I don't think I understand the concept of hell...

[deadlift]

Hi, I hope I can explain my question clearly. I've been thinking about it for a while and I just don't really understand.

As a Christian, I would never condone torture because I don't think we should ever treat people like that, regardless of what they've done. If I can love my neighbour enough not to condone torture than how can God, who loves us more than I could ever love anybody, commit somebody to eternal torture in hell? I don't think I could condemn anyone to that (I certaintly hope I couldn't) so how could an all loving God do that?

I'm sure there's probably an explanation that I just haven't thought of (I know my current understanding of God is pretty rubbish) and I'd really appreciate it if somebody could help me.

Holo - Outside of the bible no one wrote about him afterwards. There is no proof he ever existed.

Obviously, you mean 'outside the nascent Christian tradition', don't you?

This thread on the historical Jesus was done recently, and was disbanded, sadly. I still think that Josephus is mist likely to have mentioned Jesus, and again, think that potential Roman sources fit the historical profile for bring possible, if not probable mentions of him.

Historical plausibility? Lets start with the reasons for Joseph and Mary needing to go to Bethlehem, the bible mentions a census that didn't happen and a governor from another era. A more plausible explanation would be inventing a story to fit in with ancient prophesy.

Pedro, I wonder if you are confusing evidence and proof? In any case, it would be interesting to know how you would have evidence of any phenomena outside your own experience (and without opening up the philosophical can of worms of the question of whether we can really know anything aside from our own experience, which is the problem of empiricism) without writing?

Metaphor is a fascinating thing. When you compare something to something else it is both like and unlike the thing you are comparing it to. If I say 'my love is like a red, red rose', clearly my love is not a garden flower, nor is he red all over. But he might be beautiful, he might be fragrant (in my dreams ). He might be fragile, he might be thorny. There is more in the metaphor than I can convey by simply describing him. That's why metaphor is wonderful, because we can suggest a depth of meaning that is simply impossible in factual, literal language. And some of the meanings we can suggest are beyond the capabilities of literal language to convey. Poetry can tell us things that prose can't. There is more to love than neurophysiological processes. And there are some things -- and for me, God is one of them, that can only be talked about in metaphorical terms.

Red, I hope you'll understand my saying that this subject was done in depth recently, and I haven't got the time or energy to go into that level of detail again. I am very comfortable, though, that the gospel writers portrayed events, times and places to make theological claims about who Jesus was. They weren't interested even slightly in what you probably think of as history. For them, history meant something entirely different, i.e. understanding the present by reference to the past in the light of God.

So don't expect me to defend every detail of the Gospels from an historical POV. To really understand the Gospels, I think, means trying to think like a first century Jew, or at least like a first century person. Otherwise it's all a load of words.

Sorry to double post, but just wanted to add that there are large swathes of the bible that can be understood easily without steeping yourself in the 1st c, but to talk about 'history' without having any historical awareness of what history meant in the 1st c is hopelessly anachronistic.

If I was describing to you a picnic spot then I might say it was 'heavenly', that it was like 'being in another world', but when it came down to telling you how to get there I'd say "Take the M25 to Junction 13 and head north up the A13 etc". I might add that you should take sensible shoes as "There's quite a bit of walking at the other end". No matter how pretty it was I'd still be able to speak in plain terms about it.

Since hell is surely important where in the bible do we find the specific information about it and how/why to avoid it?

Back, that's why there's so much emphasis on Jesus in the NT. Jesus is portrayed as the way to God, the way to eternal life and love, and therefore of being with God for ever, i.e. Not separated from God. There are loads and loads of stuff about believing in Jesus in the Bible, so, effectively, loads about avoiding hell, although it's not presented as avoiding hell for the sake of avoiding hell, but being forever with and in the one whose essence is love.

But hell is in no sense a picnic spot, is it?

Hell is one of those things that can only be talked about figuratively. The images for hell in the NT come from the burning rubbish dump outside ancient Jerusalem -- they're not an indication of what will actually happen to us after death, more like an indication of what people feared might happen.

well, backonly, to be fair that information is there; love the lord your God with all your heart, all your mind and all your soul, and love your neighbour as yourself.

So no real information then if we must take these mentions of hell to be metaphor.

What you have is your holy book saying you will be burned. Since that is totally incompatible with a decent god you really must find a way to neutralise it. Claiming that it is all metaphor and that it really means something else entirely is all you can do, but from the outside it looks a little weak.

What do you say to Christians who believe the bible's literal description of a hell of torture? Has their faith deceived them?

Pedro, re your post of 21:54; does the same consideration apply to non Christian writers? If so, why, and if not, why not?

Yes, of course it is, because writing something down doesn't magically make it true. It doesn't matter who writes it. Doesn't mean it's not true, but you can't say that something must be true because it's written somewhere.

If I say 'my love is like a red, red rose', clearly my love is not a garden flower, nor is he red all over. But he might be beautiful, he might be fragrant (in my dreams ). He might be fragile, he might be thorny.

