As a Threat, Hell is Useless


I've been told countless times during my many decades of public life I am going to hell. Those who warn me are ever so confident they will not be going to hell with me. Now, if it is impossible there is a hell, why would anyone think I would feel threatened by such a ridiculous threat. I guess it is because the writers think there is a hell and are sure it they tell me they believe such a place exists it will cause me to worry.

The hell thing is not unlike the many times early on in this blog anonymous commenters told me I am gay. Writers thought this was the most devastating insult they could come up with. That was funny because if I thought being gay made me somehow less of a person I would not have issued gay pride proclamations. These have stopped. 

My question about hell is, why would anyone believe such nonsense? The trail of items one must create in his own mind to make "hell" real are as long as your arm. First, there is the imaginary god. Besides imagining there are any actual gods at all, we must separate them into "real" gods and "fake" gods. The one Christians imagine,  "God," is the only real one. The ones other people imagine are fake. 

But wait, there's more! The imaginary God has an imaginary enemy, Satan. Greek gods had imaginary enemies but today's Christians think both the Greek gods and enemies are fake.

Then there are the Christian pundits who describe what hell is like and what heaven is like. They admit no one have ever seen either. Some also admit the Bible doesn't know what is there either. No one who wrote the Bible claimed to have seen them. No one to this day anywhere in the world has seen them.

So, why do some Christians think threatening people with hell will frighten nonbelievers into the faith? No rational person will be frightened by something lodged in another person's imagination.

A few minutes ago I got another of my daily quota of scam phone calls. Quite often, as every reader knows, the calls are threats to my bank account or credit card, "Someone has charged your account with $499.00 of merchandise. Push one (to give us your credit card) and this will be taken off your account." This is a threat. But since I know the caller is not telling the truth I can easily hang up.  The threat of hell is the same. 

Once in a while scammers get lucky just as once in a while someone believes the threat of hell. A large majority of people today laugh them both off.

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