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Metaphor

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Is hell real or not? Is it something created to scare children into acting a certain, kinda like the Bogeyman? As stated in other articles, you can't physically go there, so Hell being a real place doesn't seem to work. Is it real but on a different plane of existence to where we exist? That's more possible. But again, in my head, it doesn't seem to work. Granted my view is atheistic and so this entire concept is a strange one to me.

It should be noted, however, that Hell doesn't even exist in the Bible until the New Testament. Before that, God's laws were obeyed purely out of people's love for Him. What seems probably is that when the New Testament was being added to the Bible, which I believe was in something like the second century but I could be wrong about that, the Church was starting to notice that people weren't adhering to the laws of God. A more cynical view would be that they saw church attendance numbers go down and so saw a fall in their income. Either way, the concept of punishment for not following God's path was created, and has since gone on to become the bed rock of Christian faith. (The guy who came up with the idea should have copyrighted it, he would have made a mint!) Now if you don't do what the Bible instructs you are punished with eternal damnation to hell and will suffer from now until eternity. This must have had a serious effect on the number of "good" Christians at the time.

The very idea of eternal suffering leads us away from the image of God that we are exposed to. Generally speaking, God is all about love. He will love you no matter what you have done, as long as you repent your sins and follow His path. He is portrayed as being forgiving, kind, gentle, etc. The concept of Hell throws not so much a spanner in the works, as the entire tool box. If you do not follow God's way, you will go to Hell and be punished forever more with the worst suffering imaginable. So, God is saying "Do things my way or I will cause you pain". This doesn't seem very kind or forgiving; it's cruel and egotistical. For those that would argue that it's the Devil that physically administers the punishment, if God created everything, he will have created the Devil as well. It seems a little short sighted to me that you would create something that is there to tempt your creations away from loving you. Not to mention that God would have to allow anything like that to happen, much like the tempting of Job. At the time, if I'm not mistaken and please correct me if I'm wrong, Satan was sitting next to God throughout the entire process of testing Job's faith. It was a bet between the two of them, the image of which, God and Satan sitting on a couch, bowl of popcorn between them, placing bets on humanity like their watching a sporting event, is an unsettling thought, even to the non-believer.

The concept of Hell seems to contradict certain other teachings of the Bible, and given the timing of it's addition to the Bible, I would have to conclude that it doesn't exist, and was in fact created as a metaphor, probably for the guilt people felt having wronged another, to deter evil-doers.

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