Precisely the point that you could mean beautiful and fragrant or thorny and untouchable without gloves. Metaphors are hugely ineffective ways of transmitting information because they are open to so much misinterpretation.

There is more to love than neurophysiological processes.

Nope, I'm afraid it's all in your head, quite literally.

Sorry to double post, but just wanted to add that there are large swathes of the bible that can be understood easily without steeping yourself in the 1st c, but to talk about 'history' without having any historical awareness of what history meant in the 1st c is hopelessly anachronistic.

But if you write historically about an event which never took place, I think that we can all agree that this is not history, this is fiction.

Feelings are in your body as well as your head, no? And our experience of love is conditioned by our culture, too. Simply to see our feelings as neurological is to adopt a most impoverished view of them.

I think I would say that the plurality of meanings that metaphors permit makes them much more efficient at conveying information, because so often the information that we need to convey is complex, ambiguous and even contradictory. My love might well be both tender and thorny, both beautiful and transitory, both passionate and fragile. To call him a rose can convey all those things in one concrete noun rather than in a long list of abstract concepts -- and I haven't exhausted the possible connotations of the word rose here, by any means.

Feelings are in your body as well as your head, no? And our experience of love is conditioned by our culture, too. Simply to see our feelings as neurological is to adopt a most impoverished view of them.

Nope, absolutely everything which you experience in this life is based on your brain. Without it you experience nothing. That's quite a simple thing to understand.

Plurality might be great for poetry, but it's absolutely useless for conveying the truth precisely because of its ambiguity.

ISTM that we might be back to the arts / sciences divide that often crops up on these threads. I am an artsy person through and through, my favourite subjects at school were English and History, and my degrees are in humanities, mainly text-oriented subjects. So I really love poetry and ideas and expression and exploration, that's what makes my soul sing. To me it's not that the truth expressed / encountered in good literary texts of any genre is any less true than the stuff that people learn in chemistry or maths classes, but it is a totally different type of truth. If poetry doesn't do much for you, that's fair enough.

Funnily enough, I think I'm right in saying that among fundamentalist Christians there's quite a high proportion of computer wizzes, engineers and sciencey type professions that are all about logic and straight line thinking (except even that's a metaphor - d'oh!) :)

As Oscar Wilde said, 'The truth is never pure and rarely simple.' That's why we need figurative language.

But I agree with Holo that we are at an arts/science impasse here. I'm an arts person too and for me the truths that are found in stories and poetry and in the visual arts and in the theatre are just as true and important as those found by scientific investigation.

So for me saying love's nothing but brain activity is to adopt a reductive and impoverished view of an activity, a feeling, a relationship, an inspiration that is at the centre of what I understand to be human.

It's funny, isn't it? By the time I left school I'd seen all but two of Shakespeare's plays at the theatre, some several times over, and if you asked me what a particular performance of, say, Twelfth Night was like, I could give some info about the staging, the costumes, the interpretation of characters, the plot etc of the play itself...but if you asked me what I thought of it, you'd get a deeply personal and usually quite animated answer. Both of these responses (the factual info and the personal involvement) are potentially true in different ways, and, IMO, to appreciate a good play you need both, although if I had to choose, I'd go for the personal involvement every time. The first Shakespeare play I saw (Hamlet, when I was pretty young) I
understood only parts of. I'd feel a bit sorry for someone who came out of a good performance and could only convey factual information about it.

I'm not saying that there can't be truth in flowery language, nor that there's no place for it. But simply that as a delivery method of truths it's hugely ineffective because metaphors can be interpreted in many different ways. I don't want to sound like a broken record, but you're clearly not understanding what I'm saying.

So for me saying love's nothing but brain activity is to adopt a reductive and impoverished view of an activity, a feeling, a relationship, an inspiration that is at the centre of what I understand to be human.

Are you so detached from the real world that you can't understand the everything you experience is related to your brain? Every activity, every feeling, every sense you have is interpreted by your brain. And I'll repeat because this is clearly a difficult concept for you. If you remove your brain, you no longer experience anything at all and that is all the proof you should need that love is in the brain.

Pedro, please stop saying that I don't understand you. I understand you very well; it's just that I don't agree with you. And please stop being snarky. It's not big or clever.

It's not that I don't see that we our experiences come to us through our brain. What I am saying is that if that is all we can say about love we have said something so minimally useful in understanding a hugely complex phenomenon that we are barely more enlightened than if we had never said it.

Dunno Pedro, if someone were to give me a physiological account if their heightened brain activity wrt me, I'd consider them to have been hugely ineffective at saying 'I love you.'

I know someone who's a brain specialist, who works on brain injuries mostly, and this person says that the brain is a profound mystery into which brain specialists peer shallowly. That's not to knock the work that brain specialists do - it's wonderful, life-giving stuff - but to acknowledge how little we know, in scientific, physiological terms, of what it is that makes us human. To claim more than this is to stray out of scientific knowledge and into philosophy.

Just to be clear: straying into philosophy isn't a bad thing by any means. I love philosophy! Just let's be aware of the nature of our conversation...this is the philosophy section, after all...:)