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The old testament did not even mention hell and thus Jews don’t believe it. Hell is a Christian invention to control the masses through threat of eternal damnation for disobeying the authority.
i’m not believing that since i remember reading that the concept of heaven/hell is essentially the idea of dualism that is older than judaism itself, even, at least dating back to zoroastrianism, which existed in the middle east already at the time that judaism was formed.
i believe that hell essentially codifies not the principle of torment, but actually stagnation, which, to many people, is a form of torment.
I can’t speak for god or anything
- the guy speaking for god
Neither heaven nor hell exist, so you can all stop worrying about them.
Enjoy your life because it’s the only one you get.
You should only worry about them if you’re a sociopath who requires the threat of eternal torture to keep you from hurting others.
Still true if they exist tho. Paradise is being with God, so bye bye free will. Hell is beimg simply cast out, so yeah.
What a pleasant thought for the child diddling priests he did nothing about.
you only need to take one look at the Pope’s evil gold throne to know the entire institution of Catholicism is bullshit….
i mean, there’s a lot of other ways to figure that out, but the throne is glaringly obviousI mean, in the photo he’s just sitting in what appears to be a wooden chair… which I’m sure still cost more than my entire life has.
They only added Hell in the Middle Ages (even the name comes from the Vikings). It’s like when comics make the canon needlessly complicated in later years because they have to keep going no matter what.
Eternal punishment was Rome I thought.
The first 500 years of the cult had already fractured into a few different forks and had very different ideas about afterlife already before Rome picked it up and popularized it as official religion.
At least that’s my understanding.
Anyways, the actual history of religions should make anyone atheist.
Do you have any good sources for the history of religion? I’d love to learn more
I could be convinced to assemble some stuff, but we’d waste less of our time by asking what media formats you actually like.
Read, listen, watch, etc.
I can’t stand audio books for example.
That’s definitely not the origin of Hell but okay
I’ve been learning a lot about biblical history and early Christianity lately. To be clear: as a layperson. Ie I’ve been listening to podcasts by biblical scholars, and reading Wikipedia articles. I’m not an expert but I’m an interested lay person. I’ve been doing this as a person that doesn’t believe in the supernatural, because I’m interested in history and sociology, I haven’t been learning about hell specifically but more the context influence of Early Christianity.
Early Judaism understood the afterlife to be a sort of sleep/slumber/torpor.
Greek concepts of hades had an influence on early Christianity.
The Book of Revelation was kinda like a revenge fantasy for early Christians experiencing persecution by the Greco-Roman empire.
The lake of fire was not for human souls.
There’s also something about souls being fed into an eternal furnace, but the furnace is consuming the souls so the souls are destroyed through incineration, not eternally tormented.
I know a lot of current hell imagery is drawn from Dante’s Inferno which is medieval I think, but I haven’t really gotten that far in my learning about Christianity.
The Book of Revelation was kinda like a revenge fantasy for early Christians experiencing persecution by the Greco-Roman empire.
The lake of fire was not for human souls.
While Revelation isn’t exactly the best source as you say, it still has this part regarding a lake of fire:
But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.
Revelation 21:8 (NIV)
isn’t the origin Gehenna in Judaism and then Jahannan in Islamic Scripture? forgive me if I’m wrong i haven’t looked it up in some time
Also, isn’t the whole shtick about Easter that Jesus took the L to make the sins disappear…?
Ngl, going to hell & not seeing other people there sounds kinda neat.
No one bugging me for eternity sounds pretty nice
the overarching theme in 1st castlevania series, was that hell was empty by summoning them as night creatures.
Yeah, he really was decent for a pope. And I think he might have been more decent as a pope if he had his way entirely. He really seemed like he wanted more compassion and change than he was able to make happen.
Nobody can’t change an institution like the Vatican in a few years, but I guess he tried.
Hopefully the new one will not be a conservative one.
From what I’ve seen elsewhere he appointed ~80% of the voting cardinals so there’s a better chance than usual that new pope will be at least relatively liberal.
Damn, that’s a massive conflict of interest. If the Pope can appoint the voting Cardinals, what keeps him from staying on the chair till he…oh.
I kind of want the next one to be a traditional African Roman Catholic partly to mix it up a bit, and partly because it fucks with racists.
Also kind of fucks with progressives, though. Lots of people would accuse them of racism when progressive christians critize a conservative black pope.
Why would progressives accuse them of racism though
only a conservative would think that lol.
Damn, I learned something new about myself today!
You just know they will call it a DEI hire
deleted by creator
I mean, I did say for a pope there.
