<p>Well, I would just like to dialog about this.</p>
<p>Personally, I don’t believe in Hell. I don’t believe in an eternal punishment for humans, even though I’m Christian.</p>
<p>How can you love a God that would send its creation to eternal flames?</p>
<p>I think Hell was distorted / invented by the church to scare people into Christianity.</p>
<p>Jesus was all about love, forgiveness, and hanging out with the sinners…</p>
<p>If anything I would think he would send the sinners who didn’t believe in him to heaven before the Christians…</p>
<p>Just a thought… and I did some research, and there are some refernces that there was a mis translation or something…</p>
<p>Anyways, any thoughts…</p>
<p>Cus I think one of the main problems with Christianity, is that people don’t love god because they see him as a disciplinary who is all about rules… when actually he is all about love, and doesn’t care if you break rules if you love and believe in him…</p>
<p>It would seem to me, according to the logic below, that all people will go to hell if it exists.</p>
<p>“Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to hell.”</p>
<p>It’s interesting to read about the origins of the prevailing concept of Hell and the original meaning of the word itself, before the books of Bible were translated from Hebrew and Greek. It seems the Biblical hell is not a place, but rather the death of the soul. In other words, if you are saved, you live forever in the kingdom of God, and if you aren’t, you simply cease to exist. If one takes this view, then it’s no longer necessary to reconcile the concept of a purely good God with one who sends most of his creation to burn eternally.</p>
<p>I was a member of one of those churches that believes if you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your savior you can’t get into heaven and it never made sense to me–even as a child. I kept thinking,“What if you were born into a buddhist family in Asia? How would you know?”</p>
<p>Actually in my former church it wasn’t good enough to be Christian–you had to be a member of our denomination or you weren’t getting in at all. Now, they’ve backed away from that publicly in the name of ecuminism–but the truth is inside it the attitudes haven’t changed. </p>
<p>I thought when I left that church that I’d find another. I like the idea of the community of it, but I’m just left with a wariness of organized religion. That doesn’t mean I’m wary of God. I never believed that image of God as the punisher. My issue with God is why does he have so many appalling people speaking in his name? He doesn’t have to send them to hell, but couldn’t he strike them mute for a year or so?</p>
<p>I was raised on Hell. Still freaks me out to no end. I switched denominations as an adult because I wanted my children to love God, not fear Hell.</p>
<p>This is the absolute truth: When I was a child and would picture what God looked like, the image that came into my mind was of an old man with a white beard, up in a tower, spanking a child. Seriously. Thank you to every Southern Baptist evangelist that came our way.</p>
<p>I think language and culture get in the way in these discussions, and to often all that happens is an argument and few people pay attention to any opinion or thought but their own.</p>
<p>I believe in the Bible as accurate, and there are many references to hell. So as much as I hate to accept it, I believe there is a hell. In a way, this makes sense since I also believe there is a heaven. The thing is, though, while we have some idea what each would be like, it’s not likely that any of us have a solid idea of what heaven and hell would be like. But we also know from looking at the people we know in this life, that we all make decisions, some of them selfish and wrong, and some of them selfless and right. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to have good things or enjoy life, but we generally agree <a href=“I%20think”>i</a>* that a person who hurts others to get what he wants is doing wrong, and a person willing to put their own wants aside in order to help someone else is doing good.</p>
<p>As to what God wants, it should not really be hard to see - who here imagines that God would reward someone for, say, hitting a child? On the other hand, who here imagines that God would be angry at someone for taking time to tutor children or pick up trash, if their motive was to help other people? How is it good to say vicious things about another person? How is it wrong to give blood? We become the choices we make, and in my inconsequential opinion if we do what we know pleases God, we shall not fare badly in the end for it.</p>
<p>As to Christianity, this is a conundrum. Jesus clearly said that He was the Way, that no man comes to the Father but by Him. Yet when he gave an example of a man who pleased God and loved his meighbor, the example he chose was a Samaritan, a belief which is generally acknowledged by Jews to be faulty and wrong; in fact some beliefs of the Samaritans are in conflict with Christ’s own teachings - to me this is His way of saying do not let words get in the way of choosing and doing what is good and right. </p>
<p>I’ve talked too much, I know, but hopefully I am not too far from sense.</p>
<p>How you can prove one way or another? You are trying to apply logic to something that logic is not applicable, it is more a matter of definition. Somebody has put definition out to make somebody’s faith stronger, maybe they felt that otherwise, their faith is not strong enough? How you can say that it is correct or incorrect? There are a lot of things that are very debatable if you take them at their face value. Why you are questionning this one and not hundreds of others? For example, one religion states that life begins at conceptions and the other has different definition for the beginning of life. Which one is correct?</p>
