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Post by AuntieSocial on Feb 3, 2004 22:28:44 GMT -5
Thanks jacopo. As I said, my knowledge base is limited so far.
Did the Persians have 'Hell' for their own? Or was it also set aside for the enemies?
I know the Vikings had a place reserved for those who died in battle (Valhalla) and a place for everyone else. I didn't know that their enemies were placed in a hell-type place.
Were these 'hells' places of eternal torment?
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Post by dragonfly on Feb 4, 2004 2:09:51 GMT -5
Hello AuntieSocial ! I love your question regarding Hell as I have a particular interest in it. It is the Christian religion that primarily has given Hell such importance and permanence.
In many other religions Hell is not permanent. That is the soul can rise through other levels after certain states of suffering have been endured. In some ancient religions after a certain time a cosmic battle would take place during which souls in hell would vanish and others restored to life.
Hindus have several million hells! Buddhists count from 8 hells to several thousand. Ancient Egyyptians had many heavens according to your personality with the option of being an animal in an animal heaven (interesting !). I really like the ancient egyptian idea of your soul being weighed...you then had to present your case for not only your former life but your continuing existance!. If you were not successful you and your soul were devoured by Ammit (usually a small ,squat ugly demon but on rare occassion a maiden)
In the middle Babylonian period the idea of a hell, limbo and heaven were clearly developed and influenced the future concepts of Christianity (particularly Catholic doctrine)....however although prayer or sacrifice could not influence the outcome and there was a 3 strikes and you are out concept it was believed that a future apocalypse would utterly destroy Hell forever .
In the 9th century Christian followers believed souls in hell would be isolated from each other for eternity while suffering unimaginable torments usually involving fire and extremely nasty looking metalic tools (that they seemed to imagine quite well actually!!!)
Prior to the 5th century ancient Greeks had people mainly punished by supernatural forces while still living!. The After life was pretty scary ,although interesting for everyone. After the 5th century however clearer concepts of Hell as opposed to heaven are taken from ancient Egyptian and Persian idealogy.Plato and Socrates had interesting ideas of the soul as being able to shift levels
Depending on your source of material the ancient Jews believed death to be final until the(second) coming of God when good souls would rise from the dead and the others simply would not be animated...unusually for the time they did not worship the dead,visit them or hope to be re-united with them. Although the word Sheol is often translated as Hell this is not correct.Sometimes Sheol does mean a dim,shadowy place where the dead Lie(and do little else!.) Sometimes the word Gehenna is translated to mean hell but it was really a place where the bodies of animals,criminals and refuse were burned.
Anyway I could go on forever as I have read alot on this topic so I will stop before I become too boring!#nosmileys
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Post by Yaw on Feb 4, 2004 2:28:06 GMT -5
dragonfly did a really good job here. To supplement a bit...
Judaism actually has a fairly nuanced view of the afterlife, depending on where you look. The lay interpretation is that the dead go to a holding place (Sheol) until the "World to Come" arises with the coming of the Messiah, at which point those who were righteous would live again in this new world. It is worth noting, however, that the mystical end of Judaism has a reincarnation doctrine, used as a relatively simplistic explanation of "why bad things happen to good people". The latter is derived from the Kabbalistic source text, "The Bahir", and pops up every so often in the mainstream (for example, Sephardic Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef's assertion several years ago that those killed in the Holocaust were reincarnated souls being punished for sins in their past lives).
The Persians (Zoroastrians) believed in a duality -- two equally powerful beings, one good (Ahura Mazda) and one evil (Ahriman). Following either one would result in being sent to his place upon death. So anyone doing good would go to "heaven" and anyone doing bad would go to "hell", regardless of religion. These had different levels -- so righteous Zoroastrians would go to higher levels of heaven, but heaven was open to people of any religion that did good in their lives. It appears that it was the Zoroastrian concept that influenced the Christian interpretation of the afterlife more than the Jewish, although the Christian afterlife is clearly an amalgalm primarily of these two concepts.
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tamara
Broken-in Plebe
Posts: 96
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Post by tamara on Feb 4, 2004 10:14:37 GMT -5
Wow, dragonfly is a hell expert! Cool...
To be fair, some Christians also believe in hell that is for a limited duration only. There is an argument that the word aionion (I think) is better translated as "for a time" rather than "forever".
My sense of it is... there is some place where we go to atone and be purified. If they call it hell or purgatory, I don't really care. I think everyone will get to heaven in the end, but those who hold out on repentance will go thru hell until they do.
