Hello Wayne,

I'm so sorry you had to endure that kind of a travesty. No one is going to burn in hell.

None of the hell thing was in Jesus' teachings. First, Jesus and others such as James spoke of Gehenna, a place where human sacrifices occurred in fire and later garbage was burned. Jesus warned that if Israel didn't turn to God, it would be destroyed in flames, and he used Gehenna as an analogy. But he never suggested people would be judged and thrown into a place where there is fire.

The translators of the Bible took out the name of the place, Gehenna, and inserted an ancient English word, "hell," which originally meant to cover something. They should have left the name Gehenna there and the problem wouldn't have arisen. Jesus never spoke of a hell because there was no such thing until the translators inserted the word.

And the idea of torment and people burning was made up by two prominent writers, Dante and Milton. There's nothing like that anywhere in the Bible.

Read the link below explaining Jesus' teachings about Gehenna. This is what the author says about Jesus and the hell thing: "I now believe that hell is the invention of Roman Catholicism; and surprisingly, most, if not all, of our popular concepts of hell can be found in the writings of Roman Catholic writers like the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), author of Dante's Inferno. The English poet John Milton (1608-1674), author of Paradise Lost, set forth the same concepts in a fashion highly acceptable to the Roman Catholic faith. Yet none of our concepts of hell can be found in the teaching of Jesus Christ!"

This is the link: http://gospelthemes.com/hell.htm

The Roman Church began using the idea of a hell to convert people through fear and keep people in line. The conception grew and was embellished by Dante in the fourteenth century and Milton in the seventeenth century until today preachers are really convinced there is such a thing. It's simply a fiction; it has no basis in reality, and certainly not in the teachings of any religion, including the teachings of Jesus.

Here's what we know from Jesus' teachings. He would never condemn anyone. Read the story of the adulteress about to be stoned. And read his words that we should not tell others they have faults (specks in their eyes) because we all have a beam of wood in our own eyes (our own faults). The Jesus of the New Testament was unconditionally loving, would never condemn someone, and certainly wouldn't stand on a mountaintop throwing little Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist children into hell. It's simply preposterous.

We also have volumes and volumes of accounts of people communicating with their loved ones who have passed away and they don't talk about a hell thing. They do talk about being sorry for the way they treated people, and often that they have a life review where they see both their own feelings and the feelings of people around them during events that hurt others. We learn from our mistakes in life after death. It appears that in the life review, we are able to actually feel other people's pain in incidents when we caused someone else grief. That's the worst it gets. Other than that, most people who have crossed over and speak to their loved ones, or those who have been clinically dead and revived, talk about a beautiful place they go where they are surrounded by those they love who have already crossed over, even pets.

Please don't believe the hell thing. It's an awful picture painted by only a few in the history of religion and not by any religious mystic communing with God. It's just not true.

Love and peace, Craig