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So what's Hell like?


Sci-2

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Being tied to a chair, unable to move arms or legs, and have a person to the left reading out the gun control thread and a person to the right reading out the atheist's thread, endlessly, over and over.

It's like a horrible version of TTTNE!!

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At the old 'Christian Forums' site every now and again somebody would use a search engine on an online bible to gather up all the references to hell (or heaven)and then try to assemble the fragments in a coherent picture. They failed every time. Not only that, other christian posters on the site tended to get *very* irked that such efforts were being made at all - a couple of these threads got locked or deleted.

That said Dante's scheme of heaven was interesting, trapped, and pretty much stolen from pagan mythology. Put simply, it was an astrological / cosmological scheme, with each planet / bright celestial object corresponding to a level of heaven. Mars, for example, was the heaven of virtuous warriors, while Venus was home to devout married lovers, I guess you'd call them. However, in each of these places, it was possible for the souls there to 'succumb to the dark side' and 'fall' into the corresponding level of Hell - which supposedly was permanent.

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However, in each of these places, it was possible for the souls there to 'succumb to the dark side' and 'fall' into the corresponding level of Hell - which supposedly was permanent.

Wait. In Paradiso the souls in Heaven could fall? I don't remember that at all.

I did think it was interesting that only in Paradiso does Dante warn away the reader, and I love the end of Purgatorio where Dante, having made peace with his sins, feels "disposed to mount the stars."

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Hell is the morning after a night out. It's that very first moment after you wake up, and your mouth feels like a public urinal, your tongue's furrier than Cousin It and there's a five year old banging on a tin drum behind your eyes. Hell is that abject, miserable, helpless moment that makes you regret all the fun you had stretched out for eternity.

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  • 1 month later...

The Heretical Rob Bell and Why Love Wins

God put Bell here to tell people -- by any and all means necessary -- how much God loves them. And that there is nothing they can do to make God love them more or less. That is the "Good News" of Jesus.

For too many people, though, what they've been told is the good news is actually an ugly truth. They hear that God is full of grace and unconditional love, a God of endless second chances, infinitely patient. But then they hear that God's grace, love and patience expires at death. "Too late," they're told. "You had your chance." That schizophrenic idea of God is simply untenable, Bell says.

"It's psychologically unbearable. No psyche can handle that," he said. "It's devastating."

It's also toxic and a lie. The Good News, Bell insists, is better than that.

"If we have the freedom to choose these things now, that Jesus came to offer us and show us, then I assume that when you die, you can continue to choose these realities because love cannot co-opt the human heart's ability to decide," Bell said. "But after you die, we are firmly in the realm of speculation."

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I remember I was about eight when I was sitting in church listening when it occurred to me, only a bunch of fools would spend their lives following the guidelines of an authority figure so they could go on and spend eternity endlessly worshipping the same authority figure. Sounded like the plot of an evil villain from a comic book or something.

If Hell is the absence of a dictatorial god, then I'll be happy to exist in that vacuum. Got enough authority figures in our lives as is.

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When I was eight I told my dad i didn't feel comfortable going to church because i was just sitting, kneeling or standing when everyone else did, and I felt like i was just mocking them (i might have said "making mock') I didnt have to go any more.

i was a real natures child and spent hours in the nature reserve near our home, exploring and observing newts and frogs and bringing home tadpoles, with the dog at my side.

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