The Bible and Hell

Questions and Answers for where to begin on the Darker Spiritual Paths.

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outlawz564
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I don't want to cause a ruckus, only to offer insight into some false precepts of Christianity that plagues the world today. The Bible does not condemn anyone to Hell. The Bible is a 3000+ year old book written by over 40 authors. It is so sad to see all these idiotic televangelists, all who have so comparatively little experience, make false claims about the Bible. In fact, nearly every church today teaches ideologies in direct opposition to the Bible.

Namely, Hell. In the Bible, Hell simply means to be in the grave. To be rotting in the dirt. The Catholic church, which the Bible unmistakably names as "The Beast" or the "Antichrist" (youtube "The man Behind the Mask, by Walter J Veith for indisputable proof), created the doctrine of Hell. Why? Because the Pope is simply the Roman worship system reincarnated. The Pope is called "Pontificus Maximus", Roman Emperor's were called "Pontificus Maximus". Both are worshiped, and both are considered to have the authority of God.

This directly contradicts the Bible. Little known fact: over 90% of those burned in the inquisition were killed for owning Bibles. The Catholic church was very aware of it's position as the beach. So much that they tried to eradicate the very book they claim their "religion" is founded upon. Spiritualism, the idea that we become a spirit after we die, stems back from the lie spoken to Eve by the serpent: "thou shall not die if thou didst eateth of the fruit". If we're an immortal spirit, like Catholicism and the ancient mystery religions claim, then we must live an eternal spirit life. This means eternal bliss, or eternal damnation after death. Hell was created to fulfill that paradigm, as the concept of the immortal spirit is essential for the deification of man. The Bible asserts that we are mortal, and our bodies are us. When our bodies die, we die as well. We cease to exist, and death is as a sleep. This is why Jesus had to conquer it. That's why it's wrong to "speak to the dead" in the bible because there are no dead spirits of men, according to its philosophy. All these Christians preaching eternal Hellfire and Brimstone are actually espousing pagan beliefs.

Don't believe me? See for yourself. Helltruth dot com is a fantastic website that details nearly every aspect of it, and it also gives the full context of the verses most often used to try and derive such a place from the scriptures. You will find it fascinating how so few verses, which obviously have nothing to do with such a thing (there are those that even directly speak out against believing in such a place) are used by Catholics and other denominations to perpetuate this disgusting lie. All of you are right, I could not worship a God that would condemn people to such a place either. But this is not the God of the Bible, this is the lie of Lucifer. Lucifer invented the lie of Hell, not Yahweh.

Want more proof? Deathtruth dot com is also great, but quite possibly THE best video proving these ideas as well as illustrating the history of how Hell evolved into the way we think of it today, can be found by searching "The Mystic Realm of Death, again by Walter J. Veith". Many other brilliant authors cover the subject, I'm just particularly fond of Veith's presentation style and his painstaking efforts to document all of his sources.

I'm not here to argue with anyone, you can all worship whatever god's you want to. But I implore all of you to at least consider the discrepancies between what the Bible actually says and what all these quacky fire and brimstone evangelists say about it.

Peace be with you all. And please don't flame me, I'm not judging or condemning anyone but I do know for a fact that Hell is not Biblical and that can be proven.

Thank you for your time.
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Kei
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outlawz564 wrote:I don't want to cause a ruckus, only to offer insight into some false precepts of Christianity that plagues the world today. The Bible does not condemn anyone to Hell.
"Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." (Matt. 25:41)

"And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire." (Mark 9:43)

"He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury.' (Rom. 2:6-8)

"And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire." (Rev. 20:15)

Most of it's from memory. This is what years of Sunday school and mandatory bible classes will do to a person... :P Anyway, it's obviously a subject that no forum, no matter how big or small, will adequately be able to cover, and at the end of the day, it will still come down to people's opinions. And forgive me for a slightly embittered viewpoint after seeing just how "kind and loving" that deity really is. But Christian doctrine, as it's written in the bible today, in its entirety centers on the "destruction of sinful world" and all its inhabitants, save those who "follow him faithfully". One of the main factors when proselytizing is the phrase "Do YOU know where you're going when you die?"

