrong.”
I don’t accept the existence of supernatural curses, as they’re unsupported by objective evidence. I also find the idea that a newborn baby starts it life cursed, and requires saving, to be morally repugnant.
It has the same problem all the others have, the promise is meaningless until or unless the claim that we need saving, is supported by sufficient objective evidence.
Since the gospel myths are anonymous hearsay, written decades after the events they purport to describe, and involve claims at their core for a supernatural deity, we have no objective evidence exist or is possible, why would I care what others subjectively choose to assign a character in those myths?
He can’t send me there if it and he don’t exist.
I only know what hell has utility for in authoritarian religion. It is a fulcrum of control, a way to threaten horrible consequences for failure to conform. This is important in fundamentalism, in part because they believe in corporate guilt – that I am not responsible just for my own actions, but subject to be held responsible for the actions of my family, city, church, tribe, or nation – if I do not sufficiently “oppose” or if I by my lack of opposition “condone” the misdeeds of others.
If you believe in such nonsense, then controlling others – including people outside your group – becomes terribly important. And hellthreat is a tool in the toolbox to accomplish that.
In the Christian fundamentalism I left some thirty years ago, this is pumped up in ways that have more to do with Milton and Dante than with the Bible. Through (potentially deliberate) mistranslation of certain terms and a long tradition, a lot of florid descriptions of eternal perdition exist that can’t really be supported from the scriptures, particularly if you are any sort of student of the original languages.
Back in the day, I regarded hell as a solved problem with the solution open to all via the grace of God. The combination of that plus my parents coming to fundamentalism late in life and already having been socialized to be decent human beings (they spared the rod, for example), plus being in a “relatively mild” and quasi-intellectual form of fundagelicalism, means that hellthreat was never an issue for me, then or now. But I have met plenty of people who were very damaged by such doctrines, to the point of PTSD symptoms. My pastor once confessed to me that people who obsessively “go forward” at every altar call “just in case” were in fact the bane of his existence. Of course – he did not dogfood this information into an objective assessment of whether the doctrine was actually helping anyone. After all, he didn’t have the OPTION to question it or to teach something different.
Apart from who teaches it and why, hell is of course another alleged, conveniently invisible, non-verifiable supernatural place or state, for which, definitionally, no evidence can be had. It is just another article of religious faith. It can be dismissed out of hand on the same basis that anything supernatural must be dismissed – it not only isn’t, but CAN’T be evidenced in any way.
Hell has always interested me, and I even wrote a short story about it that was published in the September 2003 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact (see below).
I also suspect that elements of my story were plaigiarized for the series Upload, which aired for 3 seasons, which started in 2020.
In my story, a convicted criminal can be executed and sentenced to hell by having his consciouness downloaded into a computer server that hosts a nightmarish digital world that is designed to punish the criminal indefinitely.
The story actually received some good reviews, but I still feel like I should have been credited in the Upload series.
