"There is no need for any Hell or any Devil. Man alone is capable of every wickedness"

I can't remember where I heard that...Shakespeare? Kipling? Spielberg? Kubrick?

Hell for me would be having to watch reruns of Little House on the Prairie for eternity.

Every time I go over to my mom's house, I'm in hell because she is watching those reruns.

There was actually an old "Twilight Zone" (the original series from the 1960's) episode on that very topic. John Astin (yes the old "Gomez Addams) plays a long haired hippie guy who crashes his car off a cliff and winds up in Hell.

He is locked in a room with 4 other people who, quite contentedly, are watching 100,000 slides from their vacation trip to Mexico...over and over and over.

Astin's character screams for the devil and demands an explanation of why he isn't somewhere where there are flames and demons and chains and tortured souls.

The devil shows up and explains Heaven and Hell are actually the same place. For Astin's character, the room he was in was Hell, for the other four people there, it was Heaven.

The episode ends with Astin's character, laying face down on the floor and pounding it with his fist, shouting "BUMMER BUMMER BUMMER"

"He that hath an ear...."

Another interesting point of view on utube from the Ronny James Dio days of Black Sabbath

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUJH7y1yK_E

i was in intel and assesment in vietnam.we were told to document and photograph the iron triangle after it was defoliated and carpet bombed by B52s.got there at dusk,like camping on the moon,nothing but craters black dead vegetation and body parts.took three days.is there a hell?yes there is...peace...

in my opinion if there is a god and satan,
and if god created satan...god is satan in a way..
when you create something its also coming from a part of yourself.
think about it that way.

I have always had a problem with the concept of hell. I mean, if God is a truelly loving and forgiving God, WHY is there hell? In my beliefs there ISN'T because my Goddess IS all forgiving. That's why we have Karma. Maybe you won't pay in this lifetime, but you sure will in the next.

Actually there is a hell for Christians, Muslims, and Jews. They wouldn't have it any other way!

For everything else there is Visa

Yes, there is.

People are born into or fall into various forms of hell. Other people around them, having never been in hell, have no idea hell exists for many people.

My skin has been burning my entire life... recently, other humans started putting out the fire. I struggle with the need for others to understand my hell, and the desire not to hurt them through empathy. Does the Joker's true story need to be told? Or can we just say he exists and try not to hurt ourselves by seeing what it was that created him?

I suspect heaven and hell are philosophical concepts, not actual "places".

I don't believe in an enternal pit of burning flames for the wicked. Nope. This here, what we're in right now serves as both our heaven and hell. And lucky us, get to keep coming back again and again...

bravo

The more I learn about various mythologies and religious folklore the more I realize how these concepts were originally introduced into the Abrahamic religions.

Long before the Jewish idea of the God Yahweh (or God of Abraham) and his Hell the earily Earth worshipers already had a concept of an 'UnderWorld' that was named Hel (only one "L"). This Underworld was ruled by a horned God that was part man and part beast simliar to a centaur.

The horned God was not evil, nor was Hel a bad place. It was simply the place where various spirits lived. It was believed that spirits first when into the earth, and only later rose to a heavenly plane. This wasn't considered to be any kind of punishment at all. It was just seen as the natural course of things.

So the Jewish concept of Hell with a Horned Devil that rules over it in the "Underworld" was actually a very negative elaboration on this theme. He came to be known as Satan and was seen as a 'fallen angel".

Then it became a nasty place that only bad people were sent to. And not only did were they sent there, but they would never be released.

Of course that never fully took. Even the Catholics retained the concept of a 'purgatory' were people merely go to be purged of lesser evils before being released into heaven (this was kind of the orginal idea, except originally this was the norm for all humans with no exception). It also wasn't originally seen as 'punishment', it was merely seen as a necessarily cleansing of the spirit from the earthy 'soul'. A natural tranformation process.

In any case, the very idea of a supposedly "All-merciful" God condemning people to eternal damnation is an oxymoronic idea anyway. Especially if this were to be done for genuinley trivial reasons, like they didn't believe in a particular version of mythology or some such thing. Condemning someone to eternal damnation for such a petty crime would be far from "All-merciful".

A religion that claims that God is "LOVE" on the one hand, and then has this same God condemning people to eternal damnation for utterly petty things, is such an absurdly asinine idea that it truly boggles the mind how so many people in this world can actually take such a religion seriously.

Yet they do.

What does that say about humanity as a whole?

...i sure hope so...because i plan to take over when my mother retires!


on a more serious note...no...i believe it is an influence that, my personal beliefs on afterlife set aside, has been created out of humanitys hope that there is indeed SOMETHING after death (aside from funerals and decay lol)...and if thats the case THEN *drum roll*something scary to keep us naughty ones in line

...or the next few...

....will they take discover?

Hell exists. Does anyone ****ing hear me? HELL EXISTS. LISTEN TO MY ****ING WORDS. I'M HUMAN. I'M HERE. HELL IS HERE. ARE YOU LISTENING? GOD? HELLO????

what if this is a third circle of hell?
but i think both are here though..