Please don’t believe the hell myth. It’s a terrible fiction created by the church that has been attributed to Jesus, whose name was actually pronounced Yeshua. In the myth, Yeshua is portrayed as a tyrant who requires that people swear allegiance to Him, or He will lock them in a place of unrelenting, agonizing torment for eternity. That is not the Yeshua who speaks of love, compassion, judging not, and forgiving in the New Testament. Yeshua doesn’t mention such a place as hell in the Bible, and certainly never threatened anyone if they chose not to grow spiritually by following His teaching.
There is no word for hell as a place of torment in Aramaic, Greek, or Hebrew. It just doesn’t exist. Hell is a terrible mythology that must be eradicated from human consciousness. It grew up in the early church that used it to control parishioners and get converts.
This YouTube video contains the reasons we know there is no such place as hell. A transcript follows the video controls.
Support this effort to give people the truth about the reality of the afterlife by contributing $6 for a membership.
These are the reasons we know there is no such place as hell.
Hell Is Not in Yeshua’s Teachings
The first reason is that if it had been the central message of Yeshua’s teaching, he would have told his listeners about it. If Yeshua knew that the ultimate, only important choice a person must make in life is to believe he was a god, or face eternal torment in hell, he would have repeated that often in his teaching. It would have been on every page of the Gospels. And yet, in Mark, the earliest Gospel, Yeshua doesn’t talk about a hell at all. He refers, in one instance, to a garbage dump in the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, outside Jerusalem. In Mark, Yeshua makes a strong point about the importance of eliminating things from one’s life that limit spiritual growth, and about the destruction that would come to Israel if the people didn’t change. The physical realm is meaningless, he implied. And if your hand, foot, or eye limit your spiritual growth, you’re better off without them because your body is going to end up on the garbage dump or Gehenna. And what’s going to be left? Only what a person achieves spiritually is eternal. That was his message.
By the time the King James Version of the Bible was translated into English in the early 17th century, the church had fully developed the doctrine of hell as everlasting torment. Fictional descriptions were written by poets Dante and Milton and the church had continued frightening parishioners with the images, so those images were fixed in people’s minds. The translators assumed Yeshua was referring to the mythological hell, so they translated the name of the garbage dump, Gehenna, as hell. It was a remarkably bad translation. Yeshua was not referring to a hell at all, and certainly not to such a place as the poets described it. It doesn’t exist. The Bible translations today have been corrected to remove hell and put in the word the early texts originally had, Gehenna.
Concordant Publishing Concern is a well-known publisher of Bible literature, including the Concordant Literal New Testament, Concordant Version of the Old Testament, Concordant Greek Text, and Concordant Commentary. They make the point strongly that the English word hell should no longer be used in Bible texts because of what they call the corrupting influence of human tradition that has given it the image of a place of torment where judged souls are condemned to spend eternity, an image that is simply untrue. If hell really existed and the 12 followers who were with Yeshua, whom he loved, were going to have to either swear he was a god or roast in hell for eternity, he would have told them that repeatedly. He would have made that the central point of the Sermon on the Mount to the common people assembled on the Mount of Beatitudes. He would have had at least one parable about it, but there is none. Yeshua never talks about a place of everlasting torment. It simply was not Yeshua’s teaching about eternal life.
Paul Never Mentions a Hell
The second proof there is no such place as hell is that Paul’s teachings never mention hell. Paul’s letters were also very early in the development of the Church, around 50 -63 CE. Paul used every means he could think of to convert the Jews, the non -Jew God -fearers who worshipped with the Jews, and the Gentiles. So he promised them salvation, meaning they would have eternal life in the Kingdom of God when it was inaugurated. Those who weren’t saved would just have to live their life on earth as regular people and perish, we suppose, when their bodies died. But even when he wanted so much to convert people to believe in Yeshua as the Messiah, Paul never mentions a hell. If such an important reason to follow Yeshua had been true, Paul would have made much of it. There is nothing about hell in Paul’s writing.
The Acts of the Apostles Doesn’t Mention a Hell
The third proof there is no hell is the Acts of the Apostles doesn’t mention a hell. The Acts of the Apostles focused on the central message of the early church. It contains accounts of the origin and spread of the church, including efforts by Peter and Paul to convert people. Surely, if hell were so central to humankind and Yeshua’s mission, Peter and Paul would have been telling people about it. Hell would have been central to the teachings in the early church, and to getting people to follow Yeshua. If believing Yeshua was God was the one big, only important choice the listeners had to make, the Apostles would have told people about it repeatedly, but it is never mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, even once. The reason is the Apostles never even considered the idea of a hell. It just didn’t exist in the early church.
The Notion of Hell is Completely Incompatible with Yeshua’s Message to Humankind
Perhaps the most compelling reason we know hell is not a reality is that it is entirely incompatible with the Kingdom of Heaven as Yeshua described it. In the Kingdom of Heaven, he said repeatedly, there is no judgment or condemnation. There is only universal peace, brotherhood, and unconditional love. The Kingdom of Heaven is within, he said. We enter the Kingdom of Heaven by maturing spiritually, so we are peaceful, compassionate, and loving. To mature spiritually, we must leave behind the desire and expectations for rewards for the worthy, and punishment for the unworthy. It is inconceivable that God retains one of the primary fleshly characteristics that humankind must learn to abandon, the need for judgment and punishment.