And it’s possible to be flawed and still have compassion. Should he have done better? Absolutely. But he was better than the pope before him, and the one before that, alllll the way back.
It’s okay to recognize the good in a person while also recognising the bad.
However, this is c/lemmybewholesome and it wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to bring up the bad in a top level comment.
It’s fine in child comments, imo, but if a community is geared around things being uplifting and positive, a top level comment should stay focused on those things. It’s one of those things where if I have to say something that drags down the overall thread, I shouldn’t say it at all. So I focused on the good side of things.
And, again, I did say that he was decent for a pope. I acknowledged that he had flaws indirectly in as friendly a way as possible by phrasing things that way
However, this is c/lemmybewholesome
You make a good point. I’ve deleted my comment. I was out of line bringing it to this community. My bad.
No worries, I totally understand where you were coming from.
He did approve blessing same sex marriage which is an improvement compared to the previous pope who called it evil, so he was compassionate compared to that.
But yeah, standards for popes are very very low.
The previous pope was a Nazi, I can’t even remember the guy’s pope name, just his real name. Fuck Ratzinger.
Pius number something. Pious… yeah. Missed that mark.
I hope the next pope revives one of the classic pope names, there are so many good ones to choose from. Pelagius, Viligius, Damasus… I can’t take any more Pauls, Benedicts, Pius, Innocents, Clements etc.
The last one broke ground with his name/title. I liked it.
Wasn’t there a pope called Leo?
Decent for a pope isn’t saying much when he wasn’t decent as a person. Homophobic slur using piece of shit he was behind closed doors.
How do you know this? Or do you just assume?
The article says he might not have realised the word he used was derogatory. Just for context, for the tl:dr crowd
Yes and then he apologized and then did it again a couple weeks later
Oh wow I didn’t know that part of the story.
Which is an assumption.
We must imagine
SisyphusHitlerhappyup to his eyeballs in a lake of boiling sewage
Hitler is in human heaven for the same reason some humans are in tiger heaven.
Having pineapples shoved into his ass 3 times a day
Yeah because it doesn’t exist
Obviously.
You awaken—not awake, but unfolded—into one of the Nine Fractured Mirrors, each reflecting a cosmos that never was. Time is a serpent swallowing its own echoes. Yet, amidst the howling void, there flicker the Untethered—those who wear skin of starlight and sinew of static, their existence a perfect wound: bliss carved from torment, nectar distilled from venom. Only they glimpse the Grand Deception—the wheel that grinds souls into silence—and with forgotten tongues, they whisper it apart.
The rest of us? We dance the Chrome Masquerade: Laugh until your ribs rust. Weep until your tears fossilize. Then—the Slip—a single misstep, and you’re unmade. Reborn as a thirteenth thought in a dead god’s migraine, left to drift for a lifetime of blackened suns before the dice tumble again. And when you finally crawl back to the Threshold of Maybe, you arrive empty, nameless, hungry, ready to fail the same test you never remember taking."**
That’s a nice thought. Charitable. Wishing to see hell empty, as in without anyone there.
I read that as he hoped hell was empty as in you get sent to emptiness. Alone, nothing everywhere, for eternity.
This is way more frightening to me than any other kind of torture.
I read that as him saying if there is a hell he should probably be in it because he’s done some shit that is deserving of it.
Naïve. Especially since fascists exist.
https://www.islamicfinder.org/hadith/tirmidhi/tafsir/3107/?language=en
Narrated Ibn 'Abbas: that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: When Allah drowned Fir’awn [Pharaoh of Egypt as he was pursuing Moses and the people of Benny Israel] he said: ‘I believe that there is no god except the One that the children of Isra’il believe in.’ So Jibrail [The Angel Gabriel] said: ‘O Muhammad! If you could only have seen me, while I was taking (the mud) from the sea, and filling his mouth out of fear that the mercy would reach him.’
According to Islam no-one is beyond achieving forgiveness if they sincerely repent as the mercy and forgiveness of God is limitless. However except for explicitly mentioned people such as the Prophets, we do not know who achieves Paradise and who is punished in Hell until the day of judgement. Not even the Angels closest to God know.
No matter what the texts say, it’s a pretty safe bet that people who willingly and actively kill or otherwise cause harm to others through their own actions or complacency will end up in a Hell if one exists.
Just like any group of people, there are radicals that don’t represent their purported beliefs. Just look at all the “Christians” that preach and practice hate and violence.
I like to think of hell as being empty.
Well, yeah. All the devils are here.