If sinners aren't sent to hell, there's no point in following the Christian god. And that, I believe, is why it's such a focal point when trying to scare people into following him when the facade of an all-loving, all-accepting god falls on deaf or skeptical ears. If sugar doesn't win them, smoke them out.
"There is hope in this world. Certainly, there is.
However, reality is far more cruel than you can imagine.
That's why you must become stronger." --Yoshimoto Koya, Family Game
outlawz564
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Joined: Sat Aug 03, 2013 2:04 pm

"Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." (Matt 25:41)

This "eternal fire" is only "eternal" in the sense that this fire will burn, unquenchable, until all sin is eradicated from the earth. Sin is fuel to the fire, and it can't get enough. No sin = no fuel to the fire. If Hell is eternal, sin is eternal. The Bible unmistakably states that sin will one day be no more, so therefore sin is not eternal and neither is this fire with an unquenchable hunger for sin.

From Helltruth, because I'm lazy:
Unquenchable fire is fire that cannot be put out, but which goes out when it has turned everything to ashes. Jeremiah 17:27 says Jerusalem was to be destroyed with unquenchable fire, and in 2 Chronicles 36:19-21 the Bible says this fire burned the city "to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah" and left it desolate. Yet we know this fire went out, because Jerusalem is not burning today.

To quench means to extinguish or put out. No one will be able to put out the fire of hell. That is the strange fire of God. No one will be able to escape from it by extinguishing it. Isaiah says of that fire, "Behold, they shall be as stubble; the fire shall burn them; they shall not deliver themselves from the power of the flame: there shall not be a coal to warm at, nor a fire to sit before it" (Isaiah 47:14). After it has accomplished its work of destruction, that fire will go out. No one can deliver themselves from its flame by putting it out, but finally not a coal will be left. So say the Scriptures.

I never said that bad things don't happen to the wicked. I'm just against eternal punishment. To be thrown into the lake of fire is to die the "second death". This death, while fiery in nature, is permanent, but simply means non-existence. Not eternal torment to a living soul.

Revelation 20:14 - "And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death." So, death and hell are destroyed in the lake of fire. Death obviously doesn't suffer eternally, it's simply vanquished. If Hell WERE the lake of fire, this verse wouldn't make sense either. This verse only makes sense if Hell means "the grave", which is consistent with the rest of the Bible. In other words, "the act of death as well as all the graves of the dead will be destroyed". There won't even be a remnant of death at all: it will be forgotten.

On the words "forever" and "eternal":

Again, from Helltruth:
The term "for ever," as used in the Bible, means simply a period of time, limited or unlimited. It is used 56 times in the Bible in connection with things that have already ended. It is like the word "tall," which means something different in describing men, trees, or mountains. In Jonah 2:6, "for ever" means "three days and nights." (See also Jonah 1:17.)

In Deuteronomy 23:3, this means "10 generations." In the case of man, this means "as long as he lives" or "until death." (See 1 Samuel 1:22, 28; Exodus 21:6; Psalm 48:14.) So the wicked will burn in the fire as long as they live, or until death. This fiery punishment for sin will vary according to the degree of sins for each individual, but after the punishment, the fire will go out.

Translations are finicky things! But, just to be clear, here's a plethora of versus that illustrates the Bible's teachings of what happens when you die:

Ecclesiastes 9:5,6 For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.

Psalms 115:17 The dead praise not the LORD, neither any that go down into silence.

Job 14:12 So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.

I love this verse here. Death is a sleep! The Bible teaches that when you die, you sleep like you do at night. You wake up in the morning, 8 hours later, feeling only an instant has past. So shall it be at the 2nd coming resurrection, we will all wake up in new bodies with friends and family, after it's all over, as if only an instant has passed. Better than the pagan doctrine of floating up to heaven as a spirit and having to watch your friends and family still living on earth suffer!

Ezekiel 18:4, "Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die." -Notice here that it states the entire "soul that sinneth" will die. This is congruent with the idea that we ARE our souls, bodies included. We, as living human bodies, are living souls, and the two are one in the same. In other words, here the Bible plainly states that souls are not eternal, and that they do die.

Ezekiel 18:20, "The soul that sinneth, it shall die."

"But the wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the the Lord shall be as the fat of lambs: they shall consume; into smoke shall they consume away." Psalm 37:20

"Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more." Psalm 104:35.

"Consume them in wrath, consume them, that they may not be." Psalm 59:13.

--There are many, many more, but I think it's pretty clear here: wicked souls are destroyed, they see nothing, hear nothing, and feel nothing. These versus say absolutely nothing about a "spirit departing from the body after death to descend into the place of eternal and everlasting torment and punishment from the devil".

Either the soul that sinneth dies, or it lives. Even in Genesis God says if you eat of the tree, you shall die. The lie of Satan was that eating of the tree can make you a God and you will live forever no matter what.

Can you see the difference in the two systems? Isn't it strange that nearly every religion you can think of teaches us that we have an eternal soul?

