- I realized years ago that the idea of “HELL” is a made-up word created by a fourth century Pope along with “PERGATORY” to keep the faithful faithful to the church. There is no such thing as HELL in the original manuscripts and what Jesus actually talked about was Gahanna, which was outside of Jerusalem where dead bodies, etc. were put there to be burned up by a fire that was stoked day and night. He DID NOT mean that the unsaved would-be tortured day and night for eternity!!! The “unsaved” are simply annialated or destroyed. I am so angry with God about this that I want to spit nails! Why in “Hell” did He allow this teaching to go forth into all of Christendom??? You cannot reason with an evangelical minister about Annialationism because they just will NOT accept it, but they also refuse to look at the history of the Catholic church who created HELL.
The issue here isn’t that God allows these things but that it is man who twist God’s word to reach an agenda or end goal of control or power. Absolute power corrupts Absolutely. I want to make it clear that this would simply be the argument for faith though I’m not a Christian but an atheist my goal is never to mislead and this is the argument to consider if you are a person of faith.
because god is just a figment of your imagination, so he/she can’t stop anyone?
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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I believe that the antecedents of hell came from our heritage as hunter-gatherers.
Consider that authoritative leadership coupled with obedience and selflessness was necessary to store large amounts of food supplies for the winter.
If everyone was selfless and obedient to authority, then winter could be a time of relaxation, sex, story-telling, and so forth.
If everyone was selfish, then winter means starvation, disease, possibly cannibalism, and a slow, lingering death.
It seems–at least to me–that there are parallels between a future life of ease when the year dies with winter and an afterlife in paradise if we are good in this life, as humans have always imagined the supernatural as mirroring our own frame of reference.
Greek gods–for example–have extra-marital affairs, they can be spiteful, they love and hate . . . in short, we imagine them in our image.
If we consider hunter-gatherers who have become aware of their own mortality, seeing life and death as mirroring the cycle of the seasons with the death and rebirth that occurs in nature, then it seems like an aferlife of paradise or hell becomes predicated on how one behaves in this life.
I can argue that many Eastern ideas about reincarnation came from this as well.
The year is reborn in spring after winter, and how you prepared for winter last fall influences how healthy you are when winter ends, so how you behave in this life determines how you will be born in your next life, so maybe the idea of karma came from hunter-gatherers preparing for winter.
As I mentioned in my prior post, I am not an anthropologist, so these arguments are something I believe, and not something I know.
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This is why theodicies fail. God is supposed to be all powerful, yet he cannot maintain control of his own messaging, or in fact even do a job of framing and marketing that a PR professional would endorse.
Either he isn’t all powerful, so can’t pull it off; isn’t all knowing, so isn’t even aware there’s a problem; or doesn’t give a fig, so he’s not omnibenevolent. This is the 3-legged stool which must have at least one leg lopped off to make things like this make sense. Usually, theologians who admit this, eject omnipotence. God cares, he really does, but just can’t do the thing he isn’t doing. In this case, preventing errors and heresies and the resulting chaos.
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You could reason with a JW, they are annihilationists; but they have all sorts of other ridiculous beliefs, like the whole transfusions thing, and [clutches pearls] they are anti-Trinitarian. Not to mention that they are an isolationist cult.
I agree that the typical modern conception of hell owes more to Catholicism (and to Milton and Dante really) than to scripture, due to mistranslations and deliberately obtuse interpretations in the service of dogma. Christianity needs hellthreat so that it can manufacture a “problem” to sell the “solution” for.
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