So I’m not crazy. Good to know.
That would be the lake of fire where Satan will be spending quite a bit of time.
Doubt it, it seems like the American empire’s time is up to me. Same cycle, and a harvest of the earth.
I’ve heard the missing the mark definition many times in conventional Christianity
We don’t think Satan is the ruler of Hell, either.
Nor do we think people who go to Gehenna necessarily stay there for all eternity.
There’s a caveat here. There really is no “official” Jewish position on what happens to you after you die. We don’t have dogma on this the way Catholics do. Different Jews believe different things. You could probably find some who think there’s an eternal hell at least for some people, there are some who believe in reincarnation in one form or another, and a whole lot of other different opinions.
Dante (and Milton) seem to get a lot of the “blame” for current images, but as I noted, those images were pretty well defined in the first century B.C.E.
In fact the popular images of hell, itself, pretty much all date back to the period just prior to the life of Jesus. The more nuanced questions of whether suffering is eternal have a murkier provenance, but hell as a place of fire and torment precedes Christianity. If it had not, then the words of Jesus in Luke 16 would have made no sense to his audience:
Devils with horns and pitchforks appear to be more of a late medieval or early Renaissance addition. They do appear in Dante’s Inferno, (Canto XXI), but they are not a prominent part of his depiction and they also appeared in other works from about the same period. One appearance of devils is very similar to that of fauns and satyrs and may have been an attempt to link ancient pagan belief to the Satanic, but it is not clear that the conection is direct. Prior to the Renaissance, the devil was more often portrayed as simply a monster, often serpentine, occasionally as a chimera of wolf, boar, and other beasts.
Expanding on this… tomndebb, I mean this as an addition, not an argument with your post.
Some non-canonical early Christian writings lay out pretty specifically a vision of a fiery hell. Check out the Shepherd of Hermas, a second century Roman Christian, or the Apocalypse of Peter*, both second century texts that were regarded as scripture by many early Christians but failed to make the cut when the New Testament was compiled. These may or may not be the original source of a vision of a fiery Hell in Christianity (there are people who make these arguments, but that’s a book-length answer, and controversial at best), but they’re certainly representative of belief in a fiery hell for sinners in second century Christianity.
Here’s a nice chunk from the Apocalypse of Peter**, in which God (or Jesus, the text just says “Lord”) explains to Peter what’s happening to sinners:
Here’s a less fiery and more torture-y passage:
And a bonus fire and torture passage:
The whole thing makes you think that either the author isn’t bothered by writing the same exact word over and over, or else Koine Greek has lots of different words for “fire”. I mean, “the stream of unquenchable fire which flows, flaming with fire?” Really?
These texts were accepted as scripture on par with the Gospels, the Epistles of Paul, and the Revelation of John by various different sects of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th century Christians. I’d also like to echo tomndebb here: speaking of what “Early Christians” believed is a huge generalization. Realistically, there were early Christian sects that believed in Jesus as only a man, akin to a prophet, sects that thought he was entirely divine and only seemed to be human, sects that thought he was either human or divine but sure as hell not related to the Jewish YHWH, sects that thought Jesus was just one cog in a giant universe of other supernatural figures that controlled the world, and so on. Early Christianity is a giant mess of churches that believed wildly different things.
*Almost certainly not written by the apostle Peter. Possibly by the same author as 2 Peter in the New Testament, as they have a similar style, but this is a pretty speculative claim with no hard evidence. Basic reasoning for saying these are late forgeries: no way a Galilean peasant fisherman speaks Greek this well.
**The wikipedia page has some good background but no source text. I’m quoting from the J.K. Elliott translation from Bart Ehrman’s “Lost Scriptures”.
Raindog is a Jehovah’s Witness, if that helps you understand his theology.
Back when I researched this sort of thing to sate my own curiosity, I seem to recall that a lot of hell imagery and the dualist concept of the universe as Good Creator God (Ahura Mazda) vs Destructive Evil God (Angra Mainyu) draws from Zoroastrianism, established in the 6th century BC.
This seems to make sense, as there is a marked shift, as noted above, of the role of satan between the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, satan is one of God’s court and performs tasks (usually of the adversarial or testing type) at His behest. By the New Testament, satan becomes Satan, a powerful adversary presented as a direct counterpoint to God the Creator.
Now, as for Hell, though what I’ve read suggests it’s borrowed from Zoroastrianism, or at least heavily influenced by it, the earliest religious texts I could find in that religion that mention it are from around the 6th century. The Book of Arda Iraf contains a Dante-esque account of the afterlife, including visits to heaven and hell. (There are 13 chapters on Heaven, and 85 on Hell.) It’s fascinating reading describing a host of sins and their punishments. It’s quite gruesome and well worth a read if you’re into the concept of sin and Hell. Sinners are stabbing themselves, women are hung up by their breasts, (one is condemned to somehow digging a hill were her breasts), serpents are eating tongues, the eternal ingesting of excrement and vomit abounds, etc. Fun Sunday afternoon reading.
