Time to pull this out again. Some will tell you that even Jesus warned people of being in danger of Hell fire. But in my opinion, there's no way that Jesus was speaking of, or referring to, a place of fiery punishment that lasts forever and ever after you die. From the extensive research I've done on the subject, I've discovered that, far from being a place of unimaginable size and heat, Hell was actually another name for Gehenna, and what Jesus was actually referring to was a device called the Gehenna-2000 (patent pending). These devices were mass-produced by some intergalactic company contracted by God to make his fire-and-brimstone threats against humanity logistically possible. Without going into such things as inter and extra dimensions and time-line dynamics which would take at least another four paragraphs to explain, the Gehenna-2000 is a one-man interdimensional containment chamber of sorts located in the non-time interval between the end of this life and the beginning of the after-life. It's not as complicated as it sounds. If you've ever watched Star Trek, just think of this chamber as something that operates on much the same principle as the ship's transporters. What happens is that, when you die, and you've been sinful, your atoms will have a distinct dark hue. When a certain shade of darkness is reached, rather than disperse and re-join with the All That Is, your atoms will be sucked into the nearest Gehenna-2000 chamber where your body will be reconstructed to the extent that your nervous system and your awareness of what's going on will be quite intact. Essentially, the soul is forced out of the body and made to enter this etheric chamber through one door, be subjected to the pain of four hundred non-etheric degrees for two minutes straight, be extracted from the chamber roughly through another door, and then extinguished once and for all. Sounds like a bitch, I know, but consider the fact that Jesus negotiated with God on our behalf, and through an intensely hard-fought bargaining session (some bargaining session--he ended up on the cross!), convinced God to reduce the penalty for over-the-top sin. So instead of burning alive in Hell at two thousand degrees for eternity, a convicted sinner only has to do two minutes in the Gehenna-2000 chamber at four hundred degrees, followed by soul extinguishment. Relatively speaking, that's a victory in anybody's book . . . except Jesus' book I suppose. Goes to show that a changer-of-water-into-wine does not a good negotiator make. Now, it could be said that the extinguishment part of the deal is actually a testament to God's mercy because even if you bore no physical scars from the experience, the psychological damage from burning alive for two minutes (without a water break) would be far beyond what even Jesus could heal on a Sunday afternoon after having rested all day Saturday. But don't get the wrong idea. Before being subjected to the Gehenna 2000, you'd really have to mess up, and I mean mess up bad. You would have to have done something like spit on a statue of Jesus (in the face) while having illicit sex on a horizontal six foot crucifix with an unwilling and underaged Christian girl who's been reduced to tears as a result of your sick idea of foreplay--forcing her to account for biblical contradictions and inaccuracies while being felt up roughly. Bottom line is that you've got to be a real bastard to find yourself materializing in a Gehenna-2000 chamber after kicking the bucket. A real bastard!
But anyway, the pope doesn't know anything more about it than the rest of us do. He's just another guy.
The pope might have more theological knowledge than you or me. The crux is though: its a matter of faith/belief. Not knowledge
Well, it's actually a matter of experience, which equates to knowledge. Theological knowledge is theological speculation. Bottom line is that he's just another guy. He doesn't know anything more than anyone else who's read the same shit.
Theological knowledge is only theological speculation when its used as such (to speculate). It has more uses than only to affirm a person's beliefs. Wether Hell is perceived to be a real place or not, tangible or somewhere in the afterlife depends primarily on faith/belief. Most people who do have a conviction about hell being real think it can't be experienced during this life anyway.
Absolutely. Organized religion, not personal (logical) beliefs. I will fight those greedy bastards till my last breath. Blank Title