Isn’t Hell just a symbol for being separated from God?

No. If the amount of pain you would feel if your entire body were burning with fire is supposed to be a metaphor representing how bad the damned in Hell will feel for being separated from God, then either God made a really bad choice of words (mind you, the Evangelicals say “every word” in the Bible is directly inspired by God’s Holy Spirit) or he’s going to do something to those in Hell to infinitely increase the mental pain of what we’d ordinarily call “separation anxiety” to equal that of blood curdling agony! Either way, whether God uses real fire or some other way of inflicting pain equal to it, God would still be the direct cause of the torture of billions of people if what the Evangelicals say about Hell were true.

Didn’t Jesus preach about Hell, even more than he did about Heaven?

No. While many Evangelicals make the claim that Jesus preached more (some allege a lot more) about Hell than Heaven, the truth is really the other way around! Even if we were to accept the accuracy of every instance in the modern Bible where the words “Heaven” and “Hell” are placed on Jesus lips, the actual count in the original Greek (and this is generously including several different Greek words translated as “Hell” in various versions of the Bible, such as HADES, GEHENNA and TARTARUS), it only occurs 14 times. In comparison, Jesus is quoted as speaking about Heaven 135 times, almost 10 times as much! The reason for the huge disparity is because, originally, Jesus only taught about the existence of Heaven. It was long after his death that some scribes (probably Greek converts to Christianity who brought with them their belief in Hades) inserted statements into the gospel texts to make it seem as if Jesus believed in Hell’s existence.

Isn’t Hell necessary for the sake of justice?

No. This question begins with a false assumption: that Jesus believed in punishment in the sense of “an eye for an eye,” or what is sometimes called “justice.” In fact, Jesus rejected the concept of the need to hurt anyone, just because they may have hurt someone else. He viewed punishment in this sense as a tragic, endless cycle of people taking out revenge one against the other, causing only more and more pain. Instead, he offered a new way of dealing with the human tendency to hurt or “trespass against” one another—repentance and forgiveness. Essentially, his view was that everyone hurts others and gets hurt by others, and the degree to which one commits these trespasses is often circumstantial (we might never commit murder in fact, but under a different circumstance, we would because everyone “murders in their heart” to some degree). In other words, were every person’s heart and mind laid wide open for all to see, there would be very little distinction between good and bad people, and therefore, insisting on everyone suffering for every sinful motive, thought, word and deed would not solve anything. So, rather than prescribing revenge, his message was to admit to wrongdoing and ask forgiveness with the sincere intention to not repeat the offence, and at the same time, to be forgiving of others who repent for the wrongs they commit against us, all as a way of breaking the cycle of humans causing suffering one toward another.

Don’t at least some really bad people deserve to go to Hell?

No. Even if God were of a mind to get back at those who committed wrongs in this life for which they never seemed to suffer in kind, even the very worst person who ever lived, given all of eternity to be “paid in kind” would eventually feel exactly the same degree of pain as what he inflicted on others for the same length of time. Therefore, the day would finally come when he would complete paying “an eye for an eye,” as it were, and would have to be released from any further suffering. For God to cause him one bit more would be unjust! Perhaps this makes a good argument for the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, which is temporary, but not at all for Hell which is alleged to be eternal.

Don’t those who go to Hell choose to send themselves there by rejecting God’s love?

No. First of all, there are literally millions of people who never got to make any choice at all. Some lived and died long before Christianity ever existed or before they ever heard of it once it was founded. Many others die as infants or were born with severe mental disabilities, denying them the opportunity or capacity to choose. Secondly, Evangelicalism claims that everyone “deserves” Hell because of inheriting “original sin” from Adam, which negates any possible choice to make. But the main problem with this claim is that it ignores the fact that threatening to harm someone automatically undermines any real choices. God, in effect, is made out to be a sort of Cosmic Stalker, one who demands to be loved in return, or else! Were this true, Heaven would only be populated by those who chose to believe under great duress, not because they actually wanted to love God of their own free will.

How can we be sure Hell was placed on Jesus’ lips by later copyists of the original gospel texts?

The answer is actually quite simple—because all the writings of antiquity (including the many 100s of writings that were eventually assembled into the modern Bible) could only be preserved by hand copying them over and over and, thus, contain many errors, and more than a few were intentional. But thanks to the rigorous methods of evaluating or “weighing” copies of ancient texts, developed by textual and literary scholars, we can discern most of these errors and adulterations, and get a pretty good idea what was originally written. Unfortunately, Evangelical “scholars” insist that copies of biblical be accepted without question, even though they contain errors and interpolations, even though, as a result, it causes some passages to completely contradict all the rest of the texts. But one need not be a true scholar to see that the few passages that place Hell on Jesus' lips cannot possibly be reconciled with the rest of what he was known to have said. One good example is found in Luke 9:51-55, the story about Jesus’ great disappointment with his disciples when they actually suggested imploring God to rain FIRE on a village just because they had rejected him. His response was, "You don't know what spirit is inspiring this kind of talk!" Presumably, it was NOT the Holy Spirit. He went on, trying to explain how he had come to save, heal and relieve suffering, not be the CAUSE of it. So it only stands to reason that this same Jesus, who was appalled at the very idea of burning a few people, for a few horrific minutes until they were dead, could never, ever have believed in burning BILLIONS of people for an ETERNITY according to the later inserted verses which place Hell on his lips!

Could Hell just be a symbol for the annihilation of the souls of the unrepentant?

Possibly! Although I am convinced a much better explanation for the "Hell" passages is that they were superimposed onto later copies of the gospel texts.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, annihilationism is the term used to describe the idea that Hell is a symbol for God simply annhilating the souls of all those who do not come to saving faith in Jesus. The unsaved are not hurt or tortured, but not allowed to have life after death. Annihilationists, by tradition, are reluctant to out and out reject the Hell passages. Like the Fundamentalist Evangelicals, they believe God has providentially protected the extant copies of the gospels over the centuries so they would not become so corrupted that they no longer accurately represent the original autographs of the Bible. So they believe the Hell passages are still inspired by God. However, they see in the Hell passages a symbol for not getting to live again after death. As one recently put it, God issuing an "eternal punishment" is not the same as "God eternally punishING." Personally, I find this a bit of a stretch, but unlike those who end up making a de facto rejection of all the rest Jesus ever taught about God’s nature as a loving, caring and forgiving parent in order to cling to the doctrine of Hell, the annihilationists are able to retain the message of Jesus. At the very worst, they're reinpreting a few passages to make them consistent with the other 95%, instead of what the Fundamentalist Evangelicals do, reinterpreting everything else in the gospels to make them conform to the 5%.

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