hey mark, i have struggled with the same issue but i guess when you have something taught to you as truth for your entire life its so hard to let it go. The more and more i learn about the bible and Christianity, and talking among others like you have on this forum, make me continually realize how extra and ridiculous conservative Christianity actually is. Im not an atheist but more liberal, however would not be suprised or upset if God didn’t exist. I have accepted that the bible is way too complicated to understand as an average human being and as a result we have probably made so many mistakes in understanding what the text is saying.
In addition if a God “does” exist then how is it not expected that some people wont believe due to sincere reasoning. If you are sincere in your heart about why you have let go then you are being true to yourself. In saying all that though its obvious the doctorine of hell has no many issues and the church has never been honest about this or anything else so i gave up on caring ages ago! Everything conservatives are taught is actually rooted in fear and it will eat your emotions and life away. You need to be at peace with yourself and move on, its beyond your control, enjoy your life.
Hi Mark …also was a baptist but could not go along with patriotism and war. Found some Anabaptist which to my mind was more of a group pursuing peace and not getting entangled with this world so much . It is my understanding that ” The grace of God ( Jesus Christ ) has appeared bringing salvation to all men instructing us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live sensible , upright and godly lives in this present age. ” It is the gospel of reconciliation and that is the Father’s will ..that you be reconciled . What is ungodly ? Unlove ..unbelief , unmerciful , proud , boastful , lack of humility ….What Christ has done can not be undone ..it can only be unbelieved.
Our adversary is a humanist and would have us be less than what God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ would have us to be. Knowledge puffs up but love edifies.
Focusing on hell is like learning to ride a bicycle and staring at a tree until you run into it. The ” tree” has been overcome . Be careful of theology because theologians ( like Calvin and Luther in my opinion )may have run into error . ( Calvin by the burning of Michael Servetus and Luther by the verbal assault of the jews .
Grace says we are all guilty of enmity with God and all forgiven by God’s wisdom through Christ ..Now go love and forgive others ..go demonstrate His mercy . It is His righteousness ..not ours ..we have none but His is enough.
Skepticalone.
I find that most analogies about hell don’t really work. I’m not particularly fond of the bicycle and tree analogy. Since you can see the tree.
Now if you said that an malevolent magician planted an invisible tree, and it would cause a life long illness of immeasurable endless egregious unbearable senseless suffering upon running into it. But that’s not all. In this analogy, there are hundreds if not thousands of different paths to take. There is only one path that does not have an invisible tree at the end of it. Everyone preaching to you has an equal lack of evidence to support their blind baseless assertions that they know which path is the safe path. So it’s basically a guess. Some of the of these self proclaimed prophets pretending to speak for the magician sound more reasonable than others. But in the end, neither one of them can really show absolutely anything to any degree to show that they actually know what they are claiming as supposed self evident absolute truth. So you are basically screwed. This is a better analogy.
But still nothing compares to the doctrine of hell to a sufficient degree. Anything else we can dream up can never reach the sadistic notion of hell. It literally is the worst possible punishment for the longest amount of time. Nothing else can even come close. Let alone to the threat of an average oak tree in your path, of which you propose as an analogy.
Thank you for your reply though.
Revisiting this topic. Endless apologetics and counter apologetics have been written on the subject. I’m curious if anyone here knows of a source for historical rather than devotional discussions of the topic. The introduction and evolution of the doctrines etc? The biblical arguments against existence of hell get about 80 percent of the way to refuting the actual biblical doctrine imho, but the remaining evidence seems to have a real link to the cultural concept. The Gehenna/ burning city trash dump /hell/Sheol/common grave/ pit/ etc get you most of the way to a argument of mistranslations of texts , but there are other parables etc that can’t fall into the simple mistranslation of grave/hell.
