Priest Says Hell is an Invention to Control People

Looks like the cat's out of the bag now.
So obvious to anyone not brainwashed by them since childhood.

 

If hell is a manmade invention, it would stand to reason heaven would be also.

 

I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

 

Not all religions have a hell to teach you about. The religions that do have a hell to teach you about come across as trying to control people.

 

Most organized religions worked hand in hand with the rulers of their day for that very reason. Most religions also have been manipulated by those same rulers. Take Christianity. Why do you think they have the “King James” version of the Bible. Additionally they would dictate which religion was allowed to be observed within their kingdom. That is one of the primary reason the founding fathers of the US required the separation of the church and the state. Not saying it is perfect, but it is the reason the saw the need to try to keep them apart so that the two powers could not unite against the people.

 

Ask religious folks what the state of religion was 5 million years ago. The answer to that is pretty obvious.

 

Oh yeah? Well he never spent time with my wife when she's angry.

And of course, heaven is when she is in a good mood, or, you know...

 

I remember the Sunday afternoon, while attending church with my late mother (I was about 8 years old at the time). As we entered the church, while being greeted by the priest t the door, I chirped up, pointed up to the sky and asked, "Does God live on one of the stars, or just float around up there".
Needless to say, that one did not go down too well.

 

Sigh. Such literalists. I think of heaven as a metaphor for what it would be like if everyone accepted the teachings of peace, love and understanding by Jesus and the other great spiritual leaders. And hell as what it would be like if no one did. IMO, we're getting there!

From an evolutionary standpoint, hell was an advantage. Christianity is the world's largest religion--accounting for almost 1/3 (31.2%) of its population.The Changing Global Religious Landscape Why is Christianity the world religion with the most followers? Lots of reasons, but I think one of them is hell. Christianity has the most graphic, horrific versions of hell imaginable--an eternity of suffering. The prize for second place goes to Islam, the second largest world religion, accounting for nearly 1/4 of the global population. The Muslim hell, Jahannam, is less permanent than the Christian, but certainly frightening enough. That's a pretty large majority. Add to that the eight hells of Tibetan Buddhism and we've identified a successful meme (in Dawkins' original sense of a unit of culture that competes with others for adherents). Hell is what has been called a Zero-infinity concept: so mindboggling that even the possibility of it grips human attention. The Christian hell is forever. How could a loving just and merciful God inflict such punishments on His human creations? (Better get such thoughts out of your mind, cuz you might end up there sooner than you think.) Hell isn't a sure ticket to a religion's success. The Zoroastrians, who may have introduced it to Judaism, are barely holding on, but that's because they discourage new members--a bad meme, from an evolutionary standpoint.

Unfortunately, successful memes can sometimes bring humans to dead ends. Secularists don't scare easily, and humanists find people roasting for eternity to be a turnoff. Too bad. I see hell, (as I conceptualized it in the first paragraph supra), as real and imminent. Our choice. As Sartre put it: "Hell is other people". I'd add, people who are out of "control". The path of evolution is littered with species whose adaptive strategies no longer work.

 

I think "HELL" is what we are trapped on now!!!

 

The devil is in the details, which all indicate that religion and academia love to accuse each other of playing around with words, when they've both made the common dictionary taboo, and a quarter of the entire world still claims the sun revolves around the earth. The invention of Totalitarian Communism, was at the same time that Fundamentalism was invented, and the two deserve each other if you ask me. The rest of us, deserve better, and automating the truth, that the idiots teaching everyone are truly worth ignoring, along with their political system, is all it requires to put the devil to rest.

 

I'm sorry, but the only response to this I can muster is, "duh."

 

Not more or less than any other religious doctrine though, nothing specific in hell.

If something manages to have a sound enough epistemological foundation and be testable and provable it becomes science and not religion.

If someone is criticising one religious doctrine from an otherwise still religious POV than that is not based on questioning epistemology and objective truth of a claim, it is just rearranging of an internalised set of unprovable ideas into whatever one feels more comfortable with or wants to promote for a particular social or political need.
It is an issue of likes and interests, not of truths.

Every idea, every symbol, every trend, every media product, it is all “controlling” people. We are social beings, there are too many benefits in homogenising social groups vs living individually, complex social structures is what made us a dominant species and it is an illusion to think anyone could be feee of it. It is ingrained in human behaviour as much as breathing is, and religion or not we are all both controlled and controlling, manipulated and manipulating by some shared ideas, norms, signs (clothes, language registers etc)…

When it comes to religious control it is as easy to find over-controlling cults in fundamentalist Christianity as it is in Hinduism or hybrid spiritualism, it has more to do with social dynamics and how much control that group takes vs other social interaction venues (family, school, friends, work etc) than particular sets of beliefs. You can create a high controlling as well as a reasonable and supportive group starting from any set of religious belief, the doctrine of hell is way overemphasised in this, probably because the priest did not have the opportunity to see extreme cultish dynamics even in groups with outwardly more positive and open ideologies.

 

Isn't ALL religious -type dogma constructed to---blah-blah- blah-----it's a pretty damn lucrative hustle that some hustlers probably actually believe. Some others I suppose , just enjoy being able to jerk people around like marionettes. Like a reasonable definition of cults could apply.

 

The only 'heavens' or 'hells' that I'm aware of are those we confabulate between our own two ears, believe to be true, and then proceed to inflict upon ourselves and others.

Those who find Bishop Spong's argument for the non-existence of hell compelling might like to read Matthew Fox's "Original Blessing"; arguing for the non-existence of "original sin".
Welcome from Matthew Fox

 

That's the old Buddhist parable about the blind men describing what they are touching, not "seeing" the big picture.

That seems to relate to those who get their news from exactly the same source(s), like MAGA. Except in the case of MAGA they are being manipulated with lies as well as not seeing the big picture which includes their own manipulation.

 

Gee, no one could have possibly guessed at that.

 

Or was it so the church couldn't hold back the politicians from doing whatever they decided to do? And why did the founding fathers not keep governance separate from judiciary? Maybe they needed also to stop the courts/judges holding them back?

UK isn't perfect, by any stretch but the keeping the judiciary independent of government is good. Nobody is above the law and nobody can have a judge in their pocket.

 

In my opinion THIS IS HELL!!!

The place we live which used to be nice IS NOW A LIVING HELL!!!!!!!!!

People are so mean and cruel................