Hell

B_ScaredLittleBoy

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There is no heaven, there is no hell.
There is no God, there was no Jesus (at least not one that came back to life)

If one religion is right or true...why not others? Why was or is there not still a Poseidon or Asclepius or Imhotep or Emu Man etc...

Religion is just an explanation people came up with for the world around them. There aren't four humours, but in Ancient Greece it was a good idea at the time. With time and knowledge, it has been proven that illness is caused by micro organisms and that blood circulates around the body and doesn't get used up. So many past beliefs have now been proven wrong...

Religion is just a fantasy. What puzzles me though is how very intelligent people can believe in a God or follow a religion. There must be a basic human need for understanding...maybe if you know something (or think you know it), it makes it less scary or more acceptable.

Everything is what you perceive it to be. You should open your eyes and not follow blindly. This is my view.

Oh and the devil is a euphemism for Emperor Nero. There was a detailed explanation in a programme I watched on TV. 666 has some kind of relevance to the actual era also. I forget how. But everything in the bible is not literal, and much of it is just not true. Literally, there is no devil but that is how Nero was perceived and he did some crazy shit.
 

B_big dirigible

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One of the definitions of hell not mentioned earlier but it the main Hebrew word is the same word that refers to the large city dumb outside ancient Jerusalemn. There is talk about eternal fire. That is because the fire never burned out in this city dump.
That's one of the half-dozen or so distinct concepts, somewhat slothfully rendered as "hell" in the English Bible, to which I alluded. I'd consider it to be the likely source of the belief in hellfire and brimstone, although that's clearly not the literal meaning of the original text. I'm not sure we have to blame it on Dante, as only a few of the torments he fancied for his enemies involved heat. In fact, the ultimate circle - the Ninth - was, as I recall, eternally frozen.
 

B_big dirigible

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What puzzles me though is how very intelligent people can believe in a God or follow a religion. There must be a basic human need for understanding...maybe if you know something (or think you know it), it makes it less scary or more acceptable.
Or a basic human need for belief. If traditional religion is denied, or - even worse - rationalized, then something else must substitute. Hence we have popular delusions and the madness of crowds. Some argue that the current GW craze is such a phenomenon.
Oh and the devil is a euphemism for Emperor Nero. There was a detailed explanation in a programme I watched on TV. 666 has some kind of relevance to the actual era also. I forget how. But everything in the bible is not literal, and much of it is just not true. Literally, there is no devil but that is how Nero was perceived and he did some crazy shit.
Unless you adhere to the theory that Nero was the Anti-Christ; a popular one, although the Anti-Christ as described in Apocalypse doesn't bear all that much resemblance to Nero. Also, Nero's predecessor once removed, Gaius (a.k.a. Caligula), was much crazier.
 

DarkAuron

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My friend believes that events that happened, stories from the Bible, such as mass diseases and fires from the sky, are alien invasions. I think it's the best explanation for what may have actually happened :)
 

monstro

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Earlier posters have commented that the word we use as "hell" is actually a series of words that appeared throughout the Bible at different times. And that our modern viewpoint of hell is not really from the Bible but from Dante. Dante wrote about the different stages of hell meaing some people were burn hotter than others depending on what they did wrong." As I recall there are seven levels of hell in Dante's Inferno. Not sure about the spelling.

One of the definitions of hell not mentioned earlier but it the main Hebrew word is the same word that refers to the large city dumb outside ancient Jerusalemn. There is talk about eternal fire. That is because the fire never burned out in this city dump. But of course new garbage was always being dumped in hell.

Yeah, you're right--the valley of Gehenna.

I think Dante had some influence on our vision of hell, but not as much as we might think. I mean, he didn't make this stuff up out of whole cloth--he drew on pagan, Christian, Jewish and Muslim tradition when writing the Divine Comedy. It's been too long since I last read the Inferno, but as someone else mentioned, it's presented as a place of contrasts, more or less adhering to a "let the punishment fit the crime" scenario. Some circles of hell are windy (who can forget Paolo and Francesca), others frozen, others featured bubbling lakes of shit where people (most of whom were enemies of Dante funnily enough) spent eternity buried head first. I'd hazard a guess that the conception of fires burning in hell also stems a lot from pagan fire sacrifices to Ba'al and Moloch (some of which took place in the aforementioned Gehenna). As a sidenote, the English word Hell has its etymology in the Norse goddess of the underworld, Hel.

Our modern American conception of hell has as much to do with Jonathan Edwards' sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God as Dante, I'd reckon.
 

SomeGuyOverThere

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I was just mulling a few things over the other day.

The traditional christian notion of hell, seems utterly ridiculous to me and frankly an insult to anyone's intelligence.

I imagine some will now say that it is a metaphysical concept, but was it when it was invented? And who invented it anyway? I only remember the "Kingdom" being mentioned in the apostolic NT.

Why would a God of love wish to create hell for his children? What happened to the lost sheep thing? Seems completely illogical and irrational to me.

The problem of evil is what eventually lead me to believe that most concepts of God are utterly flawed.

How an you explain that an omniscient, omnipotent, and all good being would let evil exist? If he is all powerfull, then satan cannot exist without God's permission, and similarly hell must be something that God made deliberatly, but to what purpose?

Surely he'd know, through his omniscience, even before he created the universe, exactly what you'd do in life and where you'd end, up. So why bother?

Further, why make things (people) only to send them to hell?

You end up there with the rather nasty double-predistination problem - if God already knows exactly whats going to happen in life, then in a sense, what I do doesn't matter, because he's already judged me, yet that in itself must be something he's foseen, so me making that choice doesn't seem to be something that I really had a choice in, and you can go round and round like this for hours.

In the end (I seem to spend a lot of time on forums saying this) I found the very Christian God concept to be almost irretreivably flawed, as you'd have to throw out so much to make it a rational belief, that you end up throwing out basically all of Christianity in the process.

In a wider sense, I find the concept of God to be utterly improble, but it's like 5:00am here so I'm going to bed. I'll maybe fire up the rantmobile in the morning. :)
 

kalipygian

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Etymologically, latin infernus literally means nether world, with no denotation of hot.
Hel is the name for a nordic goddess, and her subterranean realm, it is extremely cold.