I read that as he hoped hell was empty as in you get sent to emptiness. Alone, nothing everywhere, for eternity.
My interpretation is that he was implying that there is a way to escape eternal punishment, no matter how grievous the sin, and that given enough time everybody can come to grips with the wrongs they have committed and start over again with a clean slate. Either that, or his idea of a loving and merciful God is so forgiving and magnanimous that He could not bear to send even one soul to eternal damnation.
I used to read a webcomic from ages ago called Jack (Edgy NSFW material so Google it at your own risk) that had a lot of interesting takes on Abrahamic mythology. One of the things that resonated with me at the time was the concept of a personal heaven and hell, in which heaven is a reflection of your own idea of a utopia (even if that utopia for one person might be insanity for another) but hell is a reflection of the evil deeds one has committed in life and you are forced to be subjected to the same evil over and over again every day until the sinner learns the error of their ways, asks God for forgiveness, and is allowed to be born into the world once again with no knowledge of what had transpired in the afterlife.
It’s a meh comic with bad artwork for the majority of it, but some bits were really good. So good that I still remember them all these years later.
https://www.islamicfinder.org/hadith/tirmidhi/tafsir/3107/?language=en
Narrated Ibn 'Abbas: that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: When Allah drowned Fir’awn [Pharaoh of Egypt as he was pursuing Moses and the people of Benny Israel] he said: ‘I believe that there is no god except the One that the children of Isra’il believe in.’ So Jibrail [The Angel Gabriel] said: ‘O Muhammad! If you could only have seen me, while I was taking (the mud) from the sea, and filling his mouth out of fear that the mercy would reach him.’
According to Islam no-one is beyond achieving forgiveness if they sincerely repent as the mercy and forgiveness of God is limitless. However except for explicitly mentioned people such as the Prophets, we do not know who achieves Paradise and who is punished in Hell until the day of judgement. Not even the Angels closest to God know.
Yeah because it doesn’t exist
Obviously.
You awaken—not awake, but unfolded—into one of the Nine Fractured Mirrors, each reflecting a cosmos that never was. Time is a serpent swallowing its own echoes. Yet, amidst the howling void, there flicker the Untethered—those who wear skin of starlight and sinew of static, their existence a perfect wound: bliss carved from torment, nectar distilled from venom. Only they glimpse the Grand Deception—the wheel that grinds souls into silence—and with forgotten tongues, they whisper it apart.
The rest of us? We dance the Chrome Masquerade: Laugh until your ribs rust. Weep until your tears fossilize. Then—the Slip—a single misstep, and you’re unmade. Reborn as a thirteenth thought in a dead god’s migraine, left to drift for a lifetime of blackened suns before the dice tumble again. And when you finally crawl back to the Threshold of Maybe, you arrive empty, nameless, hungry, ready to fail the same test you never remember taking."**
Neither heaven nor hell exist, so you can all stop worrying about them.
Enjoy your life because it’s the only one you get.
Still true if they exist tho. Paradise is being with God, so bye bye free will. Hell is beimg simply cast out, so yeah.
They only added Hell in the Middle Ages (even the name comes from the Vikings). It’s like when comics make the canon needlessly complicated in later years because they have to keep going no matter what.
Eternal punishment was Rome I thought.
The first 500 years of the cult had already fractured into a few different forks and had very different ideas about afterlife already before Rome picked it up and popularized it as official religion.
At least that’s my understanding.
Anyways, the actual history of religions should make anyone atheist.
Do you have any good sources for the history of religion? I’d love to learn more
I could be convinced to assemble some stuff, but we’d waste less of our time by asking what media formats you actually like.
Read, listen, watch, etc.
I can’t stand audio books for example.
Also, isn’t the whole shtick about Easter that Jesus took the L to make the sins disappear…?
I’ve been learning a lot about biblical history and early Christianity lately. To be clear: as a layperson. Ie I’ve been listening to podcasts by biblical scholars, and reading Wikipedia articles. I’m not an expert but I’m an interested lay person. I’ve been doing this as a person that doesn’t believe in the supernatural, because I’m interested in history and sociology, I haven’t been learning about hell specifically but more the context influence of Early Christianity.
Early Judaism understood the afterlife to be a sort of sleep/slumber/torpor.
Greek concepts of hades had an influence on early Christianity.
The Book of Revelation was kinda like a revenge fantasy for early Christians experiencing persecution by the Greco-Roman empire.
The lake of fire was not for human souls.
There’s also something about souls being fed into an eternal furnace, but the furnace is consuming the souls so the souls are destroyed through incineration, not eternally tormented.
I know a lot of current hell imagery is drawn from Dante’s Inferno which is medieval I think, but I haven’t really gotten that far in my learning about Christianity.
The Book of Revelation was kinda like a revenge fantasy for early Christians experiencing persecution by the Greco-Roman empire.
The lake of fire was not for human souls.
While Revelation isn’t exactly the best source as you say, it still has this part regarding a lake of fire:
But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.
Revelation 21:8 (NIV)