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” 4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3: 2-5)

At any rate, I don't want to overload this post. But I hope that some of those tidbits from Helltruth sparked your interest. In my last post I tried to take care to mention that there were very few actual versus that people use to derive Hell from, and this great little website covers them. Here we have a perfect example, the verses you notated are among the most popular! But take care to notice that it boils down to only a handful of them out of a 2000+ page book! If eternal damnation were such an issue, don't you think the Bible would have written more about it? And don't you find it interesting that this little website has an exact rebuttal and covers the verses which your church used to lead you into this belief? Now that's synchronicity!

Thanks again for your time and your respectful rebuttal. I should have been more clear, the Bible certainly condemns the wicked. But it condemns them to a permanent death, meaning non-existence, not a permanent spirit life of torture.
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Kei
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Not too much more to say, unfortunately; I'll just refer to my earlier post where I mentioned that, in the end, it will still be a subjective experience. You interpret the verses to mean something useful to you, while others interpret them in equally subjective ways. You seem to believe non-existence is equivalent to this "eternal lake of anguish", but the resulting unease that pain/nothingness sparks in the human soul is the same. And that primal fear is what the religion preys on.

Hopefully I've made it clear that I'm not belittling you or what you believe. It took me a long time to come to the point where I am now, and I didn't get here by giving a knee-jerk reaction to everyone who told me my interpretations about life and its theories were wrong. I grew up in a household where sneezing could be cured by fervent prayer, so I know how bantering bible passages back and forth is ultimately pointless...especially when the veracity of said book (and its multiple translations) doesn't stand up under scrutiny.

But the fact remains that, as long as religions exist, many of them will separate humanity from itself and what it could be. I have to wonder if this vast, three-pronged monotheistic religion isn't actually slowing the progress of humanity's spiritual evolution as a whole...and if that wasn't the biblical god's plan from the beginning. Would humans be happier without religion? Maybe, maybe not. But for every individual definition of hell, be it an endless lake of fire or the threat of non-existence, the real horror comes from worshiping a supposed creator who claims to love us all and gives us free will, but decides free will means the choice to obey him blindly forever or essentially be wiped out/forgotten.
"There is hope in this world. Certainly, there is.
However, reality is far more cruel than you can imagine.
That's why you must become stronger." --Yoshimoto Koya, Family Game
outlawz564
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Kei wrote:Not too much more to say, unfortunately; I'll just refer to my earlier post where I mentioned that, in the end, it will still be a subjective experience. You interpret the verses to mean something useful to you, while others interpret them in equally subjective ways.
I have to disagree with you there. These passages illustrating what the Bible says about death are rather definitive. For instance:

Ecclesiastes 9:5,6 For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.


Please tell me of more than one way to interpret this verse, so that I can understand more clearly what you mean by "subjective experience".

"The dead know not any thing" is very clear. If they know nothing, then they certainly know no feeling. The idea of spiritual Hell stems wayyyy back to gnosticism and Catholicism and is used as, like you said, a mechanism to "smoke people out" and control them. It's destructive to the true meaning of the bible, and flies in the face of everything it stands for.

If you watch the video "the mystic realm of death" on youtube, you will not only see where Hell REALLY comes from, but you will also see that this issue is clearly not open to any other interpretation, Biblically.


People don't end up believing in Hell because of a difference in interpretation, they end up believing in it because someone else told them to. People who say, "oh I've read the whole Bible" haven't most of the time. And the ones that do derive their "interpretations" blindly by what the institutions tell them to believe.
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Kei
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Another may think knowledge or memory stops after death, as the brain is no longer functioning. Ask a Muslim to discuss that same passage with you, and they may speak of it from the viewpoint of a wandering, dead soul who has no memory of this plane of existence, nor does this plane have any further memory of the deceased. A separation of the soul from the husk/connection of humanity, but not a finality.

Then again, they might not. Depending on how they interpret the passage. ;) That's the funny thing about holy scriptures, y'know? There's only one truth to glean from it...until the next person to read it decides passage A, B or C ACTUALLY means <insert new theory>. Ask Xeritch on here, and he can give you plenty of other interpretations of eternal death. He can also give you nightmares, but I digress. :P

How about Romans 8:35-37? In the KJV: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us."

Now, let's look at The Message Bible. "Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ's love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture. They kill us in cold blood because they hate you. We're sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one. None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us."

