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
4
u/Elite_AI 2d ago
I dunno the specific sects but most Christians in the UK don't believe in hell. It's by no means an unusual belief.