In the article Hell – Roots I said:
My beef is with the Christians who use eternal Hell- this irresponsible and immoral concept – and use it to great effect. Christians who do not believe in Hell are sent packing. They are scorned by most Christians. Most of Christianity wants Hell as a doctrine. They can’t give it up. It is a tool of control; a weapon to keep those who join the Church from leaving; a motivator to get the sheeples to do as the pastor/preacher/minister/priest desires. I have no doubt that there are sincere Christians but I also have no doubt that Hell is a baseball bat aimed at the knee caps of anyone who would dare walk away. It is this concept of Hell that makes so much of Christianity adestructive cult. And it is this concept of Hell that makes so much of Christianity an abusive cult. That is what I want to talk about the next time we meet on the topic of eternal Hell.
I stand by those words. Christianity is essentially a death cult. Christianity is a cult that glorifies human sacrifice. Christianity is a cult that focuses on the negative attributes of humans and forces reliance on invisible, imagined forces to mold us and our lives. Those invisible, imagined forces include Biblegodand Satan, hosts of angels and leagues of demons, holy spirits that must not be blasphemed and dark forces that pursue us.
The concept of eternal hell is irresponsible and immoral. It is just plain harmful to children and the adults they turn into. There is no evidence for an actual place of hell nor is there any evidence for its opposite, heaven. We have learned that under the earth are rocks, dirt and molten lava. There is no chamber where souls go to be tortured night and day for ever and ever. In the skies above there is only the planets, star and a whole host of amazing phenomenon like quasars, black holes, galaxies filled with stars with, presumably, planets orbiting many of those stars. No heaven with a god on a white throne.
The Earth we live on and the Universe that we inhabit are truly marvels; as are the multitudes of life forms that inhabit our tiny speck in our galaxy that is one of many, many other galaxies. That there is life on this planet and that life includes humans who can do the math and ascertain what the planet and the universe is made of is truly one of the wonders of all time. There has been a price to pay for all this knowledge…the death of our personal gods. It is clear that there is no man hanging around above the clouds looking down on us in wrath or love. It is clear that there is no heaven to go to once we are dead. It has become clear there is no hell beneath our feet to be sentenced to upon our passing. The Age of Reason is upon us.
Yet, Christendom continues to abuse their fellow human beings with psychological torture. Christendom continues to terrify minds with gruesomely graphic descriptions of worms that never die, somehow eating your flesh throughout all of eternity. This is despite the fact that your actual body rotted soon after your death. With wild tales of gruesomely graphic descriptions of the tortures that that await your dead personage throughout time, year after year after thousands, millions, even billions of years.
If they can’t bring themselves to believe in eternal hell in a physical sense then they tell you that it is separation from god and it hurts soooo bad to be separated from god it is torture, true pain. Think about it, you are already separated from god because of sin and yet, you are not tortured by that separation. This is certainly a silly superstition that is made up as they go. They haven’t thought that one through. Many Christian cults add on extra frills like if you are Mormon you won’t get to be a god or goddess and own your own planet. Or if you are a Jehovah’s Witness and you don’t believe in their version of Christianity you’ll be sentenced to go through planetary Armageddon before god passes sentence on you and you are annihilated. If you are a fundamentalist Baptist you believe that your friends and relatives who don’t believe correctly are going to be sentenced to the Apocalypse after you have blissfully floated away on a cloud. Catholics believe in purgatory.
If you have a fear of hell, step away from it. [...] Stay in your reasoning place. Realize that the trauma is very real. Realize as well that thousands of people have stepped away from Christianity and the inane, manipulative, brain washing theme of hell and Armageddon and being raptured and all of that ridiculous superstitious hogwash. And those people, almost to a person, will tell you that it was worth the pain and the effort to find the truth and live with reality.All of them are using psychological weaponry to maintain your membership loyalty. It is no longer justifiable. If parents were telling children that if they don’t believe in a giant spider in the moon that they will be beaten to a pulp by Spider-man after they died and then all the spider demons were going to suck them dry over and over and over again for six thousand years before the Tarantula god made his final decision about your destiny we would call child protective services. But it is still okay to tell children that they will meet a gory and horrifying end after they die if they don’t serve an invisible man in the sky called Yahweh. Disgusting!
Any group that uses threats of violence and psychological manipulation to maintain its structure is a destructive cult. Give your church the cult test. I bet you find quite a few characteristics in common with cults like the Hare Krishnas or the Moonies or Scientologists. If you step away from your comfort zone for a moment you will notice the stories in the Bible are every bit as absurd as the Hindu Vedas and any other myths Christians point to as being absurd myths. You don’t believe any their creation stories but yours makes sense. You don’t believe in their gods but yours make sense. You don’t believe in their versions of a bad afterlife but yours is real. Think about it.
If you have a fear of hell, step away from it. Carl Sagan was right about reason being a candle in the darkness of superstition
. Stay in your reasoning place. Realize that the trauma is very real. Realize as well that thousands of people have stepped away from Christianity and the inane, manipulative, brain washing theme of hell and Armageddon and being raptured and all of that ridiculous superstitious hogwash. And those people, almost to a person, will tell you that it was worth the pain and the effort to find the truth and live with reality. Yes, the fear of hell is very terrifying but there is nothing real there. It is all smoke and mirrors; an illusion created by humans that want and need to control others.Sin was created by mankind to allow leaders to manipulate followers and when that didn’t seem like enough then hell was created my leaders to frighten followers into giving their time, talents, money and loyalty to their god. There is no sin. There are only the actions that are bad perpetrated by humans. Societies around the world have done better by almost any standard you can name when they have thrown the Bible into the trash heap where it belongs.
One last word on religion and liberal Christianity and its attempts to tone down hell. The problem, as I see it, is that Christianity lite still encourages people to believe in invisible, imaginary beings that have an influence on this world and our lives. That isn’t actually true according to studies on prayer or studies on people who visit Lourdes or in the reality we see when we are in churches. God does not aid us or make our lives better or give us a miracle. Liberal Christianity encourages faith. Christian faith means believing without evidence or even contrary to the evidence. This will always give a platform for more extreme believers to jump off from. There is no evidence for Christ. There really isn’t any evidence for god; certainly it can easily be shown that Biblegod is a creation of priests who wanted control and primitive tribesmen who lived in a very small part of the world. There is no basis for Christian beliefs. Let reason and decency and truth reign in your life not primitive superstitions and imagined communications with spirit beings.
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