Good question, Kellii.
I guess I cheated. I was born into the SDA church which does not believe in the mainstream Christian understanding of Hell. I already knew how inaccurate this version of hell was and because this helped to distinguish them from other denominations there was nothing stopping them from going back to the original Hebrew culture and language to understand this.
People underestimate the power of towing the party line and what biases that can create. So as I came out of Christianity I was never afraid of āeternal tortureā. The idea of this aloneā¦ is just so criminally manipulative and coercive that I cannot believe more people do not recognize it as abuse. If someone were to tell their children that they were going to burn them even for 1 hour because they lied about cleaning their room those parents would lose their children because abuse doesnāt have to be physical.
According to the bible, Hell is the grave. Christians conflate this with the āLake of Fireā which the NT says will consume sinners after attacking New Jerusalem.
Revelation 20:9
And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.
So what does āeternalā mean in the context of death? This differs from Christianity because without proper cultural context, Christianity tends to take spiritual concepts and ideas literally. Sin describes a state of separation between man and God. Orā¦ you could say that if God represents the ādivine natureā of man, as a being ācreated in the image of Godā, that the separation can be forgiven or it can become permanent/eternal. This becomes conflated with Hell/Gave. Hell becomes āeternal separationā from God.
And there is some truth to this.
When you die you have no more opportunities to ārepentā (turn away from sin back to āGodā). But instead of āGodā letās use ādivine natureā. Whatever humans call divine is divine. People say the bible is holy so they call it the holy bible. These are mental constructs. āGodā can also be a mental construct; along with angels, demons, and the devil. All of these āentitiesā exist in the mind because we create them the same way that little children have nightmares of monsters under the bed. When they look thereās nothing there. For adults, God is literally invisible and thereās no way to challenge this in their minds because theyāve already allowed the invisible to still be real and true. And imaginary friend is something that many children have in common. But why do we ignore how common this is and attribute reason to psychology? If children ānaturallyā create imaginary friends to converse with, how can we say that adults canāt slip into the same exact need and create the same belief?
Ultimately, hell is the same as this. It is imaginary but as a concept, it still exists (like a program on a computer) in the mind of the believer. So their fear of hell is in direct proportion to their belief. Some peopleās belief is much stronger than others and so the effect that fear has on them can push them further into the arms of a manipulator who can weaponize that belief for their own purposes. Since only those who believe in hell are afraid of it, it becomes useful to those seeking power to spread this belief. They donāt need to believe it themselves. They just need others to so that they can then make suggestions to them about how they can avoid that fate. And these suggestions (because theyāre made by manipulators) naturally involve the transfer of wealth and power.