11/23/2025
🚨🛑🚧Everyone Need To Read And Understand This!!🚨🚧
Someone who left religion and has the lingering thought: "What if I'm wrong?"... and might still have a low-key fear of Hell... needs to hear this:
The Christian doctrine of hell is one of the most indefensible religious beliefs ever concocted. I have seen how toxic religion uses this doctrine to control people through fear. The religious notion of hell (eternal conscious torment) is absurd from every possible angle. It’s technically not even biblical and Jesus never taught it.
There are 8 myths about Christianity's Hell that I think are worth mentioning:
🚫 Myth 1: Hell is an established Biblical doctrine that is in the Bible from start to finish.
Not so fast.
Two thirds of the Bible (the Old Testament) does not mention Hell at all. ("Sheol," the Old Testament word that is sometimes translated as 'Hell', only means "grave" by definition, and it is where everyone in the Old Testament went when they died - good or evil, Jew or Gentile. Thus the Old Testament does not contain the concept of Hell as eternal conscious torment.
🚫 Myth 2: Jesus taught that hell was real.
Not so fast.
Jesus warned the Jews many times of impending destruction, both nationally and individually. He used several different terms to refer to punishment/destruction, some of which were erroneously translated as the same word, "Hell" by Bible translators. Jesus never used any word that could be translated as "Hell" to mean eternal conscious torment.
🚫 Myth 3: The justice of God demands eternal conscious torment (Hell) in which people are eternally punished for their sins.
Not so fast.
If Hell is real and all things were made for God's pleasure (Rev. 4:11), is it conceivable that God would derive pleasure from seeing those he created subjected to eternal conscious torment. Doesn't that sound psychotic to you? It is a psychotic view of God that claims that punishing people with eternal conscious torment in hell is proof of God’s love, justice and holiness.
🚫 Myth 4: The early church taught the doctrine of hell.
Not so fast.
A belief in the restitution of all things was a standard view in the early church, held by the majority of early Christians. The Apostles Creed, nor the Nicean Creed, two foundational "doctrinal statements" for the early church, do not contain the concept of Hell. If Hell was real, why did the first complete presentation of Christianity (Origen, 220 A.D.) contain the doctrine of universal salvation?
🚫 Myth 5: The idea of God as love and the doctrine of hell makes theological sense when properly understood.
Not so fast.
The Christian explanation about hell is that God does not send people to hell because God created us with free will, and we can either accept or reject his gracious gift of salvation. In other words, according to this explanation, we send ourselves to hell by the use of our God-given free-will to reject God.
This explanation is highly problematic in many ways. If you drill down into this substructure of this notion, it's hard to not notice the following:
1. Almighty God created a universe and human species in which it was possible and even inevitable that we would be guilty of a crime that warrants eternal conscious punishment as the consequence.
2. In response, God offers the only solution in the form of the brutal human sacrifice of his son. And in some mysterious metaphysical way, this allows for the pardon of those members of the human species who hear about it, understand it properly, and accept it.
3. You have "free-will" to accept or reject the offer. However, the choice to reject it is a choice for the punishment of eternal conscious torment. In other words, God says, "Accept my offer, OR ELSE..." No matter how you parse this out, this cannot be accepted as rational, just, loving, or liberating.
🚫 Myth 6: Jesus had to die in order to save people from God's punishment and eternal hell.
Not so fast.
Why did Jesus have to die? Answer: we all have to die. Substitutionary atonement is one of many interpretations of the meaning of the death of Jesus, and in my view is the least defensible view.
Jesus had to die because all human beings do. How did Jesus die? He was executed. Why? Because he was a threat to the religious and political powers of his day. Historically, this often happens to people like Jesus. They get knocked off and taken out.
So, those are the facts. Jesus had to die because Jesus was human. And Jesus specifically died the way he did because he posed a threat to the powers of his day, and they had him eliminated.