Some of the apologetics are abysmal. “Sin against an eternal God requires eternal punishment”
That just makes God eternally vengeful. Horrible attribute for a loving deity. Ask the people who advance such an argument, how many years should they spank their child if the child sins against the parent? A 40 yr old mother should then spank her 8 yr old son for 40 straight years right? “Mom I’m 48 now you can stop beating me, I’ve fulfilled the fundamentalist requirements of being abused for the enitire age of the authority figure i sinned against “
Actually depends on what Jr said to mom whether or not she is required by OT to stone him, but that’s another issue.
I can’t tell you how great it is to find this forum. I wish I had found it years ago when the anxiety and fear of hell and the insane amount of guilt I felt when I would run into people who didn’t believe in Jesus. I was raised both Baptist and sorta Catholic and I started out like most protestants, one day at church camp, or at a youth group, where they literally put the fear of god into you.
Hell, the rapture (which is a lie), mark of the beast, and on and on the poison they feed you at such a young age. I remember thinking well now that I’ve accepted Jesus as my saviour, I’m good, right? That’s when I came across Mark 16:6, “whoever believes AND is baptized will be saved!” So what did I do? Got dunked in a pool at my church ASAP. Thinking this would would finally rid me of my fear of going to hell, it didn’t. It only made it worse now because thats 2 things I believed you had to do to be “saved” and the guilt just doubled now everytime I met someone who hadn’t done those 2 things. Finally after meeting my future wife when she told me she was agnostic I hadn’t really believed anymore but for some reason it secretly bothered me still and the anxiety and guilt came back.
Then I finally realized what was bothering me my whole life, religious trauma syndrome. I researched and researched every passage and story about salvation, and guess what? It all contradicts, all of it! Don’t let anyone tell you different. Mathew 7:21 “Not everyone who cries out lord lord to ME (Jesus) will enter into the kingdom of heaven (saved)” And this is Jesus saying this, which contradicts Paul and also Jesus too when he says “He who endures till the end will be saved” Mathew 24:13. Like Bart says, “It cant be both, it cant be” I used to cry and be so scared about hell I used to have to see a psychologist and my mom told me it was the Devil that was putting these thoughts into my head. Hang in there, for all of you that are suffering, trust me no matter how you twist this verse or that verse it all contradicts and the feeling of being liberated from this garbage feels so good. Don’t forget, Jesus also said he’d judge us on our works like sheeps and goats, don’t believe me? its in the bible, Mathew 25: 31-46 (aka fake news).
Cheers! and keep up the great work Bart.
Thanks for sharing. I became an atheist about a year ago. I am 42 years old now and I was an evangelical Christian since high school. Many times as a young Christian I experienced clinical anxiety about hell because I feared not having enough faith or the right doctrinal faith. At other times I feared for my loved one who had no faith. I couldn’t experience the joy of the Lord that everyone around me proclaimed. When I finally lost my faith and discovered I was an atheist, I felt the greatest burden lifted off my chest that I had not realized I had carried all my life. From time to time the fear of hell creeps back, but that’s to be expected. It’s not much different from PTSD. Years of anxiety on hell does something unhealthy to the brain. Healing will take more than a few years is my guess. But I take some comfort when I hear about others with the same struggle.
-Jorge
Fearing the unknown when I died scared me deeply. Deeply, when I thought about it. That’s all I could think about at a point years ago when I felt as though my time on earth had run out. Never went to church. Raised by parents who despised every religion. Knew nothin about sin, an afterlife, the devil, angels, Jesus (Santa Claus), heaven, nothin.
But, I was scared of dying until He took the fear away.
I’m somewhat new to this site so I’ve been browsing some of the old questions on the forum page. This topic looked so interesting I thought I’d comment even though the last comment was made months ago. I hope those making the original posts will notice.
