What's the mental picture most people have of hell, whether or not they believe it to be true? Hell is usually thought of as being the abode of the dead. It's self-contradictory -- a real oxymoron -- but it's where the dead ...live. Few people stop to question this absurdity. The belief is so strong that life does not end-that we are all immortal, that there is no such thing as my own personal extinction -- that the self-contradictory nature of the "living dead" isn't even an issue! People simply accept it, and :Peace2: the word "dead" to refer to a living state!
The delusion is all based on the Greek concept of the Immortality of the Soul, and for that matter, a failure to distinguish clearly between Spirit and Soul. People therefore fail to believe God's plain statement that "Thou shalt surely die." and prefer the Serpent's lie of, "Thou shall NOT surely die."
I think what most people I know would say about hell is that place where the spirits of the dead who didn't make it to Heaven go. I was never sure how you physically torment a spirit though. I was raised on pictures like those by Hieronymus Bosch. The torture demons always had some physical thingie with which they were prodding or poking the spirits.
My point or nub was for the last 50 years or so, Hollywood has sent us up a slew of pictures that offer up as the main characters or topic - the living dead. Vampires, zombies, and ghosts, (not Holy)
Oh, you mean the undead who live in hell and come visiting when they get bored; like they can just wander around anywhere the way Satan did in the book of Job?
Bad teaching.
Compartmentalized thinking.
Failure to see what you're looking at.
Failure to connect the dots.
Failure to derive concepts and principles from a smorgasbord of texts.
Failure to perceive the end results, the implications, the logical conclusion.
Failure to understand that God is Love, and what that implies.
If sin is "missing the mark," well there you go.
Quote from: ded2daworld on February 04, 2013, 07:57:35 PM
What's the mental picture most people have of hell, whether or not they believe it to be true? Hell is usually thought of as being the abode of the dead. It's self-contradictory -- a real oxymoron -- but it's where the dead ...live. Few people stop to question this absurdity. The belief is so strong that life does not end-that we are all immortal, that there is no such thing as my own personal extinction -- that the self-contradictory nature of the "living dead" isn't even an issue! People simply accept it, and :Peace2: the word "dead" to refer to a living state!
I have always though that the typical view of hell was as a place of torment in agony and flames or in "Twilight Zone"-like consternation(a great musician playing to a room of deaf people, a little child with fangs chewing on its horrified mother). People tossed in waves of lava unconsumed with nerve and flesh eternally burning.
"Whatsoever things are praiseworthy, whatsoever things are of good report, whatsoever things are true......think on these things." :punish: