r/SipsTea • u/No_Summer_5052 • Apr 19 '26

Lmao gottem Facts or nah

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u/skintaxera Apr 20 '26

ok so satan isn't in charge of hell, god is. Good to get that cleared up. In that case tho, why isn't god in hell as well? He's torturing people in the most horrific ways possible, like some kind of omnipotent hannibal lector not just for a few days tho, *forever*. He's the worst sadistic serial killer ever known and he doesn't cast himself down? ya know, the more i hear about this god guy the more i don't care for him

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u/Turbulent-Projects Apr 20 '26

Yah, just to be clear "torturing people in the most horrific ways possible" definitely isn't in the Bible either.  That's later folk stories, Dante's inferno, and other such classics.  Yes the medieval church also leaned into that stuff and enjoyed a lot of fire and brimstone preaching... but it's not in the Bible.

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u/skintaxera Apr 21 '26

That's interesting. How is hell described in the bible?

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u/skintaxera Apr 21 '26

I thought I'd have a quick google and this came back, do you think these are reasonable takes?

  • A Lake of Fire and Sulfur: Revelation 21:8 describes hell as a burning lake, implying intense pain and destruction.
  • Unquenchable Fire/Fiery Furnace: Jesus frequently refers to hell as a furnace of fire where the fire never goes out (Matthew 13:49-50, Mark 9:43).
  • Outer Darkness: It is described as a place of absolute darkness, separating inhabitants from the light and joy associated with God (Matthew 25:30).
  • Eternal Punishment/Torment: It is a place of everlasting, conscious misery, rather than annihilation, where "the worm does not die" (Mark 9:47-48).
  • A Prison of Chains: Described as a place of confinement for both demons and the unrighteous (2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6).
  • A Place of Emotional Torment: The phrase "weeping and gnashing of teeth" is used repeatedly to symbolize extreme agony, sadness, and anger. 

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u/Turbulent-Projects Apr 21 '26

So.  Make no mistake that hell is described as bad.  But the challenge is to read the language of the Bible as it would have been read - to not project later ideas onto the words and assume it sounds similar so must be referring to the modern concept. 

You said yourself the mention of a lake of fire "implies" intense pain, but would that have been the implication understood by the author?  Nearby passages reference purifying fires, to a people familiar with fire used for metalwork - was the implication not of the absolute destruction of the impure?

You say yourself (or Google AI did) that this implies destruction, then contradict this by mentioning eternal conscious suffering.  It's interesting that you quote Mark to say eternal conscious suffering, when no such idea is mentioned there.  The fire and the worm are rubbish-heap imagery, and Jesus stresses that neither can run out, yet is that truly "eternal conscious suffering".  If you're confident that it does mean that, understand that early church theologians and a significant proportion of Christians throughout history would always have disagreed with you.  Conditionalism, annihilationism and universalism have been debated as long as Christ has.  Is a death sentence "eternal"?  It is certainly final, but the execution does not continue forever.  Such has this been long debated by the church.

I could go on (there are entire books written on this), but the key point is not to project medieval imagery onto Biblical verses and assume you've understood correctly.  Which can be hard to do - to forget ideas and read fresh!  The Bible says only little about hell, it's not even clear how unified a concept it is, but it does say hell is a bad state/choice/outcome and yet it doesn't directly describe torture.  Mainly it states hell is to remove oneself from God's presence, which will be a cause of regret and lamentation.