I’d actually agree with some of the things DestinationReign (DR) has said early on though it is a bit offputting when he/she uses such New Agey language. God is a person and God is our source. I think that DR is also correct that we do reap what we sow. If we are created by a good God, we should expect God to be just. Our basic obligation is to live as closely as we can to the natural moral awareness we have and to feel regret when we fail (i.e. repentance). You said you don’t believe in God any more but I doubt that you are very sure of yourself on this point. I won’t try to convince you right now but I would like to point out that the biblical view is that anyone who seeks God (a good God) on just the possibility of this God’s existence and seeks to live according to their natural moral awareness, will be accepted by God (John 7.17; Acts 10.34-35, 17.27). You don’t have to fear hell so long as you are conscious of fulfilling these basic moral and spiritual obligations. If you do this, I think some of these passages indicate that you will discover that biblical Christianity is true; but whether I’m right or not, the big point is that God does accept anyone who does follow these moral/spiritual obligations. (And if you want I will argue in detail that this is the biblical view.)
So I don’t think your fear of hell is irrational if you don’t keep these moral obligations. Let me qualify that I’m not talking about eternal conscious torment (ECT) some Christians and other religions believe in, but the reap-what-you sow kind of thing DR brought up.
Just a couple of more comments, Mark, not about hell this time but about why you left your faith.
You said, “I have now become convinced that The Bible has so many errors, bad science, failed prophecies, and horrible immorality.”
The Bible does not have bad science, it has hardly any science at all. The parts that are taken to be science (the creation story basically) are poetic statements meant to give a general but nonliteral understanding of the events (see Henri Blocher’s In the Beginning). The horrible immorality is just imagined. I take a little time looking at the Canaanite conquest and some similar problems in my book Human Suffering and the Evil of Religion if you’re interested. (Email me or continue the conversation here if you think you have any I can’t answer: ** you do not have permission to see this link **.) The only claimed failed prophecy that I can think of is the one where Jesus said he would return before his generation passes away. I think this one is very easy to answer. As for general errors, I think we should admit some so long as they don’t negate the general historicity of the NT (and to a lesser degree the Hebrew scripture) and so long as the important teachings of the Bible are clear. I think that’s what we find.
One other comment, this time about why you once became a Catholic. You said, “I could no longer reasonable say that everyone had it wrong for 1500 years after Jesus Christ’s ministry and now Martin Luther saved us from the wrong doctrines through the Reformation.” Mark, most people during much of those 1500 years had to accept what was given. For many their lives were in danger if they disagreed. People weren’t allowed to think for themselves to determine what the scripture teaches. There was a lot of variation in secondary doctrines even in the Catholic Church over that time span and the final doctrinal winners didn’t make it because everyone agreed with them. Before the church thought it had the right to punish heretics and tell everyone exactly what they should believe, there was a lot of variation in secondary doctrines, enough to reflect the kind of differences we see among Protestants and Catholics today. No, the Catholic Church didn’t have it all right just because they’ve been around the longest. Nevertheless, both Catholics and Protestants have for the most part always agreed on the basics.
Browsing this forum page I’ve come across a few posts I thought I’d add a response to.
Caesar’s argument that the biblical passages on salvation are “a big mess of confusion” (19oc17) I find very unconvincing. They all say that you have to believe in or trust in Jesus and seek to live a moral life. Exactly how “works” or living morally ties in can be debated but the general sense is that a moral life has to be present, that one must repent of one’s sins when they occur, and that one cannot live continuously in one’s sins and believe one is accepted by God. That general sense is enough for any reasonable person to see that if there is any confusion, it’s only in the details. God explains salvation to us in the Bible with quite enough clarity for our needs.
It’s kind of like one of Ehrman’s argument against the historicity of the NT. In one of his debates with Liconna, for example, after Liconna both admit to some historical errors, Ehrman asked something like, how many errors must there be before you admit we can’t trust it? Well, if the errors are of the kind that don’t make any difference as to our understanding of the teachings or the basic historical events, then what does it matter that such errors are present? It fits what we should expect if God guided and inspired the NT’s writing and transmission.
