Religion without hell?

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Originally posted by RedVento:
This might be interesting to you guys

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The Origin and History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment

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Deals with the origins of hell, and its origins in the OT (it wasnt just for sinners...)

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Seams like Christians really have no originality at all....
Red

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now now... the doctrine of hell is troublesome to most christians i know, as it seems to fly in the face of an omnibenevolent God... something c.s. lewis once wrote has always stuck with me... i'll have to paraphrase, since i don't have it here and my memory isn't perfect.. "it's true that the only way to heaven is through Jesus Christ, but it doesn't necessarily follow that one must have heard of him in order to enter God's presence *through* him"i think what you should do is simply ask individual christians what they believe... maybe even ask *why* they believe it... i personally define heaven as "being in God's presence, eternally" and hell as "being outside God's presence, eternally"...the ramifications of those two things probably can't be grasped until the one applicable to each of us occurs... to me, it would be miserable living eternally apart from God... even tho i can't quite understand all that would encompass, i understand enough now (being in his presence now, in a sense) to know it's not something i wantthe link you provided shows the universalist slant, and having debated many of them i can testify to the strength of their arguments... what to believe? i think (just my opinion) that focusing on eternal damnation is a fear tactic that christians are better off staying away from... we see no evidence in the new testament that those who carried the gospel to the world taught anything but, in paul's words, "Christ and him crucified" for our sins

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Originally posted by RedVento:
But isn't it worth pondering? Jews originally had no sense of heaven or hell, when you died you died. The Christian notion of Hell never became that popular until "Paradise Lost."

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Now in all my years of going to temple not once did any Rabbi talk about Hell. At none of the jewish funerals I went to did the Rabbi talk about Hell, or Heaven for that matter. As far as I was taught we are to do good for the here and now, and not for the promise of eternal salvation/damnation.

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Plus what about religions like Budism? They beleive in incarnation. Those who are evil come back as a lower life, those who are good come back as a higher life until reaching Nirvana. No hell their either, well not in the "eternal suffering" sense.

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i think jews believed in 'paradise' and 'sheol' didn't they? i don't know if those beliefs are still held... as for hell, read my post above... different people believe different things... blanket statements as to those beliefs might be in error

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Originally posted by Karl:
Sheol and paradise seem to be later developments; it became abundantly clear, when you sat back and looked at it, that people's just rewards didn't necessarily come in this life. This frustrated the writer of a number of Psalms, as I'm sure you know.

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The later addition of ideas about some kind of afterlife was the sticking point between the Sadducees and Pharisees in the gospels - the former only accepting the afterlife-free Pentateuch as Scripture.

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Theology evolves through the Bible. It's an interesting topic.

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right, i remember the "disagreements" between the sadducees and pharisees... not much has changed in the religious world, eh? but i'm not sure about sheol coming later, although maybe different terms were used... remember the ones to whom Jesus preached until his resurrection? they were held somewhere, and (according to scripture) had been for some time... i think they were the "watchers" we read about in 2nd enoch, and their offspring, but i could be wrong