Whatever you wish Epimetheus. As you said knowledge is what you want it to be. If that works for you, fine. I would rather know as much as possible. We can learn from others.
Not quite sure about other versions of hell, but as far as we wacky Catholics are concerned, hell is simply this: eternal separation from God. When you die, you either are one with God (heaven), on your way to being one with God (purgatory), or you have chosen, by your actions, to be separated from God for all of time and then some.
Now, that doesn’t sound so bad. The torment comes from the knowledge that you could have been one with God, but you decided not to be. It’s pretty hard to describe or imagine.
I like to put it this way- imagine, if you will, an orgasm that never climaxed, but simply got more intense and more pleasurable… forever. Now, imagine that you are not able to experience that, having instead opted for castration. That, my friends, is hell.
woosh
Excuse me, but yes we do have knowledge of the spiritual world. It’s in the Bible and I don’t believe the Bible is false, I believe it’s the word of God. I concur that what you’re saying isn’t biblical. So what, if your experiences seem to be real? How else can satan deceive people unless he makes it seem very real? Real enough that people will believe what the spiritual experience says rather than what God says. There needs to be a standard with which to compare any spiritual experience we have and I believe that to be the Bible. I do plenty of thinking in this life and I think the devil is winning in many people’s lives today by engineering experiences that lead them away from the word of God and into false doctrine. There are warnings in the Scripture about this but many today are ignoring it and just embracing any experience they can get from the spirit world. This is dangerous, in my view.
1 Timothy 4:1 - Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.
1 Timothy 4:3-4 - For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but after their own lusts , shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
His4Ever, i knew you would come and post here to set the record straight.
You might want to give some verses from God’s only word, the Bible, about Hell.
I can’t right now, i am at my local library and must be offline in a few minutes.
See yall tomorrow.
Cherubims are angels. “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a flock; thou that dwellest between the cherubims, shine forth.” Psalm 82:1
I don’t think God dwells between plants.
In Exodus 25 it’s talking about the making of the ark of the covenant and a replica of the cherubims are to be included. Verse 20 says “And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims be.”
They have wings and faces. I think it’s clear that they’re angels.
Okay, vanilla, I’ll share a few verses on hell:
And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched:
WHERE THEIR WORM DIETH NOT, AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.
And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched.
WHERE THEIR WORM DIETH NOT, AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.
And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell.
WHERE THEIR WORM DIETH NOT, AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.
Mark 9:43-47
I don’t know if we’re actually supposed to cut our feet off, etc. or if Jesus it tellings us what a horrible place it will be. It’s real and people will be cast into it according to Christ. And evidently it’s horrible enough that it would be better to cut off a member of our body that’s causing us to sin, rather than to go there.
The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.
Psalm 9:17
And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
Matthew 10:28
And in hell, he lift up eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.
Luke 16:23-24
The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished. (yes, Lekatt, God does punish)
2 Peter 2:9
I know it’s easy to joke and say hell is going to be one big party time but that’s not the truth. God has lovingly provided a way not to go there. That way is the death of Jesus for our sins and His rising again from the dead. Accept and trust Him and His sacrifice and live.
So in answer to the question of the OP, yes hell is a very bad place. Worse than anything we could imagine. And no, it’s not what we make it to be as some people say. It’s real. God created it for the devil and his angels. All those without Christ go there also. God doesn’t put them there. They put themselves there by rejecting His provision. He gives them what they want, an eternity without Him.
No!! Really?!
If you notice the context, the fact that Cherubims are Angels is not what is being called into question. I was pointing out the first mention of Angels in the bible and commenting that they were not mentioned in the creation. Your bible verse is in PSALM. NOT genesis.
Mentioning that something is an Angel books later, chronologically speaking thousands of years later, does nothing for the reference in Genesis. Just like mentioning that Lucifer is only refered to ONCE in the bible and Satan himself isn’t even refered to by name or concept until 1 Chronicles 21:1.
Since the bible was not (supposedly) written at one time, it is suspicious that these things are not mentioned earlier. Hey, perhaps they were covering up the blunders of the past with ad hoc references 18 biblical books later!!
But that is an entirely different debate isn’t it? To spell it out to the contextually illiterate: Saying “Could be anything at this point. The author does not even mention what these Cherubims are” means that looking at it as chronologically consistant we don’t yet know what the hell a Cherubim is or isnt at the time it is mentioned. Which is exactly what I said.
Can always count on His4Ever to give the appropriate Bible quotes for any occasion.
For some the Bible is God, nothing outside of the Bible can be true. The Bible is worshipped as if God were speaking from its pages. Those who do this and there are many, would not know anything about God without it. They do not know God, only the Bible, and there is a great difference between the two.
Jesus said the “Kingdom of God is within you.” He said nothing about it being in the Bible. God lives within us all, there will you find the truth of God for yourself, personal truth.
Love
Leroy
Thanks, MEBuckner, for your answers. Based on your post, and those of some other people, it sounds as though it’s pretty hard to avoid hell. Worship an evil being, call your brother a mean name, call someone (anyone) a fool, fail to believe the right stuff… Or perhaps it’s okay to call someone a fool if he/she really is a fool. Better not be wrong though, huh?
His4ever, this whole thing about the only way to get to heaven is to believe that Jesus died for my sins seem to me to presuppose a few things. The assumptions seem to be that everyone hears about the Christian God, and about Jesus, and about the Bible, and that everyone has an equal chance to obtain correct beliefs. But that’s quite plainly not the case. Many people throughout history have gone their whole lives without hearing a thing about Christianity; without knowing it exists. Others may have heard of it, as some strange foreign belief system, but have no knowledge of the details. Still others have at least some notion of the basics of Christianity, but only in the context of “this is something other people (misguided people) far away believe. We, of course, know better. We belive in <insert name of other belief system here>.” (Sort of like the way you learned whatver you know about religions other then your own.)
We do not have a level playing field here.
People born into Christian families have a big advantage over everyone else. People who grow up in countries where Christianity is the dominent religion have an advantage over people who grow up in Muslim, Buddist, Hindu etc. countries.
And then there’s the matter of the way the different versions of Christianity disagree with each other. Is only one version the right one? Do the followers of all the wrong versions of Christianity all go to hell? How is one to know if the version one was brought up to believe is the right one?
From the perspective of this non-believer, this is completely nutty. It probably made sence to primitive people who literally did not know that a wider world existed; who beleived that everyone in the world belonged to their culture, and was exposed to the same information they had. Once Christians found out that this was not the case, they should have seen the foolishness of these doctrines (or dogmas, or whatever they are) and dropped them.
The fact that the bible suggests a hell, and describes it as such a horrible place says alot about the religion Hazel. It sure shows a god that isn’t nearly as loving as he claims he is, wouldn’t you think?
I love you if you are my friend, otherwise… BURN IN ETERNAL TORMENT YOU DESPICAL BEING!! God sure has a maturity issue to resolve, but at only 6,000 years old he is just a child.
At least he doesn’t have his children burn witches, dash infants heads against rocks and rape and pillage like he used to. It will only get better in time I imagine.
I would love to find out exactly when Christianity* morphed from a religion based on love and peace into a religion based on fear and punishment.
His4Ever, the image of God that you appear to create in your posts is that of a cruel and capricious divinity, one that does not appear to have much regard for man. Any God that would create a celestial torture chamber for the purpose of inflicting eternal agony upon the portion of population that doesn’t belong to a particular subset of a particular religion isn’t a God worthy of my respect or worship.
Frankly, such a God isn’t worthy of your worship either, His4Ever. Or anyone else’s.
[sub]By this, I mean His4Ever’s brand of Christianity.[/sub]
Since Hell and Satan (the devil) seem to be so closely linked, here’s a great book giving a wonderful history of the mythology of Satan and how he came to be the creature he is in the Christian mythos:
The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels.
