Sunday, May 23, 2021

No, there is no hell




 No, there is no hell

A woman asked me the other day if I believed in hell. I said, “No. How could a loving Creator consign HIs/Her/Its creations to hell. That makes no sense.”


“So if there is no hell, do you believe in heaven,” she persisted.


“Yes, of course. Heaven is what God wants for everybody and sooner or later we will all get there,” I said.


“That’s not what my church teaches,” she said.


I said, “No, of course not. They want to frighten people with the threat of damnation so they keep coming back and will donate money to the church.”


“I don’t know,” she said. She seemed sad.


It is hard to believe that you are loved unconditionally when you have been told the opposite your whole life.


Some people die still frightened that they are not good enough. It’s a sad way to die, to end your life.


In the meantime we keep busy to distract ourselves from the self reckoning that we fear.


It is a sad way to live when we have a choice, a choice we have never been told about. The choice is a faith in Universalism which teaches that we are loved unconditionally by our Creator and that hell is of our own making here on earth. 


As Winston Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”


So, is there a hell which a god of some sort will condemn you to for all of eternity to burn in flames?


No there is no hell but the hell of our own making created by bad choices. 


The great Christian prayer which Jesus taught us to pray says in part, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Did you catch that “on earth” part?


How do we experience heaven? Jesus tells us that we experience heaven on earth when we do God’s will and not our own. One path takes us to heaven and the other to hell.


So, we can choose heaven or hell. It is up to us. God gives us free will and it’s up to us what we want to experience. In either event, God loves us always.


No, there is no hell.


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