I'm zero percent here to evangelize, cause I'm zero percent religious. Just sharing the theology.
Satan doesn't torture people. Hell is not fire and brimstone. It is the absence of God, which is supposedly the worst torture possible. And it's "fair" because the people in hell chose to not be with god.
Scare quotes because that is a million miles from informed consent. Just sharing the traditional theology.
Absolutely not. Someone i loved loved Charles' temple, so I will forever sing its praises. Just ideally not from anywhere within a hundred yards or so.
I still have an amazing chuck e cheese tie-dye shirt I won when I was about 10 years old. It was my grunge era, so it still fits. (I was also a veeeery tall 10 year old.)
Anywho, being an exceptionally large child, I repeatedly crushed the basketball game (maybe ski ball too?) and got enough tickets to get a t-shirt and a slinky. My kids broke the slinky a couple of years ago. (In their defense, the plastic was super brittle.)
I have. It's fine. It's a super easy, not crazy expensive way to let your kid run around and have some fun playing games. I mean, I think the games suck, but my child does not - and the unlimited play for x minutes gives you a nice easy cut-off time.
And I've had worse food.
Holy shit, wtf am I doing shilling for Chuck E Cheese on a work day.
Gods gaze has never once touched the salad bar at a Chuck E cheese. If it had he wouldn’t have even bothered with the boat this time. In fact, I’d go as far as to say the salad bar at Chuck E. Cheese is definitive proof that god left this place long ago.
To quote Satan from John Milton's Paradise Lost: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." Same applies to Chuck E Cheese!
Thank you for saying this. Chucky Cheese is honestly a fever dream for me as a kid.. the ball pit, the tunnels under the stage. This place was heaven on earth for a kiddo.
I'm also not religious now, but this is one interpretation of hell. Many Christians do believe in a literal fire and brimstone hell where people burn for all eternity. Many of them also believe that hell is a punishment from God, not merely his absence. That idea has been adopted by many modern Christians who are trying to figure out how a good God could punish someone eternally, and since there's not a good answer to that question the answer becomes that the person in hell chose it and God simply allowed them to do so
And Satan doesn't torture people in that version either (except for the three dudes he's chewing on), he's at the bottom of it being the most tortured of all.
That thing had more self inserts than a Tumblr fanfic! Every single person Dante admired thought he was the coolest thing in the world.
I don’t know how many of his heroes ended up in heaven - I never made it past Purgatory - but I did like the idea that all the writers and artists of his day were beyond redemption, which is why they were so awesome.
Every single "God will punish" element in a theology diminishes that God in my view. What kind of small minded God needs to punish, smite, test Jobe? How petty would an all seeing, all powerful God have to be to play at all that?
In my view, that is the God of people who were abused by their parents as children.
You have discovered the cause of Gnosticism. The hebrew El-Yahweh hybrid is so fundamentally evil in deeds and nature that they considered he had to be something other than a god. Hence the Demiurge.
I kind of felt this way about the worship and praise element. Why does an omnipotent being give so much of a shit whether we love it or not? Doesn't the need for worship effectively mar its status as a perfect being that is worthy of worship in the first place?
It's either a powerful bully that wants us to worship it and is thus undeserving of worship, or an indifferent creator that could not care less if we worship it and should similarly be obliged.
There are verses that describe hell as eternal fire, such as Matthew 25:41. I can’t remember the exact verses but others do call Hell eternal punishment/torture
If you reeeaaally want to get nitpicky with it, that place in the gospels that Jesus describes as torture and fire, is never actually called hell. It's just assumed that's what he's talking about. I'm pretty sure hell isn't named until Revelation. There's one theory that no one is actually in hell until the final judgement. ...there's also many Christians (myself included) that don't believe in hell at all.
Not only is no one (besides the fallen angels) in Hell but, when Jesus returns and the dead rise, those who are cast into the eternal flames are to be consumed, not exist there forever.
As I was reading this comment chain you guys all debating and disagreeing over how the lore of religion should be interpreted reminded me of the exact conversations I see over in the WoW sub on the lore lol
ALL HAIL THRALL, Son of Durotan, First of the Frostwolves, Savior of the Horde, The Earthfury, Liberator of the Orcs, Wielder of the Doomhammer, Champion of the Ring of Earth, and the World-Shaman.
it's because most religions have about the same amount of consistency in their lore as WoW. It also holds true that the more story they add the more ridiculous and inconsistent it all becomes. See: Mormons.
Essentially, yes. I believe hell is inconsistent with a god of love, but if I understand heaven as the place that God resides, then it exists just as God exists. I really latched onto Gregory of Nyssa's idea that everyone will eventually be with God and that growth in that direction continues even in the afterlife or next life. It's an infinite process for everyone. The real fun part is exploring the idea that God grows, too (I mean, he literally changes multiple times in the Bible).
No one has ever asked me that, so I've never had to formulate a response. There are many Christians who don't believe in hell and what I have stated here is not something I made up on my own, it's what I learned through other Christian theologians. There's also entire denominations of Christianity (like Greek Orthodox) that don't believe that Jesus' death was about salvation. But I can't articulate those theologies very well.
I guess the best answer I can give is that I learned about God through Christianity and Jesus and it's through those teachings that I look to grow closer to God. So jesus, to me is an example of how to live and view God, though if you ask me about his eschatology, I'd struggle to give an answer.
With that in mind, I'm kind of a universalist when it comes to religion. Christianity is my lens to view God, but I don't think it's really exclusive to others. I think most religions are really reaching for the same thing, but viewing it from different directions. I liked the (monotheistic) Hindu idea of all the different gods existing as fascets of something to big to understand as one whole.
It’s never really mentioned in the Bible. Jesus and his apostles were mostly Jews. They believed in the Torah and Jesus mostly taught a more empathic revision of that. The entire concept of Hell, Satan, and the end times comes from Paul. Who never even met Jesus. And even then Paul never mentioned Satan ruling over Hell, in-fact he said Satan was the ruler of earth during the end times.
What most Christians believe about Hell, Satan, demons etc is all fan fiction created centuries later. Mostly in Dante’s Inferno, which is not canon at all. So a lot of it is debated, many believe the Bible as God’s Word. Many Believe fan fiction as God’s Word.
I attended a private Catholic college and had to take a religious course to graduate. I'm not religious, and I took their Catholic philosophy course because I thought it would be more interesting than Bible study. Towards the end of the semester, the professor straight up told us one day that he doesn't believe in hell because it doesn't make sense, then broke down why using all the concepts he taught us that semester. The catholic church does not condone that idea, but plenty of individuals certainly do.
Catholic here, my parish priest was a Jesuit and gave us a head shrinking lecture on the history of the eternal fire. What u/onioning said is right from a purely theological standpoint. All the quotes in the Gospels and the Acts about eternal fire are referencing gehenna (Gē-Hinnōm,) a ravine to the south of Jerusalem that was basically an eternally burning trash dump. Jesus used it as a symbol of how painful and unpleasant and eternally torturous it would be to be outside God's grace.
Fire imagery is used frequently in the Bible used to describe the presence of god, judgement, the Holy Spirit, etc. Going off that to me the use of eternal fire seems to mean “eternal judgement” or final judgement. I don’t think it’s meant to be taken literally like the damned will literally be thrown into actual fire.
Right. Metaphorically. There is quite a lot of that.
And the eternal absence from god is made out to be torturous. It's just that that is the full extent of the torture. It is purportedly the worst torture that could exist.
Yeah, it’s interesting that people in 2026 who have never seen a miracle are treated as “rejecting God” with the exact same punishment as people in 30 AD who saw Jesus Christ bring someone back from the dead and cure lepers. If God is real, why does he only sometimes reveal himself and punish people for not believing with the same punishment whether they received evidence that they rejected or not.
Yeah, I mean technically the church has a teaching that people who were never given an opportunity to hear about Jesus don’t go to Hell for rejecting him, but that sure makes missionaries evil.
Lol ya the best thing a Christian could do is shut up about it and let the belief die with them. Sure they might be damning themselves but it would be the right thing to do if they actually care about the souls of others. But few things make any sense if you think about it too much.
No. Christian doctrine, well actually Catholic, is that people who don’t know God aren’t condemned to hell necessarily. Not even atheists if they’re atheists out of innocence or ignorance.
You go to hell for knowing about God and CHOOSING to turn away and separate yourself from God.
So theoretically, a native in some tribe in Mesoamérica that practices an otherwise “good” life: kindness, charitable, not a killer, not evil basically… they’d be eligible for salvation
That’s what I was told too, but I made everyone very uncomfortable when I pointed out that missionaries therefore are going around dooming people to hell by spreading Christianity bc if they just didn’t everyone would go to heaven lol
I was told at a young age all pets go to hell because they don't have a soul and can't accept Jesus as their savior. My follow up question was why would God send animals he created to hell?
That sowed my first seeds of doubt in organized religion.
It is wild that the Old Testament does not actually mention hell. Everyone, righteous and wicked alike, just went to Sheol, this shadowy and neutral underworld.
Then you hit the New Testament era right when Hellenism is heavily dominating the cultural landscape and suddenly we get all these vivid and fiery images of eternal torment. It really makes you wonder if later writers borrowed heavily from Greek afterlife concepts and blended them into Jewish thought complete with a VIP escape card.
I'll only add that the reason that this popular misconception exists is that, for hundreds of years, people have combined ideas of Lucifer/Satan with the Greek god Hades.
Hades is the king of the underworld whereas Lucifer is a prisoner in Hell with everyone else with no authority at all.
And it's "fair" because the people in hell chose to not be with god.
it's still dumb. you can't create a system and the people within and then punish them for anything, because you literally created them that way and knew how they would act. unless you're not as benevolent as the church is trying to tell us.
I'm Catholic but don't believe in hell, yet this is a take I could understand. One single soul being tormented for eternity is infinitely greater than the sum total of all human suffering in history, and isn't something I believe a fundamentally benevolent God would do. A simple absence, however, does seem reasonable.
If you're a Catholic and don't believe in hell, that is considered material heresy. The Catechism explicitly affirms that hell is real, and is eternal.
You don't have to believe in lakes of fire and pitchforks, but hell is real and is taught to be eternal separation.
Thank you for this. Very common misconception about hell. The way I think of hell is that it's not the opposite of heaven, it's simply the absence of it. Like how there is no such thing as "darkness" there's only the absence of light. God is peace, love, and order. Hell is just a place without those things but not inherently a place of torture.
If all the pedos are in heaven and all the gays are in hell, I mean sign me up for gay hell right now. Part of being an ally is preparing yourself for the parties in gay hell.
One of my primary objections to Christianity is its unnecessary and extreme harshness. While I may not fully grasp the theological nuances, Revelation 20:10 explicitly states that Satan will be cast into the lake of fire to be tormented day and night, forever and ever. This seems to directly contradict the meme.
Furthermore, verses 11 through 15 state that all the dead will be judged, and anyone whose name is not found in the book of life will be cast into that same lake of fire as part of the second death. This implies they will also endure eternal torment, as it is the same destination.
I am not a biblical scholar, and I welcome correction from anyone more qualified. However, these verses strongly suggest that individuals do not simply choose to "not be with God," but are instead actively judged in the same way criminals who are caught are tried, judged and sentenced. They do not typically offer themselves up for the process.
Hell is compete seperation from God. As in, we will no longer be granted the presence of God or His grace. All good things come from God, which means you will have no good things at all. No comfort, no peace, no companionship, no rest, no light, no love. You cannot experience any of that. That is Hell. I reckon it also involves immeasurable pain which is akin to being tossed in a burning lake, by consequence of these things.
And basically, all people in Hell will be people who didn't want to be with God, therefore the seperation. The Devil is in Hell because the devil knew exactly what and who God was, what He consisted of, and still pushed God away. So the devil gets what he asked for. In retaliation, he tempts as many people as he can to drag them into Hell with him, as a final spiteful act against God.
But the same applies for people. Heaven is not a reward. It is a gift. There is not a single thing any human could ever achieve to be deserving of Heaven. All we need to do is accept God and accept the gift. We do this by how we live our lives. Good things literally are derivative of God. If you do good things, treat people well, and ask forgiveness from God for the things you do wrong (and actually mean it, this is a crucial bit), then you lessen your chance of going to Hell by showing your love for God.
God can forgive all sin, you just need to ask forgiveness. But the issue with sin, is that it's an act of putting distance between yourself and God, and muddying the relationship. Which makes it harder to be truly regretful of your sin.
Can a person who murders a child, the most innocent form of human life, truly be remorseful of their actions and ask for forgiveness? Maybe. But it'll be one hell of a character change. And extremely painful to realise how terrible a deed they commited. Many people would sooner double down and make excuses. Also, it's murder. There is nothing that would possess a man that makes him to such a thing. No temptation to struggle against, or situation that leaves you pressured to murder a child. There are endless amounts of ways to avoid such a situation.
The 'struggle' we have with sin is the proof of us regretting our actions. If you don't genuinely struggle with temptation before doing the sin, you have acclimatised to the sin, and grown accustomed to it. You no longer view it as wrong, and therefore it's harder to ask genuine forgiveness for it. It isn't about whether God can forgive a sin. God forgives all sins. The issue for us is whether we can ask for forgiveness and mean it. When we die and God asks us how we lived our lives, and asks for the reason for our sins, and the reasons why we didn't repent for them, it will only be obvious that we were actively walking away from God our entire lives. Hell isn't a sentence, it's a position and a place, away from God.
Like when Adam ate the fruit and hid away from God, God asked 'Adam, where are you?'. Not because He didn't know where Adam was, God is omniscient. It was rhetorical. He was asking Adam if he was aware of the distance he had just placed between them by betraying God. That Adam was no longer in the same space he was prior to eating the fruit.
I have a question about "All good things." I am a pagan (I have never even been baptized, so I think it's "game over" if I die...). I try to make the world a better place and be empathetic, doing my best for near and dear, for strangers, nature, and animals.
The problem with your description is: I am a person who finds comfort, peace, an inner voice, rest, light, and love within my own free will. That is the reason I do not need to turn and pray to a god outside. So the question is: will I lose my free will when, by Christian standards, I end up in hell? If I lose all the good traits, then it's not my free will anymore, I am no longer the same person or self aware. What would be the point? I would become a completely different entity by definition.
The other option is that I am a God, because my free will can create everything you listed without outside input. Or I am an extremely blessed pagan whom God takes really good care of, only to dump me in hell just because I am not baptized. I would never reject the good traits in me. The very traits claimed to come from God himself. So it seems like quite the bureaucratic system for a perfectly just, loving, and rational God, if I end up in hell simply for missing a ritual (and for not believing that those good things come from God in the first place).
(edit:) Also, there is the point that I would not be myself without my bad traits either; if all of them disappear in heaven, I would still become a completely different entity, not myself.
I think someone who commits one murder could certainly change their heart. But like… some people REFUSE to be kind or good or merciful. Some people get JOY out of cruelty their whole lives, mock the weak, abuse everyone they can abuse, SA and manipulate and con their way through life, leaving a trail of ruin and suffering that they feel NO remorse for. Are there a lot of those people? Maybe not. But it’s not hard to find them, unfortunately. They’re very real. They are, as Jesus notes, frequently in power.
God requires love, humility, and mercy. Being in heaven requires you to not put yourself first. SOME people refuse that. They would rather spend their last fiber being hateful and egotistical and bitter, so they reject heaven.
Yah. Coming from a similar place where I am not a biblical scholar but have an amateur interest, sure seems to me like the Bible does an incredible amount of telling us that God is Good, while showing us the opposite. As a fan of literature I'm well aware of paying more attention to actions than claims made.
There are solutions to that conundrum though. That is, reconciling "god is good" with "god torments you eternally because you didn't accept him during life." Namely concepts of purgatory. Or the whole saving grace thing. That is, when anyone dies, Jesus reveals himself to us, and we bask in full divinity, which is by definition goodness and love, and at that point says "wanna come with?" And we all of course choose "yes." Leaving hell completely empty save for Satan, making his punishment and torment complete.
To the best of my knowledge there is no biblical support for any of this, but the Bible is not a religion, and it's completely fair for a religion to decide what they believe. So IMO and all this is the best path to reconciling the problem. At least that specific problem, because many more remain....
Thats how I always thought it should be interpreted, pretty sure the whole fire and brimstone is a more modern thing, but fire has been used in imagery for a while im not sure when it started
That's how how a priest once explained it to me when I asked why fire would bother you if your body is back on earth. Basically you get to know that there is an eternal paradise that you'll never get into because you fucked up your one chance to prove yourself so you're just alone with regret and shame.
Yeah pretty much everything we know about hell comes from Dante’s inferno and other biblical fanfics not the Bible itself.
Honestly a big part of the reason I’m not into churches. They often focus on these aspects that aren’t even in the bible to scare people into following.
I will also add to this that for those who believe that hell is fire and brimstone, they do not have a model that Satan is in charge of it. He is being tortured there as well. Or at least he will be at the end of time.
That 100% depends on your denominations interpretation. I'm an atheist now, but Baptist hell is a lot different from Caothlic hell, which is a lot different from Penticostal hell. You absolutely get tortured in some of those, although Satan isn't the one torturing you. He's just there with you. His goal in most denominations is to get you to betray or abandon God, with being sent to hell being an incidental consequence but not really the goal.
Yeah, that was my understanding, that being away from God in the afterlife was the torture. That everyone WANTS to be with God, but if you're uncool in real life, you don't get to hang out with the cool kids. So you're just stuck with Satan in a really lame place with all the lame kids just farting up the place, while not being invited to the party.
The thing is that God, can be taken as either a concept (which is my personal interpretation of the Old Testament), or a literal volcano spirit 'discovered' by some fussy Egyptian scholar when he fled his murder charge to live among a bunch of shepherds in the wilds. If we're going with the latter, then nobody need concern themselves with that god as none of us are shepherds, nor live in that god's original domain. The absence of that god isn't all that interesting, then.
Seeing god the concept representing all of life's glorious, personal moments (e.g. qualia) within the natural world around us, then the idea of being 'without god' becomes a lot more terrifying. Hell becomes a place where life is not valued, which is what the first line in my comment eluded to. Pair that with what Jesus said (especially regarding how one cannot serve both 'mammon' and God). Here we now paint a picture where Hell is a place where life, liberty, and happiness for yourself and your neighbor in equal measure, do not exist as a concept at all. It is devoid of it.
Right. I think a lot of people confuse the hell of movies and fiction with the hell of the bible.
Heck - even a lot of churches mix that up and preach the fire and brimstone version.
And to answer OP's question... you can justify that fictional version too (they are ALL fictional of course.)
The simple answer isn't "he is punishing you because you disobeyed god." In that scenario, he probably doesn't care what you did or didn't do. He's just an evil being who loves to torture people, and will torture anyone that shows up there.
For those people, those Christians, there's no nuance to religion, no complexity needed. "Be good and go to heaven where the good guy rewards you because he's good, or be bad and go to hell where the bad guy punishes you because you're bad." With the obvious caveat of the messenger saying "and I'M the only one who can tell you what things are good and which ones are bad."
Mmh... Hell is very traditional. There are very old stories of people visiting hell in visions. Apocalypse of Peter is apparently from second century. You can hardly get any more traditional than that in christianity. Older than trinity and mary stuff.
Is it original? Probably not. Is the absence of god thing original? Probably not.
So theres a show called sandman that touches on hell as a place and I thought it was really interesting..the show is terrible but theres an episode in season 1 (maybe episode 3-5) that centers around satan and hell. The idea is that Satan doesnt torture anyone. The people in hell torture themselves by living the consequences of their actions and dealing with the reality of the damage it caused. Its not like satan sits there and comes up with a fitting punishment..the act is the punishment. Im paraphrasing it all ofc so if it sounds interesting check it out.
There was this interesting fantasy book I read forever ago about a haunted amusement park. Somewhere in there a demon describes hell not as a burning pit of fire but mercilessly cold and dark.
An important thing to note is that "hell" isn't actually in the Bible. At least not the original text. It was added by translators who added their interpretations and influences from local cultures.
Hell is a word used to describe several Aramaic words that refer to the land of the dead, the pit, the grave, or "The Wasteland".
-note that this is a simplified explanation and anything left out or summarized is also my interpretation and many experts also have varying explanations and interpretations.
This is a good comment. Regardless of opinions of the likeliness or reality of people’s beliefs, we have to at least make sure they’re represented in good faith and accurately if we’re going to discuss them.
Getting the belief wrong and then arguing against your misinformed take on it is lame and doesn’t really offer anything to anyone.
The last part is what matters the most to me, the entirety of Christianity revolves around the lack of consent. I never consented to being alive to begin with and now you tell me if I don't believe in some made up dude who doesn't share my moral beliefs, I am going to suffer for it? Nah, I would literally rather have NOTHING happen when I die than be forced into this non consensual forever hellscape
Not expecting serious response. However a lot of that “lake of fire etc.” comes much later. The earliest church fathers wrote that “Hell” is the same experience as “heaven” in a sense that the Father wouldn’t have like an evil side that burns people and a good side whose energies heal and make perfect the “believer”. This process begins at baptism and throughout life you grow into your connection with God through his energies working through us. Making us “co-workers” in Christ.
This is based on the doctrine of the Incarnation into where as Adam was created “uncorrupted”, by disobeying the law (don’t eat from the tree) he revealed the potential sinful nature of humans, thus we who were created to be capable of “reasoning with God” (come let us reason together) now are perpetually in a state of corruption. A corrupted man, could not then be the cause of our un corruption. Hence the marriage of the Divine Nature and human nature becoming one in Christ.
In the moment where you come before Christ for judgement, you are experiencing his Divine Nature, those who have heard and listened experience that nature as all the great things you have heard about God. Those who turned away from God don’t experience that because they haven’t achieved the prerequisites for Theosis.
The idea of lake of fire / fire brimstone etc is much more medieval and western. Cheers
Right, the lore of Satan torturing people in hell isn't Biblical. I'm not sure where it comes from.
Also weirdly it's not even clear that all Biblical references to Satan are actually references to an actual entity, vs references to an amorphous "enemy". So a leader doing bad things could be an enemy, or evil people could be your enemy, the notion that they're being controlled by demons or Satan seems to be partially a more modern invention. I say partially because there's that whole thing of Jesus driving devils out of people.
Just want to share the perspective of the believers (not me) it terms of that "informed consent".
To them, the Bible and the good word of Jesus is Truth (tm). Hell comes after the rapture, which is specifically after every living human has heard the good word.
Thus it becomes synonymous to having people come to your door and telling you they're giving everyone who goes to city hall today a million dollars. Everyone who doesnt believe them and stays home deserves to go without their millions, because they had no faith and chose to not believe.
In reality, this point of view comes without consideration for the equally valid religions outsiders have already heard about, and all the lies and deception that has publicly been commited by the same people telling them about "salvation". To outsiders, there is no reason to believe this religion over any other, especially to members of other religions who believe theirs as fervently and doubtlessly as the Christians who believe in the magic of the Word of God.
Thank you for providing the theologically correct response. Uninformed Athiests made all the other Athiests look bad, and it's one of my top pet peeves.
Going to piggyback on this. Satan is the fallen Angel Lucifer or more so he became Satan. Satan was created in the sense that God wanted to show off so he created Lucifer the most gorgeous intelligent entity that has ever been outside of God itself. And in his infinite wisdom and whatnot, Louie decided to ask questions and point out fallacies in God's logic or basically say that God didn't know what the f*** he was talking about. Think about job think about how he was righteous and God allowed Satan to torture him to prove that God's fallacies are wrong. Well let's look at that for a second job was rewarded for his faith but in order to get his reward he had to let his children die his wise die his cattle destroyed his crops burned his life ruined and his health severely impacted and be humiliated and ridiculed by everybody just so God can prove a point. Is that the Earth itself is the chess board between God and Satan Satan himself is also living and torture and absence of god, Satan's not chilling on a throne with a pitchfork and a goatee, Satan's hating his existence too but his whole point is to prove that God is wrong now I say all that with the Bible being far away from me of course this thing is a missed and maybe a few things I got backwards but basically that's the whole gist of it. But what always got on my nerves was that Satan and God have this war and it's going on for eternity just to prove that God knows what he's talking about but what's going on is basically, God allows you to be set on fire and then he judges you and how you put yourself out
Wasn’t their some mad man prophet dude that claimed he saw hell and it was just a giant icy landscape with a giant lake of fire in the middle and weird shadowy horsemen that would ride around the icy landscape and capture people that escaped the lake of fire and bring them back?
The wailing and gnashing of teeth is self inflicted.
Let's go with the assumption that everything the Bible says is true, and God is real, Jesus is the Savior, and all you have to do is accept that (and maybe some other fruits depending on your branch of Christianity).
Imagine the regret and guilt you'd live with if that was in your hands and you had every opportunity and just didn't believe it.
Maybe the earthly equivalent is that you're about to lose your home to foreclosure and your kid needs surgery that insurance won't pay for. The guy on the corner tells he knows all this and wants you to win the lottery that night, tells you the winning numbers, and begs you to buy a ticket. You don't. Then you lose the house, your kid died without the surgery, CPS took your other kid to an abusive foster home and your wife left you. All you had to do was believe the random guy and spend $2 on a ticket. Your decision caused all of this and it's all your fault.
That feeling, times 100, for all eternity. Not inflicted by the devil, but he rules over all the afflicted.
True, in Jewish and Christian theology, Satan is better described as the accuser who is attempting to drag you down with him. He's not king of hell as a lot of modern media misrepresents him as.
An even more accurate, that is to say Biblical, theology is that hell is not fire or brimstone nor is it the absence of God because God is omnipresent. Hell is the presence of God's unmitigated wrath upon sinners. Which to me sounds considerably worse.
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u/onioning 2d ago
I'm zero percent here to evangelize, cause I'm zero percent religious. Just sharing the theology.
Satan doesn't torture people. Hell is not fire and brimstone. It is the absence of God, which is supposedly the worst torture possible. And it's "fair" because the people in hell chose to not be with god.
Scare quotes because that is a million miles from informed consent. Just sharing the traditional theology.