Eternal suffering in hell isn't in the Bible

Faith & Science Conversation
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Excellent! Therefore the only reason Jesus had those wounds was to convince His disciples. It is the only thing that makes any sense at all.

Wow… that is quite a leap. LOL It suggests no such thing to me. What it suggests to me is that the spiritual is different from the physical. While the physical operates according to the objectivity of mathematical laws which care nothing for what we want or believe, the spiritual is fundamentally subjective where what we want and believe is central. It is because I find a purely objective reality impossible to believe in that I believe in the spiritual at all.

Don’t believe in the rational soul of Greek philosophy and Gnositicsm. I believe in the spirit grows from the choices we make quite different and apart from the mind. I believe the mind is just as physical (in the sense of being an objective thing according to the laws of nature) as the body. There is only an effective duality because the mind is a living organism in its own right with its own needs and a different inheritance passed on to the next generation – memetic rather than genetic.

No. You are really forcing this into a mind body dualism aren’t you. Let’s take a look at it including verses 46-48 which makes it clear that the spiritual body is of a different substance.

42 So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. 44 It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48 As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven.

This says that the body we have now according to the laws of nature is perishable, but this is a seed from which a powerful imperishable body grows. The last man Adam, Jesus, was resurrected as a life giving spirit and quite different from the physical life of Adam according to the material substance of the Earth.

When Jesus said we must be perfect, He only meant that eternal life requires the self-destructive habits of sin be removed. Those habits are a degenerative disease which bring death to the spirit. He did NOT mean that we can never make mistakes. Making mistakes is a perfectly natural part of the learning process. As a teacher of math, I know that getting good at math doesn’t mean making no mistakes but making them faster because you catch them and fix them.

This is contradictory unless you make a distinction between a false self and a true self and I don’t think this identification of the true self with God is terribly helpful or healthy. I often say that, hell is our heart’s desire and heaven is God’s desire for us. So the while I agree in some sense with part of what you are saying, I think what you say can be taken in the wrong way. The identification of the true self with God looks to me like the self-aggrandizement of the religious saying that only their religious crap has any value. It implies that if we like football, or art, or science, or philosophy then these are things which all must be thrown away to focus exclusively on religion. This is nonsense. If you read Isaiah chapter 1 you will see that God care nothing about this religious crap. What He wants, is for us to do good rather than evil seeking justice and helping those in need. The false self consists of the self-destructive habits of sin and certainly not all of our non-religious interests and activities.

LOL This is a little too much like saying one should not get too attached to thinking for yourself, but to be ready to become a mindless robot under the control of a religious guru. PAH! I agree only in the sense that one should not make ones theology the judge of others – being careful about turning ones thinking into a legalism by which you think you can judge who is saved and who is damned.

That is the difference between the watchmaker god who makes only machines and the creator of LIVING THINGS which participate in their own creation. What happens to us is not all on God, we make important choices which affect the final result.

YES, it was quite intentional of God to choose love and freedom over power and control. It was His choice that He would NOT be making the only choices of any importance.

Love means letting others live their own life and make their own choices no matter how painful it is to watch them do so. Love and life are simply not compatible with power and control.

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We are in part, I think, talking past each other due to differing understandings of certain terms. I don’t see away to avoid that, nor a need to try to correct it anymore, so I’ll just pray we’re actually both on the right track in our own ways. :slightly_smiling_face:

I still think, though, that you are dismissing an important variable, and that variable is HELL.

“ Love means letting others live their own life and make their own choices no matter how painful it is to watch them do so. Love and life are simply not compatible with power and control.”

I absolutely agree with you here. Yet, all things depend on God. He gave us life. He is the reason there is the choice of eternal life, and if there is a choice of eternal suffering, then he is the reason for that, as well. He is not simply refraining from asserting power or control over his creations so they can make their own choices, he is refusing to put them out of their misery even if, after the judgement day, they realize their mistake and want to correct it.

And the massive book he created to guide us spends the vast majority of it contrasting between Life and Death, rather than Heaven and Hell, with our savior, Jesus, drawing many analogies like separating the wheat from the chaff and destroying the chaff, along with his questionable statements about eternal suffering—even Hell is often spoken of by reference to Gehenna, a place where everything thrown in is burned, but nothing burns forever without being consumed.