Can we imagine the ruler of a country today requiring all citizens to swear allegiance to him and worship him, frightening them by telling them they will be thrown into a fiery furnace if they don’t worship him? That ruler would be a monster, more evil than Idi Amin, Stalin, or Hitler. And yet the Church would have us believe the God Yeshua described is that monster. Judgment, condemnation, and retribution are spiritually immature attitudes characteristic of a tribal people that wages war with its neighbors, executes people for trivial indiscretions, and amputates hands or arms of people who commit petty crimes. The Church assigned these immature attitudes to God, whom they portray as a ruthless dictator that rules through fear and intimidation. The ideas of judgment, condemnation, and retribution are simply incompatible with spiritual maturity, Yeshua’s teachings, and God.
The Loved Ones of People Living in Hell Would be Inconsolable
The fifth reason we know there is no hell is that even those in heaven would continue to suffer during their eternal lives because of His existence. What person who has merit in heaven because of their love and compassion would want to spend every day in eternity knowing a parent, son, daughter, brother, or sister was writhing in pain in a fiery torture chamber and could never be redeemed. What kind of a heaven would that be? For them to be imagining their loved one’s agony every day of their eternal lives. It is inconceivable that the God Yeshua described would condemn a parent, son, daughter, brother, or sister to that mental anguish for eternity.
People Who Became Loving and Compassionate by Following Yeshua’s Teachings Could Not Bear Knowing Millions of People Are in Unspeakable Agony
And what sort of universe would it be for those who took to heart Yeshua’s teachings and had become loving and compassionate, to know that billions of people were in unspeakable agony while they were in a heavenly luxury? The universe would, for eternity, contain pain, suffering, and misery, regardless of the existence of heaven.
Those in Torment Could Never Grow to Be Loving and Compassionate
Those who were in the torment would never grow to become more compassionate, learning to love others and God. They would have no opportunity for a reprieve, even if they changed an outlook and attitude. In fact, a hell would perpetuate anger and hatred in the universe as billions of souls cursed God and humanity. It’s simply unthinkable for such a concept to be attributed to any God other than that fabricated by a church that itself encouraged the torture and murder of those who disagree with his teachings. In the Kingdom of God, as Yeshua described it, no person will be judged, none will be unworthy, none will be unloved, none will be unacceptable.
We Are Taught by Yeshua Not to Be Judgmental and Hateful
Probably the most difficult lesson we must learn, and the most persistent worldly characteristic we must abandon, is the desire for rewards given to us who are right, and punishment and retribution inflicted upon those who don’t believe as we do. The suggestion that God would judge humanity, committing the vast majority to eternal torment, is perfectly in character with the medieval church, but diametrically opposite to Yeshua’s teachings about the kingdom of God.
The Hell Myth Was Developed by the Church to Control People
The hell myth is a fiction developed by the church to increase its power and keep the flock under control. It simply never existed.
All the Communications from People Living in the Afterlife Say There Is No Hell
The next proof there is no hell is that afterlife contacts give no indications of a hell. They, in fact, say hell does not exist. We have a vast library of records from people who have had spontaneous after-death communications with deceased loved ones, induced after-death experiences in a psychotherapist’s office, near-death experiences, medium readings, and recordings of those in the afterlife speaking with the aid of direct-voice mediums. None of the vast numbers of reports about the afterlife contains any communication about a hell.
A small number of near-death experiencers have had inconsistent experiences that were negative, but they still don’t match the hell myth and are likely material reactions to the trauma they’re in, not glimpses of an afterlife. If hell really existed, we would expect virtually every near-death experience and every communication from those in the afterlife to allude to it with strong words. No one living in the life after this life refers to it, because it simply doesn’t exist.
Today’s Christian Leaders Are Abandoning the Hell Myth
“I think everybody who knows Christ, whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’re members of the body of Christ. God’s purpose is to call out a people for his name, whether they come from the Muslim world, Buddhist world, the Christian world or the non-believing world, they are members of the body of Christ, because they have been called out by God. They may not even know the name of Yeshua, and I think they are saved, and that they are going to be in heaven with us.”
Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at McMaster University, a Canadian evangelical, wrote,
“How can Christians possibly project a deity of such cruelty and vindictiveness, whose ways include inflicting everlasting torture upon his creatures, however sinful they may have been. Surely a God who would do such a thing is more nearly like Satan than like God, at least by any ordinary moral standards and by the gospel itself.”
Among Jehovah’s Witnesses, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, Watchtower Society’s second president, stated,
And now, who is responsible for this God-dishonoring doctrine, and what is its purpose? The promulgator of it is Satan himself, and his purpose in introducing it has been to frighten the people away from studying the Bible and to make them hate God.
Among Catholics, Pope John Paul II stated that Hell is not a place of fire and eternal suffering.
“The images of hell that sacred scripture presents to us must be correctly interpreted. They show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God. Rather than a place of hell indicates the state of those who were freely and definitively separated themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.
Hell Never Existed
There is no hell. There never was a hell. Please don’t hold on to that primitive belief that is not believed by Bible scholars, Bible translators, the writers of the earliest Gospel, Mark, Paul the Apostle, the other Apostles, and many officers in religions today. Look forward to a wonderful life that we are all destined to have when we transition from Earth into the next realm of our eternal lives. There is no hell.