Jewish afterlife beliefs evolved over time, but once they devoloped their eschatology (largely derived from Persian/Zorastrian beliefs after the Babylonian exile), the belief was that Sheol was only temporary. There would eventually be a resurrection of all the dead, everybody would be judged, then the good people would be given eternal life in paradise, and the bad people were simpy annihilated. The punishment for bad people was deletion from all existence. This might not sound like too bad a deal compared to eternal, burning hell, but they were thinking more in terms of reward for themselves than punishment for others.
Well, obviously, they did. And the Lord inspired the creation of the internal combustion engine, so mankind would have to invent rubber tires. Because apparently, these tires are consumable.
And that’s why Jesus Saves Tires. Just like it says in this thread.
We admit that we don’t know what comes after death, for sinners or righteous people. There’s various speculation, but that’s all it is.
I suspect that Judaism focuses less on an afterlife partly because Christianity has devoted so much attention to it over the centuries. Judaism may have become a more this-worldly religion to differentiate itself from Christianity, or because we didn’t want to look like we were trying to imitate the Christians.
That’s your business as an individual Jew. Judaism just says you’re supposed to obey the commandments, not why you’re supposed to obey them. Whether or not you do obey the commandments counts for more than why you think you’re supposed to, in Judaism. There’s been a lot of Jewish debate over what, exactly, you are supposed to do to obey the commandments, but less debate over the reasons why you’re supposed to obey them. In fact, there are some commandments that we acknowledge that we don’t know why you’re supposed to do them.
I doubt Satan would really be that bad as god in comparison. If he’s welcoming sinners with open arms, as the OP states, wouldn’t you all be buds?
I don’t believe in any afterlife, but assuming heaven and hell exist, let’s look at the numbers.
God killed (est) 33,000,000 throughout the bible.
Satan killed 10 people. Yes, just ten, all in the book of Job, with god’s influence and blessing.
God forgives basically everything except atheism, so in heaven we can hang with Hitler, Hussein, Himmler, Manson (eventually), Susan Smith, Andrea Yates and the like.
In hell we get atheists like myself? Hmmm. Then pray for me to go to hell and spit on Himmler for me, cool?
WOW this is an eye opener!:eek:
Now it all makes sense. That’s why God sent prophet after prophet to the Jews, then gave up on them.
To me Hell is a very intense refiners fire, where our tendencies to do anything outside of Love for each other and God caused much pain in our life. It is God’s reform school, run by demons so we learn we never want to go back there.
I also believe there is a place worse, outer darkness, where if we even resist the fires of Hell, we get our very own universe with nothing in it.
Jesus overcame all and can rescue from both places.
The second one.
First few chapters of the book of Job pretty much spells it out that Satan is God’s bitch. To put it less crudely, Satan can’t do thing 1 without God’s say-so. So, if God wants Hell to be a place of fire and brimstone and torture, Satan has to go along with it, because, well, the Bible seems to indicate that Satan has no choice, he has to listen to what God tells him to do.
Reminds me of the Vas Corp Mani (Armageddon) spell from the Ultima video game series. Every person, creature, and object in the game is destroyed, leaving you alone in a vast, empty world with no one to talk to and nothing to interact with.
That part of the game gave me nightmares.
I remember C.S. Lewis found this idea particularly disturbing. IIRC he said that if you start from the premise that you (that is, the soul part of you) are indeed immortal and cannot die, then (in the absence of God and everything else) even minor bad mental habits become exponentially worse over time until you’re alone in what’s literally a hell of your own making.
Or see Stephen King’s “The Jaunt” for another view of what a mind’s eternity in isolation would end up like.
According to Matthew ch 16 v 27-28, Jesus was going to return in glory with His angels while some of them were still living. mark also makes reference to this) He thought the world was going to end during that century. Said that generation would not pass away until all things (He spoke of) was accomplished. So the second coming has come and gone.(as I see it!)
The end of every person’s world will end at their death. each generation thinks it is while they are alive, at least it seems that way to me!
Matthew 16:
27 For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.
28 Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.
“The coming in glory with angels” and the “coming in his kingdom” are not necessarily the same. The former speaks of Christ’s Return, the latter of His Ascension to the Divine Throne, which was witnessed by the Apostles in Acts 1, Stephen at his martyrdom (Acts 7), Paul at his conversion (Acts 9), and John in receiving the Revelation. Christ indeed foretold that the generation would witness the end of the Aion (‘world’ is a bad translation) and the Aion of the Mosaic Covenant did indeed end with the destruction of the Temple, the Priesthood & the Jewish nation (Matthew 24).
And once again we are about to enter a new Aion… Aquarius, right?