This is why it seems more like a coercive trap some people (St. Augustine?) made up and promoted to scare people into complicity—people who did not understand that no one’s heart can be made to know God or love God (or anyone else) through causing it to fear evil or suffering. And if it is that, it is indeed choosing power and control over love and freedom.

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Not only that but we have I think a different approach to religion all together. From the beginning my approach was to seek value and meaning in the elements of religion (given the findings of science): such as God, spirit, and hell. So rather than simply discarding things because they seemed unreasonable I changed them from the unreasonable understanding to a more reasonable understanding of them. This way of doing things makes it easier to make it all work with the text of the Bible, particularly the teachings of Jesus which are pretty central to Christianity and rather dubious to discount, twist, or ignore.

Simply discarding things like the atheist really amounts to no more than a refusal to see any of value whatsoever in the thinking of others (including the Bible). In some sense my approach is the how things are done in the hard sciences, which contrary to Kuhn is not by any kind of revolution, The first test of new theories is that they agree with the old theories where we know these work.

So you keeping harping on the teachings of hell which don’t make any sense to make the case for discarding it. While I have already discarding the nonsensical ideas as a basis for a new teaching about hell which agrees with what Jesus taught and makes a lot more sense.

And I don’t believe there is any magical event making people realize their mistakes. Hell, just like our prisons, tends to be filled with people who blame everyone but themselves saying that people made them do it.

And do you include Jesus in the people making that mistake. I think you go too far in the reaction against this. Both of these are extremes which go too far:

  1. God is the scary rule by fear soul destroying monster who will get you if you don’t lay down your intellectual integrity and simply believe what you are told like a good little Christian soldier.
  2. God is a nicey nice who will always fix all of your mistakes and make it all better so you never have to worry about making any mistake of great importance. And if he cannot fix it then he will put us to sleep (like shooting horses) so he doesn’t have to listen to our whining and complaining anymore.

God is neither of these extremes – both of which would be considered terrible parents. The second even worse than the first, is guaranteed to create monsters who will never learn that their actions have consequences. The good parent teaches responsibility and gives us this choice: “I set before you life and death, therefore choose life.” Deut 30:19

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I don’t ascribe to either of those. You are right, we have a very different approach to religion. Mine is not an approach to religion at all. For me, “religion” is a concept human beings created to distinguish certain areas of human existence from others. I do not consider myself to belong to the “Christian Religion.” Rather, I consider myself to be a student of God through Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible and God himself through my own existence, and a member of the Body of Christ. The church and all its rituals are means to an end, as were the sacrifices and ritual rules of the Old Testament.

i don’t belong to or participate in religion, but rather belong to and seek to participate in the reality of God.

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I have a question about Hell some people say they die then come back to life. They say they saw people in Hell burning alive? that God showed them Hell

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Hi some people say they die then come back to life and say God showed them Hell and people are burning alive? I cant see this is true?

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It’s hard to know what to make of “near-death experiences.” Some might be accurate, but others may be based on preexisting cultural understandings of what the afterlife is assumed to look like. I still think it’s fascinating, but I try to stay skeptical. Dreams are very subjective.

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WElcome to the forum Miles. It seems you are referring to near death experiences and people’s stories of what they remember of it. We have had a few discussions of them in the past you may want to search for. Like Laura, I am a bit skeptical and feel they are probably more hypooxic dream states rather than actual true experiences. I say that as there is a lot of inconsistency, and there is really no correlation to what we see in the Bible from a Christian standpoint, as far as I can see. Plus, as Miracle Max says, mostly dead is partly alive, but if completely dead, the only thing you can do is go through the pockets for loose change.
Kidding aside, from what perspective are you asking? If you are comfortable sharing, what is your religious background and what prompted your question?

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Hi thanks for replying to my question. I’m
Chirstian I was raised in a Christian home told about Hell. I hear so many stories of near death experiences.

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They’re just stories Miles. Stuff we make up. Don’t fret.

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I suggesting the Rethinking Hell Podcast hosted by Chris Date a budding OT theologian. Though to be honest i mostly only listen to him about this one subject. They have around 200 episodes I think and around 3/4 of them are debates with universalist or those who support eternal conscious torment.