Read that second one again. More than a slight difference, considering the fundamental changes in the latter. The Message is a modern interpretation of an earlier text. Some Christians might complain, "But that's not the REAL Bible!" Really? Then what is? The King James version was written using common language of the time, and the Message Bible is written in today's lingo. Does it match earlier versions in meaning and tone? Well, did the King James version? Even back then, many of those translating had to rely on their own understanding of Greek and Hebrew. Not to mention the "Hebrews incident" where many people say the name Jesus was inserted instead of Joshua, resulting in a verse that calls "eternal rest" into question yet was translated the same exact way in later bibles.

You've certainly learned about scriptures, but I admit I find it fascinating you've chosen a decidedly Left-Hand Path board, with members who freely keep company with demons, on which to state your claims. I can't help but wonder, if you're wondering too. If not, no worries, they're your decisions to make after all. But many here have faced the much darker side of the biblical god's "love" and barely come out alive. And frankly, personal and practical experience will always win out over any written text.

I will never, EVER tell someone what to believe or not believe...but for what it's worth let me share something I wish I knew earlier: if, somewhere down the road, you find yourself cut off from everything you once "knew" as true, remember you are strong enough to find your own path...because no one else can or will do it for you.
"There is hope in this world. Certainly, there is.
However, reality is far more cruel than you can imagine.
That's why you must become stronger." --Yoshimoto Koya, Family Game
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Kei
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MagicWand-a wrote:like the fact that the bible isn't worth the paper it is printed on. Historically, its innaccurate at best. At worst- its an incomplete tome haphazardly interpreted and thrown together by bigoted religious officials designed to control te masses of its day, the biggest firestarter for wars on the planet.
Pretty much sums up the entire conversation. I've always admired your way with words. :D

I'm also glad I'm not alone in thinking they may have been here for other reasons than spewing verses at us, even though that's what they did. Speaking from experience, if they're feeling insecure about their beliefs, the easiest thing to do is fall back on what's familiar to them. It's when those same familiar verses ring as hollow as you secretly always knew them to be that your life begins to fall apart...and that's when you either give up or try to think for yourself.

These encounters can be enlightening, in a way. At least, it serves as a reminder of what I could have been if I chose to keep the blinders on.

(Does anyone else find it ironic I'm writing this while my landlord is having a church gathering out in the living room? :seasaw: :lol: )
"There is hope in this world. Certainly, there is.
However, reality is far more cruel than you can imagine.
That's why you must become stronger." --Yoshimoto Koya, Family Game
outlaw564

Well my account got banned, so just to get one last word in I made another. No more conversion tactics, I promise you.

But I do want to clarify my intentions, to be honest I wasn't here to try and prove the bible right or wrong, I just wanted to clarify what it says.

The parable of the rich man and the beggar is actually a rebuke against hell, jesus was mocking the sadducees who studied the mystery religions at alexandria. They belueved in a a spiritua immortal soul, and prayed to abraham instead of God and believed that heaven meant going to "Abrahams bosom". The Catholic church took this parable literally to try and support their doctrine of Hell and purgatory. Do a bit of research and you will find that 1) all of jesus' parables were fictional and 2) it makes no sense for a person in heaven, which is supposedly eternal bliss, to see someone down in hell suffering, and 3) jesus says he's the only person who has veen to heaven so far. When read as literal, this parable is often used as grounds for contradictions in the bible. But yet the same bible that says all past sins will be forgotten in heaven. Doesn't make sense for the beggar to remember and witness the rich mans suffering.

At any rate, helltruth walter veith, and even wikipedia covers all of that.

I'll probably get banned again, but I apologize if I have offended anyone. It just hurts to see so many people believing things about the Bible that are flat out untrue.

Good luck in case I'm banned again!
Andreeje
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Patron Deities: Hecate, Sepheranz, Lucifer, Belial
Your favourite Demon?: Marbas, Arkos, Anima Sola
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Location: Sierra Nevada mountains

Some of the legends from the bible do contain some truth, but these were beliefs taken from much older beliefs and modified to fit their view. Read about stories of the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Canaanites, then go back and read the Old Testament and compare the direct passages which were plagiarized. Then look into the New Testament and how it took from the Greeks, Romans, Norse and Celtic. After all, Lucifer was the Roman name of a Greek God who was demonized by the church on their conquest to take over the falling Roman Empire, and he make a scapegoat. Though according to Roman and Greek writings, he is the God of the dawn, the rising sun, the bringer of light, evolution and enlightenment.

When I read a book I read it to learn about what others think, then I work through direct communication to confirm or disprove. You can't just take someone else's word because you read it in a book. You have to know, not think. It's gnosis. It's conformation. Example: how do you know an entity would have negative effect upon you because the church says they are evil; yet when you contact and become close to them they are more than willing to help you with your goals and evolution. You can only know from direct communication.
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