When people ask the question, "Why did Jesus have to die?" what they are really asking is: "What is the spiritual significance and relevance of the death of Jesus?" Once someone deconstructs and discards the faulty premise of separation from God, they're left to rethink the meaning of Jesus' death.
But the complexity of the question is deeper than it appears. The question assumes there is only one answer, or that there is a "right" or "wrong" answer. This is problematic because the significance of the death of Jesus is not a multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank theological question with one "right" answer.
The death of Jesus can hold great significance in many different ways for any particular person, and those ways may shift, change, expand, and deepen over time or in different seasons of life.
First and foremost Jesus would have wanted people to take from his death what he had taught, expressed and lived on his human journey, which is the truth that there is no separation, and God and humankind are one. That truth and reality is never threatened, and even death does not disturb it. Jesus taught his disciples that his death was not only inevitable, but necessary in order to truly get that we all share in the same spirit and life of God.
Humankind has made death the enemy and something to fear. We personify death in the frightening image of the Grim Reaper. In our distorted view, death is the ultimate separation and separator. But what Jesus demonstrated is that truth and ultimate reality never
dies.
Truth, love, life, peace, freedom, harmony, wholeness, and the oneness of all things in, through, and as God... never dies. We are never separated from this reality, and death has no bearing upon it. Death is both an ending and a beginning, but the constant through it all is our individual and collective oneness with God. It was not necessary for Jesus to live in order to guarantee or preserve this truth. Even with the profound impact of Jesus life and teachings, it may be that his greatest contribution to his truth was his death.
🚫 Myth 7: There is a God and separation from this God is a real possibility.
Not so fast.
Nothing is separate by itself or in itself. Nothing has an
independent self-generating existence. The word "God" is often used to identify Ultimate Reality. This "God" or Ultimate Reality is the unifying force in and though all things. Concepts such as “near” or “far” have no relevance to this reality. God is neither “near” nor “far.” You are neither “near” nor “far.”
It may startle you to know that you are not separate from God. You are part of God. There is no separation, gap or chasm to be crossed or resolved. Jesus did not die on the cross to bridge the gap between you and God because there is no gap to bridge.
By definition, if there is a "God" there is no separation from God. Separation from God is not possible ontologically, regardless of how hard religion tries to convince people otherwise. If you could be separate or separated from God - able to have a self-generating existing apart from God - that would make you God.
Aristotle wrote, “The least initial deviation from the truth is
multiplied later a thousand fold.” Religion’s concept of God as separate from humankind is no small deviation from the truth. It is an epic falsehood that is the source of deep suffering in our world. It’s the lie Jesus came to expose, and then we managed to make a religion out of Jesus to keep the lie going. This only goes to show how inventive we can be when threatened by the truth.
Acts 17:28 says, “For in God we live, and move, and have our being." Clearly, God can be understood as the ground of all being, and the source of our being. Don't think of "God" as a Gandalf-Deity in the sky, but as the very essence of existence itself.
We know from science there is “matter” and “form,” and our world is an interplay between the two. “Matter” is a field of energy, which takes on “form.” When Jesus was described as "the exact representation of God's being," it certainly wasn't saying that Jesus was like God in "form" because God is spirit and spirit cannot be confined by any one form. Rather, the essence or matter or energy of "God" took up expression or form in humanity, in this case Jesus. In your case, you.
Whatever "God" is, you are not separate from it.
Another route for deconstructing Hell is to simply employ rational and critical thinking. Could you conceive sending one of your children to eternal conscious torment because they did not understand or adopt your beliefs or salvation formula? Could you say that doing so was an act of love or justice?
🚫 Myth 8: You have to believe in Hell to believe in Jesus and Christianity.
Not so fast.
History is filled with people who find significance in Jesus and identify as "Christians" but do not believe in the doctrine of Hell. The idea of eternal damnation did not pick up steam until 5 centuries AD after Christ. Yes, you got that right, 5 centuries AFTER CHRIST. Early Christians did not ascribe to the doctrine of hell, and almost all early church fathers rejected the idea.
Jim Palmer
