Having looked at the Old Testament's treatment of Hell, or rather the lack of Hell in the Old Testament, I will now turn to the New Testament; Investigating the teaching on Hell in the Gospels.
An Idea Whose Time has Come
I believe a universal basic income is an idea whose time has come. We must debate and refine it, but it is the only responsible way forward.
Hope
Hoping is something we do. Hope is something we believe, feel, desire. The problem with these definitions is that they are passive. There is no change in space and time that is affected by hope. That, to me, is simply not good enough. To this end, I would like to propose and extended definition of hope.
Hell: Overview and Old Testament
Here I introduce the idea of Hell I will be dealing with and to look at how the subject was treated in the Old Testament.
Hell? No.
Fear of Hell tortures multitudes of people. From the devout, to the deconverting, to the nominal believer, to the completely unreligious who still have some little flicker of fear in the back of their minds, the threat of eternal, conscious, fiery torment hangs over people's hearts and minds. If I can unpick and unpack this threat in order to expose it as false, unfounded, and untenable, perhaps I can help to alleviate those fears and bring peace to those afraid to take the next step away from their abusive relationship with faith.
Where I Am in the Journey
Not a single episode, not a short season, but a long process of unravelling that puts me where I am now. It's not that I have been on a journey; I am still on that journey.
But I’m Still Not an Atheist
Disbelieving the God of the Bible and those other faiths does not mean that I believe in the utter absence of anything transcendent, higher, other, unexplainable, or above our current understanding.
Walking the Black Dog
For those of you who aren't familiar with the expression, the black dog is an old euphemism for anxiety and melancholy. I find myself taking a walk with this old, unwelcome, friend quite a bit in recent days.
Ghosts and Jesus
The difficulty with all of this is that this mild fascination with all things gently spooky coincided with my conversion to evangelical Christianity. Suddenly there was a whole bunch of stuff I wasn't supposed to be interested in because it was "dark."
Jesus, the False Prophet
The Jesus we see in the New Testament is a false prophet as described by the very book that is supposed to reveal him as God.
