Fundamentalist teaching about Hell is primitive, stupid and evil.
The doctrine of hell fire, imported into human history by orthodox Christianity and orthodox Islam, has increased the willingness of human beings to inflict the most terrible kind of cruelty on one another, in the perverse belief that they were actually doing people a favour.
The omnibenevolent "God" of fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity is apparently willing to punish unbelievers, and disobedient believers, with an eternity of being burned alive in hell fire.
The fears and terrors that this doctrine brought into the world have blighted many a life, and not only for the anxious devout: if just punishment for disobedience to God was eternal hell fire, then burning someone at the stake for heresy, witchcraft or homosexuality, was small beer by comparison. As are such things as the amputations, decapitations, and various other inhuman punishments carried out in such places as Saudi Arabia.
The Christian and Islamic doctrine of hell fire, and the concept of the orthodox Christian and Islamic God, have brought an unimaginable degree of suffering into human history. If fundamentalist religious adherents persuade themselves to believe that God is willing to punish humans by burning them alive for eternity, then the capacity of such religionists to feel normal human compassion for others becomes extinguished. Mundane evil punishments that are finite, as opposed to the infinite torments of hell, end up being regarded by them as completely acceptable, and in line with the Divine Will.
Fundamentalist religion is the greatest curse ever to blight humanity. It tears out people's capacity for love, compassion and wisdom, and encourages acts of the most heinous cruelty, destroying untold lives with its callousness and ignorance; and fundamentalist religion is still imposed by means of terror, on pain of death for apostasy, in theocracies such as Saudi Arabia.
Bertrand Russell said, "The good life is inspired by love, and guided by knowledge." There can be no love when people convince themselves that it is ever just for any human being to be tortured in flames for eternity; and there can be no knowledge when logically inconsistent, internally contradictory and empirically false texts, written by ignorant and primitive people thousands of years ago, are taken verbatim as the revealed word of the Creator of the universe.
© Gary Powell, 2013
The doctrine of hell fire, imported into human history by orthodox Christianity and orthodox Islam, has increased the willingness of human beings to inflict the most terrible kind of cruelty on one another, in the perverse belief that they were actually doing people a favour.
The omnibenevolent "God" of fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity is apparently willing to punish unbelievers, and disobedient believers, with an eternity of being burned alive in hell fire.
The fears and terrors that this doctrine brought into the world have blighted many a life, and not only for the anxious devout: if just punishment for disobedience to God was eternal hell fire, then burning someone at the stake for heresy, witchcraft or homosexuality, was small beer by comparison. As are such things as the amputations, decapitations, and various other inhuman punishments carried out in such places as Saudi Arabia.
The Christian and Islamic doctrine of hell fire, and the concept of the orthodox Christian and Islamic God, have brought an unimaginable degree of suffering into human history. If fundamentalist religious adherents persuade themselves to believe that God is willing to punish humans by burning them alive for eternity, then the capacity of such religionists to feel normal human compassion for others becomes extinguished. Mundane evil punishments that are finite, as opposed to the infinite torments of hell, end up being regarded by them as completely acceptable, and in line with the Divine Will.
Fundamentalist religion is the greatest curse ever to blight humanity. It tears out people's capacity for love, compassion and wisdom, and encourages acts of the most heinous cruelty, destroying untold lives with its callousness and ignorance; and fundamentalist religion is still imposed by means of terror, on pain of death for apostasy, in theocracies such as Saudi Arabia.
Bertrand Russell said, "The good life is inspired by love, and guided by knowledge." There can be no love when people convince themselves that it is ever just for any human being to be tortured in flames for eternity; and there can be no knowledge when logically inconsistent, internally contradictory and empirically false texts, written by ignorant and primitive people thousands of years ago, are taken verbatim as the revealed word of the Creator of the universe.
© Gary Powell, 2013