There is a good book on conditional immortality by Edward Fudge also. He has three books out I think on this subject of hell.

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No one ever pauses to think that many of us might prefer annihilation to spending eternity with Yahweh. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a Jew subject to Yahweh’s wrath in the O.T. so why would I want to spend eternity with this character?

Goddess bless

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The concept of eternity has little to no basis in science so there’s that. I understand that Yahweh is magic but most have envisioned a physical heaven and hell as real places. Is the universe eternal? Eh. We don’t know but if the universe is eternal then the lights will all go out at some point due to diffusion of all energy. That will be as close to nothingness as the human mind is capable of perceiving.

I have no idea what this means: “the inevitable logical consequences of the self-destructive nature of sin”.

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Jesus with an assist from Zoroaster whom Jesus seems to regularly plagiarize. Where oh where did Jews come in contact with Zoroastrianism? Or is it “infected” by Zoroastrianism? Most of those verses are all but identical to various Persian concepts about the world, suffering and the end times, few of which existed in Judaism prior to the exile. Then again, monotheism and universalism is again, a Persian concept as the Jews were largely pagan prior to the exile.

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I used to square that circle by He was just being pragmatic but would turn out to be cool. But not for many a year. When some Canaanites became Israelites (possibly with migrant Chaldean leadership?) they took on board Yahweh the NW Arabian storm god as a heno-monotheistic evolution of Elohim. Their priestly class rapidly purified him. But God in Christ did not evolve if He is for real. He incarnated in that natural culture. If God is real, you don’t have to worry. He’s not Yahweh. He’s competent. You’ll always want to be in His company.

The concept of eternity is the greatest single certainty of existence. Transcendence, if real, is unimaginably worth having. Is the universe eternal? We do know. It isn’t. Nature is. The universe will be dead for about 10^87 years mind you. But nature has been doing fine since eternity and always will.

I have no idea either.

Jesus plagiarized the Akkadians. Zoroastrianism was dualist, which much of Christianity still is, but the post-Exilic Jews weren’t, paralleled with Greek monism. Both were obviously influenced by Zoroastrianism, but it’s all natural memetic evolution with monotheist tendencies in Egypt, India, China a thousand years before.

The pre-Exilic Jews reverted to ‘paganism’ - polytheism - at the drop of a hat, true.

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Thank you for all of those. I read your posts with great interest and lol, you have elaborated on things I agree with that I generalized about.

This is pretty similar to the inerrancy argument. Can something be inerrant if it only proclaims partial or undeveloped doctrine? Should we have to reconcile the various resurrection accounts or the various references to sheol and gehenna and hell and death? No, this is where the Spirit of God(dess) takes over guiding interpretation. All interpretation is dependent upon Her Spirit.

I also note that I anthropomorphize the divine as feminine because those are the generalized qualities that I seek in the divine but the idea of a gendered god seems incoherent to me. If we had a true neuter word for Goddess, that alone would change how people think of “them”. Satan to me is also more so female in her articulations. Some times I capitalize Satan because this is clearly a divinity and dualism is incoherent without a counterpart to the Creatrix.

The Morning Star is often categorized as female and a beautiful female goddess at that. If we look towards Zeus (from which derive the names of God in the Romance languages) we see that Aphrodite is the one most apt to counter Zeus in that she was not created in as much as she was transformed energy from someone arguably as powerful as Zeus but Aphrodite’s ways of exerting power are far different. Without understanding Asherah, it seems difficult to find the real El, Elohim or Yahweh, not to mention El’s close cognate, Ba’al, and even All-ah.

Compassion is the commandments all in one which is similar to your tag.

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Aye, if God is, They are completely, kindly, competent.

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What happens to killers who die? do they sleep in death until God brings them back and then wipes them out in Hell.

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I don’t know, but will leave that up to God.

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Annihilation only sounds bad if you ever thought for a minute there was an alternative. If there was then I might have to give some thought to what I’d do with a zillion more eons. I might decline but not for a reason as petty as the crimes alleged against the OT God. It might turn out that three score and ten (or whatever our allotment might turn out to be) is sufficient. I’ve still got a little play to see if that is so or not. I wouldn’t choose eons of life just to avoid death though. Pretty sure most Christians expect to endure at least one death. That is all I expect.

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