Dr. Pagels is (as of 1995) the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University.
The book is an academic text, but Pagel’s writing style is such that a layman and easily follow her. Highly recommended.
Sorry, but when I read this sort of things, I can’t help myself : I just have to post an answer…
If he really was loving, he wouldn’t have created hell at the first place. Or he wouldn’t want anybody to go there (assuming that he’s not all-powerful and that hell isn’t his own creation).
god created hell, according to your reliion. god choose to send people there. Providing a difficult and narrow way to avoid to avoid torments you decided to inflict at the first place, without any necessity to do so ins’t acting “lovingly”. That would be true only if god wasn’t all-powerful and couldn’t do anything about the existence of hell. For instance, if Satan were a being much more powerful than god, had created hell because he enjoy making people suffer, and god had sacrified himself to allow some people to avoid this fate, that would be loving.
But with your views, god is in the same situation than a serial killer who would say to his victims “if you do this and that or if you guess correctly what is my favorite color, I will lovingly spare you life…If you don’t, I’m going to kill you slowly and painfully”. God, in your view, like the serial killer, is fully responsible for the tortures supposedly inflicted in Hell. He isn’t under no obligation to send anybody to hell. But he willingly choose to torture people forever. Sparing some of them is definitely not an act of goodness.
Take ten hostages, kill 9 out oif them and then try to explain to the court that you’re actually not a criminal but a good person because you spared one (and that only because this person acted in a very obediend and respectful way). Good luck to convince the jury.
I don’t even understand how such reasonnings (god create men sinners/there’s no way they can’t sin/all sinners are tortured forever because god decided so/ but god will spare some of them ===> hence god is good and love men) can make sense to some people. It totally puzzles me.
God created Hell for the devil and the angels which followed him.
God sends no one to hell, they reject His offer of forgiveness.
There is a verse in Romans which says something like “They are without excuse, for Gods’ existencse has been knowable to them through creation.”
Okay, it doesn’t say That exactly, but something liek it.
Let me try to get the verse.
Well then, if it does say something like that, we are ‘with’ excuse, aren’t we?
As all evidence points towards the fact that he wasn’t involved in creation. It happened by itself.
If you buy the image of Hell that appears in Dante’s Inferno, then Satan is just another inamate – and one in a pretty unenviable position, stuck in the middle of a frozen lake (no fire there!), chewing on three other sinners.
I highly recommend the book The History of Hell. It’ll answer all of your damned questions.
For a pretty non-violent, non-suffering Hell, see the “Don Juan in Hell” section of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. This pissed off C.S. Lewis so much that he wrote The Great Divorce in retaliation.
wait, I didn’t mean creation of the earth, I meant the verse implies that just looking around at the creation that is there right now “proves” it, somehow.
Romans 1:20:
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.
Make of it what you will, I thought it was relevant to the discussion.
RE what Hell is & how bad it can be- it may be WORSE than the ABSENCE of God- esp for those here who hate the Biblical God-
Isaiah 30: 33. For Tophet is ordained of old; yea, for the king it is prepared; he hath made it deep and large: the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it.
*
Daniel 7: 9. I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire.
10. A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him: thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him: the judgment was set, and the books were opened.
*
Acts 2:1. And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.
2. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
3. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
4. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
*
Hebrews 12: 29. For our God is a consuming fire.
When the Bible speaks of Sheol (Hebrew Old Testament) or Hades (Greek New Testament), it seems to indicate that Absence in which a person is left in the Hole of the Self. When it speaks of Tophet/Gehenna/the Lake of Fire, however, I think it indicates that point at the Final Judgement in which all people are thrust into the Pure Love & Justice of Jesus & God while out of harmony with Him/Her. However, I also believe that hope may well exist for all souls to finally reconcile with God at that point & that if any refuse, they will mercifully be allowed to burn themselves out.