<p>Someone correct me if I am wrong (boy is that an unnecessary request on this board!)but I think the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition is that hell exists but is not an eternal punishment for its denizens. There is an end to punishment. In an infinity of time, all sentience finds reconcilliation with God.</p>
<p>Why does the condition of damnation or salvation have to be an either/or proposition? For that matter why does the argument for the existence of the soul have to be either/or, yes/no? </p>
<p>If you were in Hell, would you necessarily know it? If you were in Heaven, would you know it? Maybe we are and it is as good or bad as we make it.</p>
<p>I agree and live my life this way. Nevertheless, there are many instructions in the Bible that make no sense at all in this context. Why eat cows but not pigs? Why blow a horn on the first day of each month? Neither of these things seems intuitively relevant in modern times, yet there they are, commanded in the Bible.</p>
<p>So it is entirely possible that the all-knowing, all-powerful God actually wants us to say vicious things about other people. It defies logic, right? But so do lots of other commandments. In the end, we can not know. We can only do what feels right and seems to make sense.</p>
<p>Anyone who enjoys this discussion would enjoy reading The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs, which documents his year-long experiment of following the Bible as literally as possible for one year. It sounds like it would be goofy, and it is in fact quite funny sometimes, but it also delves seriously into the notion of living religiously.</p>
<p>I suggest that you check out Universalism. The Universalists believe(d) in universal salvation. (They also have a strong belief in social justice here.)</p>
<p>BigG, I think it has to do with consummation. We are meant to become something, and our choices determine our end. ‘Heaven’ and ‘hell’ may be words used to describe the success or failure of aligning what we were meant to be, with what we become.</p>
<p>I don’t think that’s correct. True, logic and faith are separate qualities, but even so I am not aware of a single commandment from God in the Bible that could reasonably be considered evil.</p>
<p>You all might enjoy the book, “The Year of Living Biblically” by A.J. Jacobs.</p>
<p>On the surface it’s very funny because he’s trying to follow all of the rules listed in the bible–other than the ones that would get him thrown in jail–but he does end up coming away with a deeper sense of his own faith.</p>
<p>Or as Jack Handy says,</p>
<pre><code> If God dwells inside us like some people say, I sure hope He likes enchiladas, because that’s what He’s getting
</code></pre>
<p>If life is eternal, as Jesus promised, why does there need to be a concept of consummation or a final becomming. What if we simply continue to morph, improve, regress, devolve, evolve, etc. forever?</p>
<p>Buddhists—well, most Buddhists—believe that “hell” (not the word they use, mind you) is being trapped in the cycle of death and rebirth, and that the ultimate goal of all things is to be freed from that cycle by coming to the realization—Nirvana—that all things are one.</p>
<p>This jibes nicely with the view of some Christians that hell is the state of being separated from God, which started when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden. In both cases, humanity’s curse is separation from God, and its ultimate aim is to reunite with God.</p>
<p>I had a conversation once with a man who suffered a cardiac arrest in a restaurant. There were some ICU nurses eating lunch there who began CPR. Everyone thought someone else had called 911, but no one actually had. He was down for quite a while (ironic since the hospital is located directly across the street). </p>
<p>He told me he had a very long “near death experience” where he met God. I asked him if he remembered much of it it. He replied “Oh, yes, everything.” I asked him what it was like. He responded, “think of the most loving, peaceful moment you have ever experienced, and multiply it times 100 million.” </p>
<p>He gave me his business card and said he’d be happy to discuss it with me further if I would like. He started to walk off and said, “And by the way, everyone goes to heaven.” I responded, “Even murderers and child molesters?” He smiled and said “Yep.”</p>
<p>No way to know for sure about any of this until the time comes. And if we do just die, we won’t even know that we don’t know.</p>
<p>Nrdsb4, thanks for giving us all a little extra hope!</p>
<p>I’m really intrigued—nearly convinced, to tell the truth, because it’s so darned appealing—by the idea that life is some kind of simulation, a la The Matrix, that feels completely real but in fact is more like a video game.</p>
<p>Imagine if all murders were pretty much just the cosmic equivalent of someone doing a drive-by shooting in Grand Theft Auto. Distasteful, immature, and making things really inconvenient for the other players, but ultimately making as much difference to the soul of the deceased as you or I dying in Super Mario Brothers. “Aw, crap, I died,” the victim says in the afterlife. “Wanna play again?”</p>
<p>I hope this is true, but I hope not to find out for a long time. Believing it might be true does keep things in perspective, though.</p>
<p>I’m a Quaker. (For the most part), We don’t believe in hell or in original sin. We think heaven, the Resurrection, etc., etc. are speculative matters, and not integral to our believe. No one can “save” another for their sins, and think that entire idea is destructive of personal responsibility and one’s relationship with the Divine. </p>