Friday 15 May 2015

The idea of hell is incompatible with the golden rule

The golden rule says to aim to treat others as you want them to treat you.
So if you think that the golden rule is a good rule of thumb then ask yourself if you would want to be sent to a hell of eternal suffering ( if such a thing existed ) If the answer is no then how could you agree to send others to hell ? Not possible. How could a God who lived by the golden rule send any human to hell ?

The idea of hell is incompatible with the concept of a loving, perfect God. An almighty caring God would have needed to prevent a hell coming into existence and if it had would have had a duty to prevent any human becoming liable to go to hell. God could have terminated this planet as soon as a hell came into existence, before any human was liable to end up in hell. If there are many habitable planets in the Universe it should have been easy for a god to start another human race elsewhere and hopefully that god would have learned some lessons on how to prevent everything going pear shaped.

In any case hell / hades / Tartarus look like fictional places.
2 Peter 1v16 claims,"We did not follow cleverly invented tales"
Yet 2 Peter 2v4 uses the name Tartarus in the original Greek which was a dungeon in the mythical Hades. "For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to tartarus, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgement"

I agree with the Bible passages which say, "Love your neighbour", "Treat others as you want them to treat you", "Love does no harm", "Do not murder", "Greater love has no man than that he lay down his life for his friend", "Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness"
I think these ideas are not compatible with the idea of hell. The Bible has its wires crossed on this point. It is like sewing a patch of new cloth onto an old wine bottle, the bottle will split. Spotting and accepting that there is a contradiction about this matter is like rending in two the curtain separating the holy of holies in the Temple of Jerusalem. Or it is like Samson pushing apart the two columns holding up the pagan temple. Or it is like the story about Samson about finding the hive of bees in the carcass of the lion,"Out of the eater something sweet" or it is like saying if you had skepticism the size of a grain of mustard you would say to the mistaken ideas in the Bible to pick themselves up an be thrown in the sea.
The stories about Jesus can save us from the myths of hell and show that it is not real.

No comments:

Post a Comment