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I actually tried that experiment at one point, and there were surprisingly few popular sets of hell criteria. The main disagreement seems to be over the followi

by pjscott 15y ago

I actually tried that experiment at one point, and there were surprisingly few popular sets of hell criteria. The main disagreement seems to be over the following questions: 1. What is hell, and does anybody go there? (Popular answers: nonexistent, some kind of vague "separation from God", or a literal eternal torture place.) 2. Do people get saved from hell by faith, or by good deeds? 3. What about people who have never heard of Christianity, or who were indoctrinated into another religion so thoroughly that they will never accept it? 4. What about children who die before they can learn about religion? These four questions cover the great majority of the variations in Christian hell-beliefs.

colomon 15y ago
Well summarized. Some surprising-to-me data points I researched last night while working on a longer response to bad_user I decided not to post: 1) Apparently (based on a couple of surveys) at least 25% of American Christians don't believe in hell at all. 2) Based on an admittedly quick survey, the four gospels seem to strongly emphasize the positive benefits of believing in Jesus. When they do speak of hell, like the Sermon on the Mount, it's all in terms of what will happen to you if you're not a good person: "Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire." 3) The strongest phrase I was able to find in the gospels was "...but whoever does not believe [in Jesus] is condemned already..." In that context (John 3), it seems to "be condemned" is to not have eternal life -- and then it immediately softens it up three verses later with "But whoever does what is true comes to the light..." All in all, I found a lot less Biblical support for "If you don't believe in Jesus, you will go to hell" than I thought I was going to. Perhaps I just wasn't looking in the right places...

by pjscott 15y ago

colomon 15y ago

Well summarized. Some surprising-to-me data points I researched last night while working on a longer response to bad_user I decided not to post: 1) Apparently (based on a couple of surveys) at least 25% of American Christians don't believe in hell at all. 2) Based on an admittedly quick survey, the four gospels seem to strongly emphasize the positive benefits of believing in Jesus. When they do speak of hell, like the Sermon on the Mount, it's all in terms of what will happen to you if you're not a good person: "Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire." 3) The strongest phrase I was able to find in the gospels was "...but whoever does not believe [in Jesus] is condemned already..." In that context (John 3), it seems to "be condemned" is to not have eternal life -- and then it immediately softens it up three verses later with "But whoever does what is true comes to the light..." All in all, I found a lot less Biblical support for "If you don't believe in Jesus, you will go to hell" than I thought I was going to. Perhaps I just wasn't looking in the right places...