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Post by AuntieSocial on Feb 4, 2004 16:41:59 GMT -5
In many other religions Hell is not permanent.That is the soul can rise through other levels after certain states of suffering have been endured.In some ancient religions after a certain time a cosmic battle would take place during which souls in hell would vanish and others restored to life. This, to me, is more in line with what we, as a society, consider to be just. Reform is possible. The idea that someone would deserve eternal damnation is such a foreign concept to me. I can't imagine anything that I have done that would deserve that level of punishment, yet I have Christians, on a daily basis, tell me that is where I am heading ... only because I do not believe. Jesus, in the New Testament, condemned three towns to such a fate because of non-belief. Where is the compassion? Where is the LOVE? If the Christian concept of Hell was temporary, I would at least be able to concede that the sacrifice of Jesus did establish a loving aspect to the religion, but I can't even go that far in my considerations. I view the actions of the character named Jesus to be no different than those of his father in the Old Testament. I have said many times that there is nothing in Christianity that is unique. All (or most) of the myths have been traced back to existing pagan religions prevalent in that time. If that is the case (and I was remiss for not thinking this through completely earlier), the concept of Hell and the torments must have also come from a pre-existing culture. That being said, I can see how someone would consider the idea of eternal life and that of control as two different aspects of the reason for the creation of religion and god-belief. With respect to the translation of the ancient term into either "for a time" or "forever", I have heard this before. It is also not the only term that I know that is being debated (two others are 'virgin' and 'effeminate'), but I look at what the majority of the Christians believe. Yes, there are those who believe that Hell is temporary, but do they describe what happens to those souls after that prescibed period of time? Does anyone who is interned in Hell successfully make the transition? There are no writings or myths describing the assention of a condemned soul. The majority of Christian sects, that I am aware of and have had encounters with the adherents, believe that Hell is eternal. If the adherents believe this, it is due to the sect teaching this concept ... if the religion is based on a loving god, I would think that the religious leaders would be erring on the more lenient (hope-instilling) definition ...
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Post by Yaw on Feb 4, 2004 17:50:49 GMT -5
AuntieSocial Read "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis. Although it's arguable he was being metaphoric. I don't think it was meant theologically. At any rate, it does describe condemned souls given a "vacation" to paradise, where they are given the choice to reform and stay, or to go back. I don't think I have my copy up here, unfortunately. It might make a good discussion topic -- though for other reasons than Lewis would have forseen.
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Post by dragonfly on Feb 5, 2004 1:21:36 GMT -5
I hold the same concerns with the Christian religion that you do AuntieSocial. I think you summed it up perfectly with your statement/question "Where is the Love ?" !!!!!!!!
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coolguy
Maverick's Chew Toy
Posts: 26
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Post by coolguy on Mar 22, 2004 18:12:32 GMT -5
Auntiesocial[ Actually, I think that quite a few cultures had rewards and punishments in the afterlife. The Persians believed in a "Hell". The Vikings also had a type of "Hell", although it was reserved for enemies. And of course Hades was there long before Hell. As for the original subject. I just posted minutes ago about the "indoctrination of youth" being the "indoctrination method of choice" of the major and prominent religions. To reiterate, these religions proseletyse to infants and children long before they are capable of making informed, logical decisions. Everyone who is a theist has undergone a "religious conversion" but the vast majority didn't convert from Judaism to Christianity or Islam to Christianity, but simply from atheism to theism long before they were capable of volitionally converting themselves. There are actually laws that protect children from being forced to enter contracts and what not, because they are incapable of making informed logical, decisions, however in the case of religions, theists know that the "ripe" opportunity to convert a person to their religion is when they are children, before they are intellectually capable of making such monumental decisions. The child is vulnerable, because of his lack of experience, worldly knowledge and lack of practice at being rational - he is more prone to gullibility than an adult. Likewise, religions also prey on people in times of trauma, after the loss of a loved one or when they have been battling an addiction or heart attack or cancer, or during disasters (think 911) when they are less capable of being rational. And they prey on the elderly who are near death and fearful of death. In all cases, the religionists/theists prey on those who are rationally weak due to their emotional state (overly fearful or hurt adults or children, overly trusting children) or are rationally weak due to lack of life-experience (ie innocence) (children). If you really think about it, theists/religionists are a sick bunch that prey on the sick and weak. Given that most of the nations of the world have had "compulsory religion" (that means forced state religions) that used the "indoctrination of youth" technique for roughly 8-16 centuries, most people living in the past two thousand years have been indoctrinated to one of the various religions (usually via youth indoctrination, or by force with a club/sword/gun), and have continued the cycle by indoctrinating their own children. So, today, it is "normal to believe in God" as the majority of people are "indoctrinated" believers. However, this does not mean that people who are not indoctrinated or forced to believe theistic ideas would have an innate desire to believe in deities, which is a major myth spread by religionists. The religionists make the unevidenced claim that all of us feel a natural inclination towards God, a natural pull to understand God and be close to him. That's absurd; what people feel is a natural sense of wonder, and a natural inclination to understand the world around them, which does not even include a God, but the religionists claim that this desire to understand what's going on around us is actually a desire to be close to God. I completely doubt that "normal people" would have a longing or desire to believe in the ridiculous without being compelled (indoctrinated/brainwashed) to believe such things. To sum up, it is only normal that people believe in God because indoctrination of youth happens to be the norm and has been the norm for millenia. The cycle of theists indoctrinating their offspring to be theists will undoubtedly continue, and will probably remain the norm for many years to come, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Free-thinking, rational people will remain the minority (the abnormal - the deviants from the norm) for just as long, and the only way to change that is to help those who have been indoctrinated overcome their brainwashing and become free-thinkers so that they, as individuals, don't continue the youth-indoctrination cycle. That's a tough task, but I seriously doubt that it is impossible.
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