Bart does bring up a problem passage in which it appears as though Matthew has Jesus saying that one can be accepted by God (have eternal life) by just keeping the Mosaic law and contrasts that with Paul’s statement that we must have faith in Jesus. Notice that this is the only solidly conflicting how-to-be-saved passage we’ve come up with (correct me Bart, if you see any others). I offer a possible resolution for this problem (if you want to look sometime; it’s under this “Other Relevant Issues” section). Basically it seems to me that Jesus is telling the rich young ruler what any Jewish prophet would have told any other Jew before the time of Jesus, “Just keep the law, that’s all that God has given us for now. More information may come later and you won’t be responsible for that until later.”
Just a few more responses to old comments on this page. Re RG959, 13ap18.
RG, you claim that there a contradiction in saying “Not everyone who cries Lord, Lord” (to me) will be saved and “He who endures to the end will be saved”? One is saying you can’t just believe in Jesus, you also have to follow his teachings. The other says you have to endure to the end without rejecting Jesus. This you say is contradictory? Why can’t it be both? And if Jesus said we will be judged for the way we live (Matt 25), that contradicts something too? Like what?
My last response to this forum page (at least for a while). Response to ** you do not have permission to see this link **, 30jl18
Jorge, you didn’t need to leave your faith to resolve your anxiety, you just needed a better understanding of it. When you were young, where did you ever get the idea that not having enough faith will damn you? That’s not in the Bible. To be accepted by God, God just asks us to fall upon his mercy and trust in Jesus and to live the moral life he asks of us (basically the kind of moral life we all know we ought to live).
Overcoming the fear that loved ones will be eternally lost (read endure eternal conscious torment, ECT) can also produce some pretty heavy angst. However, if you were to study carefully the biblical teachings, I think you’d find it teaches that there is no ECT as we understand it. Several biblical scholars (Thomas Talbot, Robin Perry, etc.) argue for a restorationist form of universalism like that the great Church Father Origen advocated. Or look at my arguments sometime in my book Flirting with Universalism.
I think some of the posts about how psychologically damaging belief in hell is certainly have a very strong point and should not be ignored, but do you really think that if there is a good creator, this God should be completely unconcerned about good and evil? I’ve been reading some holocaust accounts recently. You know, marching millions of people into gas chambers, throwing live babies onto piles of burning wood, locking babies and children in a building until they die. Do you really think (whether or not there is a God) that these horrendously wicked people should get away with what they’ve done? I’m a Christian and I don’t accept ECT but I would argue that the Bible claims justice will be done.
I also want to question if what the fundamentalist parent teaches their children is that much worse psychologically than what the atheist teaches theirs. I once had a college teacher who told the story of how his young son was just coming to think about death. He asked his father what happens to you when you die. The prof, a specialist in world religions, told the child as simply as he could that some people think you go to heaven and some think some go to a place of punishment and some think you come back to live again and some think you just cease to exist. “But what do you think, dad?” the boy asked. The father admitted that he thinks you’re just annihilated. The boy began weeping convulsively, screaming, “No, it can’t be.” This isn’t a belief that can easily be accepted unless (like some fundamentalists with their belief in hell) you simply have the mental power to fully suppress it. If atheists think fundamentalist Christianity is too horrible to be true, they should take a clear look in their own beliefs.
You say, “When I finally lost my faith and discovered I was an atheist, I felt the greatest burden lifted off my chest that I had not realized I had carried all my life.” Several posts have claimed the same thing. But I’ve also noticed that some people will say the same thing when they lose their faith and then talk about the relief and release and joy they experience when they regain it. Richard Morgan is a good case in point (** you do not have permission to see this link **). It is a relief to know that you’ve found the truth, that the burden of sin you carry (the knowledge of how we have hurt others) is gone, and that you’ve found a relationship with your God and creator. What could be better than that?
The very concept of an eternity of torture – in exchange for a short finite life – would be considered cruel and unusual punishment to the extreme by any court in America. Its one of the most wicked ideas ever preached and has ruined the mental health of millions.
Such a god that would do that is unworthy of praise.
I would hope I was brave enough to refuse to worship such a god even if it existed.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert