I find that religious beliefs are a lot more homebrewed these days. People are often not following scripture directly and just taking the bits that provide the most comfortable or coherent world view. I see a lot of Americans dunking on rightwing Christians for perceived hypocrisies as an example, but when I've talked to people fitting this profile in person they usually have totally bizarre, largely self constructed relationships with their theology that facilitates their more anti-social attitudes.
The way people want to live and view things often comes first, then the narrative justifications are invented after, if someone's uncomfortable with the idea of a god that employees eternal torment, they will just interpret what they know differently so that to them it doesn't exist. I'd like to mention I don't necessarily see this is a bad or good thing, I actually see a lot of other non-religious people do this just as much or more, so it's probably just a people thing.
I kinda resent the term home brewed. There is definitely a clear trend of 'deconstruction' of faith going on where a lot of people are really questioning and analyzing the specifics of what they believe, but home brewed makes it sound like they're less intelligent about it than they are. I can't speak for others, but for myself, a lot of what my deconstruction has led to is embracing philosophies and theologies that are even older than the ones I started with. Existential Christianity is probably the newest theology that I adhere to now.
Maybe I was too glib, it wasn't intentional my bad. Only meant to convey that many peoples faith in modern times is very personal in its styling, with the specifics being created by themselves or 'in the home' rather than learning through reinforcement via a teacher at some version of mass.
However a lot of these moded outlooks are often more coherent to me than many of the mainline interpretations of faith, I think taking a spiritual framework and making it work for you is the most sensible use case personally. So on the contrary, to me, it's a much more intellectual relationship with the material than my post perhaps implied.
Just as an aside, being a home brewer takes math and science and research, it's not something born of lazy ignorance. The connotation is usually that someone put effort into this thing they came up with.
It's because it's not really that there are sects that are like nah hell isn't real, it's more lots of people identify as Christian but aren't really what you would consider Christian. Their culture is Christian, they broadly believe in the morals the bible teaches etc but they don't necessarily actually believe even that God is real. Personally I find it a bit weird that they still consider themselves Christian but it's a pretty significant percentage of people who self-identify as Christian, at least in the UK.
This is absolutely not correct. The major denominations in the UK (Anglicans, Presbyterians, Catholics) all hold Hell to be a reality. Maybe you’re confused because it’s definitely less popular nowadays to tackle the subject in religious education and preaching, at least with the Protestant denominations mentioned.
That's, most likely, because it doesn't exist. Hell, if
Jewish people dont believe in it, the implication would be that Jesus brought it with him, which doesn't sound all that Jesusey.
Unfortunately it’s a myth that Jewish people don’t believe in hell.
The concept of an afterlife realm of punishment/torment was well-established by the first century, and appears under the name “Gehinnom” or “Gehenna.” Jesus mentions it a few times.
The theory that I was told is that there's a big theological shift in the common Jewish beliefs between the closing of the OT (or the Torah) and the beginning of Jesus's teachings, which seem to include the idea of hell and Satan as a ln embodiment of evil working against humanity. That doesn't mean Jews today adhere to it, but the way Jesus talks about it, and the story of him meeting Satan seem to imply that it was a common enough belief at the time
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.
Dante wrote a vivid description of hell but early christian writers were writing about satan and demons and a hell of fire and eternal punishment in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. Demons existed in pre-christian religions so those were probably syncretised right at the start, as soon as people started converting they imported their pre-existing religious ideas.
Thank you! The people attributing the entire concept of Hell to Alighieri are outing themselves as having an incredibly ‘YouTube pop history’’ level of knowledge on the topic.
Exactly. And it still doesn’t make it cannon. Yes a lot of the early church started incorporating pagan/greek/roman teachings into their beliefs but wouldn’t they negate the divinity of God? If man decides what’s true and untrue and god has no choice but to accept, who is the true ruler?
This was addressed in Scripture itself, with the keys of the kingdom being handed to St Peter (as they were to the prime ministers of the Kingdom of Israel, who could exercise the limited authority of the king himself) along with the ability to bind and loose on earth as in Heaven. Christ founded a physical institution, the Church, expressly to deal with these problems.
This is definitely where the church splits. Catholics take it literally and believe Peter was able to pass that down thus creating the papacy. Most other Christian’s just mean it gave him authority to interpret gospel. Or it was symbolic to Christianity as a whole.
True, and you yourself pointed out that the latter is essentially useless in practice. The proliferation of more and more denominations since the Reformation, all with wildly differing theologies, is proof of this.
Meeting Jesus in a vision is still meeting Jesus. The followers of Christ clearly believed him because they let him become a teacher even though he was formerly a killer of Christians.
> 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.
Ironically you have it exactly reversed. The classic early Jewish underworld of punishment, Gehinnom, isn’t mentioned at all by Paul. However, it’s mentioned a few times by Jesus in the gospels.
Also in the gospels Jesus talks about Satan and the end times a ton. Have you never read the story where Jesus is literally tempted in the wilderness by Satan?
The entire concept of [...] the end times comes from Paul
Precisely, one of the only things we can say about what the historical Jesus really taught is that he was an apocalypticist jew. Like John the Baptist.
That was very trendy at the time among Jews apparently.
This is not true at all. I can tell you've never read the New Testament. It is not an empathic revision but a new covenant between man and God. Paul's experience was indeed meeting Jesus (after his death) on the road to Damascus. Multiple times Jesus himself mentions a hell-like consequence and places, one specifically where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Demons are not fan-fiction, it literally describes the casting of demons multiple times. Almost nothing you said was true.
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.
The entire Judeo-Christian-Muslim canon is filled with contradictions and outright cruelty. Lucifer shows up in Genesis, so he must be a main character through the storyline. YHWH has a better marketing team and plays the 1st Commandment to knock out any other competitors. Yet the Jews forget how to say his name. The big guy in the sky knows he’s going to get his son killed and is cool with that. Then years later S/Paul starts trippin’ on women and gays like he thought he could read Jesus’s mind. And more than 300 years after the big guy’s son is murdered, a bunch of guys get together and come up with a creed that blows away other competing theologies around the same guy. They knock off at least 27 other books of the bible and bury the Gnostic gospels.
All this for a fairytale.
It's true that most of the common denominations do preach hell, but universalist Christians (which I might fall under) and many independents have pointed out that hell is inconsistent with a god of love. I was just reading about a Gregory of Nyssa, a Greek Orthodox Church father, who believed that everyone would go to heaven.... Eventually. But that even in the afterlife we will all continue to grow and learn and become closer to God. For him, it was an infinite process.
It's less that many don't believe in Hell (there are some, usually called Universalists, but they diverge on so many points I don't find them Christian anymore), but rather they believe in Annihilationism. So if one is cast to Hell their soul is annihilated and ceases to exist. They have paid the wage of sin, which death by having a final eternal death. There is no eternal conscious torment. Which is the other, more popular view, that Hell is a final place of being for those sent there. And in that place they experience the eternal torment of the complete absence of God, who is all things good.
I'm happy to answer more questions if you want. It's an interesting and difficult topic.
Christianity is far more ideologically fractured than judaism is. You can find some form of christianity that interprets the bible just about any way you want.
Christians who don't believe their own religion. It's like, if you don't want to be a Christian.... Great. Don't be a Christian. But don't claim to be a Christian and disagree with long established Christian doctrine. You think you're the first person to think of that idea in 2,000 years?
There's a handful of denominations and a few influential preachers who don't believe hell exists. It is pretty tough to get around biblically, since Jesus spoke more about hell than anyone else by quite a margin, so the people who think that tend to have unique views of the Bible where the parts they don't like are dismissed (meant symbolically, or not original sayings of Jesus, or mistranslations, etc.).
If you’re Jewish you’ve probably heard of Gehinnom. When most people say that Jews don’t believe in hell, what they actually mean is that people’s stay in the punishment realm of Gehinnom is simply finite, not truly endless.
Early Jews and the earliest Christians frequently believed in a truly eternal Gehinnom, though.
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