Religion without hell?

Can I post this?All religion have some kind of hell / torture, either physical (forever burning) or mental (forever rebirth). I know that this hell concept is powerful as a stimulant to make religious people avoid doing evils. However sometimes hell is also used to threaten atheists and fellow believers which did not agree on some minor points alike.Can religion thrive without hell? Is hell the only reason for us to have religion? (IMHO, that can be seen as 'hell-worship' opposed to worshipping God or cash or anything).Let me know your say.

bumpLet me ask it another way. Can a religion teach us to know God without having to point at Hell? Sadly, Christianity & Islam (of which I know well) rely heavily on Hell to make people do what God said.Rabi'ah, a female Muslim sufi, once stated, 'Allah, if I worship You because of lust for heaven, then forbid me from entering heaven. If I worship You because of fear of hell, then put me in hell for eternity. I worship You because of love.'

I know. Why is it so hard for people to act altruistically? Was it because of selfish genes within us?

...which would really make a good excuse for the need of a moral system. Anyway, we know that without rules, we tend to follow our selfish selves (forgive the pun).

Well, we are stuck with those terms [no] thanks to Dawkins. Can't you consider those terms as metaphorical? Of course DNA doesn't know what it is doing, it just replicates. DNA have no consciousness so you are right that it cannot be selfish or altruistic. Maybe you can suggest another term to replace Dawkins' frequently misunderstood 'selfish gene', Syamsu?

Maybe we should talk about that being a naturalistic fallacy. Being born selfish would not make being selfish good. We tend to look at what's natural as what's right, whereas nature is only value-burdened after humans ascribe values to nature.Syamsu, I see that Quetzal mentioned other biologists. Let me pull out two I consider influential. One is E.O. Wilson of sociobiology fame, and the other is the late S.J. Gould, nemesis of Dawkins. Have you any comments on them?