Quit Hoping to Hell and Start Hoping to Heaven

[Undertoad]

When I was 10, I announced to the class that I did not believe in god.

The rest of the kids were *highly* confused by this. The teacher said, it's fine, he can believe that, there are many different beliefs.

One by one, about a third of the class came up to me in a kind of wonderment, having never come in contact with a nonbeliever. And most of them asked, "But aren't you afraid of hell?"

Well obviously, if I didn't believe in god, then I didn't believe in hell; and so it was entirely illogical to appeal to hell as a reason to believe in god.

These kids had learned everything at such an early age that it became part of their very existence, and actually approaching it with logic was foreign to them. They could only argue for their god within the belief system that they had been brought up into. It was an enlightening day, and at the end of it I was more certain of my non-belief than ever.

~ ~ ~

It gets worse when you learn that most of our concepts of what hell might be are not biblical at all, but come from Dante, Milton, and various church's bullshit interpretations. The bible doesn't describe "levels" of hell, for example; that's Dante. Biblical researchers find that our concept of hell might even be an effect of incorrect translations.

Also, a god who permits eternal damnation and suffering is not really the sort of god that we would look up to, not the god we can or should actually worship.

Humanity are not slaves, and when you really think about it, the idea of a god who gets angry when we disobey, and deeply punishes us, is offensive. A god who establishes a system of eternal torture is a horror.

So: fuck hell. There is no hell. It's a human invention, and does not exist.