Blake:
I have no idea what you consider to be the “common view” of hell. As far as I can tell the JW view is far closer to the view accepted by the majority of Abrahamic adherents than the idea of brimstone and demons.
Roman Catholics, for example, don’t believe in a fiery hell. Hell is just a state, not even a location, where the dead are excommunicated from God eternally: “a state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” It’s unclear what degree of consciousness the residents of hell have, but it seems to be less than that of the living. Most Jews, likewise, don’t believe in a hell where the residents lack consciousness,as do most Moslems, most Bahai etc.
So in the sense that there is a “common view” of Hell, the JW viewpoint is close to it. Jack Chick’s viewpoint (which is ironically the Dark Ages Roman Catholic viewpoint) of a Hell where the residents are fully conscious is the one that is wildly divergent.
And as far as JWs not using the word hell, every one that has ever come to my door has used the word. One of their standard opening lines is “Do you ever wonder what happens after death” which then leads to What the Bible really teaches about Hell".
Are you sure? I can’t recall ever seeing this, and the idea that everybody gets a chance to reject Cueball God seems to be one of his core beliefs.
I’m not actually interested enough to demand a reference. But if you ever happen to run across a tract that shows this, please post a link in this thread. Jack’s crazy enough that such an inconsistent viewpoint isn’t surprising, but I would like to have solid evidence of it.
It’s implied in the above tract that the woman never got a real witness for Christ.
Btw, it’s a good thing Gustave Dore’ art is in the public domain!
And also p. 32 of this is what I really had in mind~
http://media.chick.com/digital-comics/0109/0109_2.html
I’d never have guessed.
OK. The OP specified people ‘ending up’ in hell. so the JW non-eternal hell of non-existence doesn’t qualify.
jinty
July 21, 2011, 12:36pm
43
Well, the War in Heaven described in the book of Revelation caused 133,306,668 angels to rebel (according to some dude called Alphonso de Spina, b.1491), so presumably that puts the lower limit on the population of hell at just over 133 million. And IIRC twice that number of angels stayed loyal to God/Yahweh, so again we have a floor for the popn of heaven at 266m or so. (Yeah, these numbers are at odds with the 144,000 quoted above. Somebody ’s spreadsheet’s got a dodgy calc in there, I tells ya.)