Hell was invented by Church to instill fear

This video is of an interview retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong did with Keith Morrison of Dateline NBC back in August of 2006.

A partial transcript of the interview can be found beneath the video link:

https://youtu.be/LkaH3hEmV3M

Spong: I don’t think Hell exists. I happen to believe in life after death, but I don’t think it’s got a thing to do with reward and punishment. Religion is always in the control business, and that’s something people don’t really understand. It’s in a guilt-producing control business. And if you have Heaven as a place where you’re rewarded for you goodness, and Hell is a place where you’re punished for your evil, then you sort of have control of the population. And so they create this fiery place which has quite literally scared the Hell out of a lot of people, throughout Christian history. And it’s part of a control tactic.

Morrison: But wait a minute. You’re saying that Hell, the idea of a place under the earth or somewhere you’re tormented for an eternity – is actually an invention of the church?

Spong: I think the church fired its furnaces hotter than anybody else. But I think there’s a sense in most religious life of reward and punishment in some form. The church doesn’t like for people to grow up, because you can’t control grown-ups. That’s why we talk about being born again. When you’re born again, you’re still a child. People don’t need to be born again. They need to grow up. They need to accept their responsibility for themselves and the world.

Morrison: What do you make of the theology which is pretty quite prominent these days in America, which is there is one guaranteed way not to go to hell; And that is to accept Jesus as your personal savior.

Spong: Yeah, I grew up in that tradition. Every church I know claims that ‘we are the true church’ – that they have some ultimate authority, ‘We have the infallible Pope,’ We have the Bible.’… The idea that the truth of God can be bound in any human system, by any human creed, by any human book, is almost beyond imagination for me.

I mean, God is not a Christian. God is not a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindi or Buddhist. All of those are human systems, which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition. I walk through my tradition. But I don’t think my tradition defines God. It only points me to God.

http://deadstate.org/retired-priest-hell-was-invented-by-the-church-to-control-people-with-fear/

groinroot said:

...retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong...

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wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Shelby_Spong
is clearly a false Christian, who does not believe in the existence of Heaven and Hell, and who even dares to say "God is not a Christian". :*:

Having said that, those "Christians" who use the names of "God", "Heaven" and "Hell" to control/enslave others for their own earthly benefit are also false Christians, simply because they are using God's name in vain.

The true Christian teaching is that God, Heaven, Hell, angels, demons, the Devil (or Satan) exist.
But in order to end up in Heaven (and not Hell), one must not only believe in its existence, one must also live one's life in accordance with the teachings of Jesus Christ, the most important of which is to follow His example of rather being sentenced to death (or imprisonment) than sinning (by being a slave of unrepentant sinners) to avoid such earthly punishment.

kingjamesbibleonline.org/James-2-18
"Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works."

Who the fuck wants to go to heaven after they die?
Al my friends and happening things will be in hell.....no way I'm going to heaven to sing boring hymns all day long

I dun think permanent stay in hell will be enjoyable. Its even more suffering than your current suffering. Thousands kelvin of heat and furnance and you cannot die and have to endure the extreme heat.

Going to heaven is like getting a permanent relief from sufferings on earth.

Like pains from cancer and other sickness.

Pains from human loneliness and fear of rejections.

Pains from negative human emotions.

Pains from unfufilled life and regrets.

Pains from human depravations.

Pains from over indulgence and excessive wealth.

Pains from working like a dog for the Lee Family...etc.etc...

Pains from asking the question WTF are you here on earth.

That is why its called heaven.

Most people want to go.

those who eat meat sure go to hell.

[video=youtube;4PN5JJDh78I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PN5JJDh78I[/video]

Dude you make heaven sound like California

Wisemen once said:

Heaven isn't too far away
Closer to me everyday

They say in heaven
Love comes first
We'll make heaven a place on earth

Coz I know
There'll be no more
Tears in heaven

harimau said:

I dun think permanent stay in hell will be enjoyable. Its even more suffering than your current suffering. Thousands kelvin of heat and furnance and you cannot die and have to endure the extreme heat.

Going to heaven is like getting a permanent relief from sufferings on earth.

Like pains from cancer and other sickness.

Pains from human loneliness and fear of rejections.

Pains from negative human emotions.

Pains from unfufilled life and regrets.

Pains from human depravations.

Pains from over indulgence and excessive wealth.

Pains from working like a dog for the Lee Family...etc.etc...

Pains from asking the question WTF are you here on earth.

That is why its called heaven.

Most people want to go.

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Raider said:

Hell got bonkable girls or not?

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You want bonkable girls? Go to Islamic paradise. Over there Allah supplies 72 virgins, young boys and ever flowing wine. But how to bonk when Allah's faithful follower has left his prick on his corpse on earth?

Everyone knows that if you don't believe in the Abrahamic God, you will go to hell. You need to stop deceiving yourself that your idols will save you or that there is no hell awaiting atheists and heathens.

Hell Obviously Doesn't Exist
Ah, Hell. If the Christians have done their homework, about five billion of us are ending up there; if the Muslims are right, it's also about five billion.

If we atheists are correct, none of us faces such a ludicrous and disproportionate punishment.

What is immediately obvious about the threat of Hell is that it is borne of insecurity. If one needs to terrify infants into believing that thinking contrary to certain doctrines and dogmas will lead to an eternity of fiery torment, a) one ought to look first of all at how one is spending one's time on this planet, and b) the doctrines and dogmas are likely to be too stupid to be believed without recourse to blackmail.

Can you imagine if science, or indeed any other discourse, were to employ a tactic even remotely similar? "You must believe that the Earth rotates around the Sun otherwise you're going to roast for rather a long time". The proposition is absurd. The claim is either true or it isn't. One's belief in it has no bearing whatever either on its validity or on the consequences for oneself after death.

Where Christianity is concerned, what believers rarely acknowledge - or perhaps even realise - is that it is not until "gentle Jesus meek and mild", in Christopher Hitchens' sarcastic phraseology, that the doctrine of Hell is even introduced. It is perfectly clear that, as conveyed in the Old Testament, an all-powerful God could exist without the need for the invocation of any Hell. It is to Jesus - or, more accurately, those upon whom we rely in ascertaining his words - we must look if we need an instigant of the terror and misery inflicted upon countless millions of gullible individuals. The argument could be made at this juncture that Jesus did not invent Hell and was thus doing mankind a kindness by alerting it to the danger that lay ahead as a consequence of unbelief (or the wrong sort of belief). Even if this ludicrous proposition were true, what does this imply about those who lived prior to Jesus' arrival? Was Hell a real threat for them and, if so, oughtn't God have alerted everyone to it? Or did they all automatically enter Heaven? If this is expected to be believed, and Hell was therefore not a real threat before Jesus, the blame really does rest squarely on the Nazarean's shoulders.

The continued (though fading) belief in Hell is easy to understand. If a religion were not to offer an afterlife reward or punishment, then its truths and dogmas would need be examined in the cold light of day and argued to be truly transformative independent of post-mortem consequences. Because this claim can be so easily refuted, the teaching of hell (and of course heaven) persists to this day, however cloaked in euphemism it may be.

As is the case on a number of issues pertaining to religion, I have a great deal more empathy here with the fundamentalists than with the more moderate believers. If I did genuinely believe what I cannot possibly imagine believing - that a friend of mine were due an eternity of punishment after death - I would do all in my power to prevent this awful fate. The number of believers recruited specifically to proselytise and to conscript more members is, admittedly, absolutely vast; but what is going on in the minds of those who do believe in a Hell state but do not attempt to rescue those they believe to be doomed to it? Do they in fact struggle to believe in such a mercilessly cruel God but fear saying so?

Many contemporary Christians might assert that they themselves do not recognise the existence of any Hell in the afterlife. They are perfectly entitled to adopt this position but they ought to remember that the person they are thereby directly contradicting is the founder of their religion and the man they believe to be the son of God. As Diarmaid MacCulloch writes about the Sermon on the Mount in A History of Christianity, "There is much punishing fire flickering round the preacher's words. There is nothing gentle, meek or mild about the driving force behind these stabbing inversions of normal expectations".

One ought always to be on one's guard about those who assert that to think in a certain way is to commit a sin. This is the immoral and bullying trick that religion plays. Couched in cosy rhetoric and increasingly vague threats is the assumption that, in dissenting, you are subjecting yourself to an eternity of howling pain and misery. Quite apart from spectacularly lacking in evidence of any conceivable kind, this is a direct and patronising threat that cannot go unchallenged. Never forget that Heaven only exists and is made so appealing because it has to contend with Hell. And never forget that there are millions of people around the world who believe that you, in deeming the evidence for any God - or even one specific God - to be insufficient, have an appointment with the devil. Thank your lucky stars that they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

One thing about any afterlife remains absolutely clear: religious convictions set aside, I would not want to spend an eternity with the people self-righteous enough to claim themselves most deserving of reward in a sickly Heaven state. The people I'd like to run into after my death are some of the very people most likely in religious terms to be damned in Hell. Torture though the fires may be, the conversation would no doubt be of a higher calibre.

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to Hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me? - Annie Dillard

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ralph-jones/hell-obviously-doesnt-exist_b_2377666.html

[video=youtube;Wgj65-EfmoA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgj65-EfmoA[/video]

JohnTan said:

You need to stop deceiving yourself that your idols will save you or that there is no hell awaiting atheists and heathens.

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You also need to stop deceiving yourself that being a slave of the PAP government will guarantee you a place in Heaven, or that there is no Hell awaiting false Christians (such as yourself) and other non-Christian hypocrites.

The fact that no one has ever come back to tell us about heaven or hell, shows that anyone idiotic to believe it is either indoctrinated and emotionally blackmailed. I know death scared the hell out of a lot of people into turning religious. The bible or quran can be taken as advices that are reality.