I used to believe in hell. Like, literally! I believed in the traditional version of fire, torment, conscious and physical punishment for eternity. It was preached, feared, and reinforced in the fundamentalist church I was part of. Hell was what you will get if you stray even a little. It shaped the spiritual part of me, and my relationships with my friends and my family.
For the denomination I was part of, it is not enough to just be a Christian, you will have to be their kind of Christian to be saved from Hell, to the T, anything else will lead you South of Heaven (that’s for the Slayer fans!)
Hell as a place of eternal damnation, along with missing the Rapture, was something something we were made to fear more than anything else.
Hell is a culture of fear
In many Christian circles, hell is the ultimate motivator. It’s the stick to heaven’s carrot. Obey or suffer. Believe or burn. For those of us who have spent even a short time in a fundamentalist or a high control group, it wasn’t just something you believe, you were emotionally blackmailed. Especially if you are like autistic little me, you have no filter when asking difficult questions or points at things most preferred to brush under the carpet.
Hell becomes a mental prison. Doubting the leaders’ word is dangerous. There is zero tolerance for mistakes. You live trying to escape from a God who, you’re told, loves you but the same time pays close attention to your every move, ready to throw you in the fire pits for missing the mark even a little.
Why did I stop believing in Hell?
This is not a thorough theological exposition against Hell. There are far better people than me to do this. This is my personal journey and reflections in deconstructing Hell as a place of eternal damnation for humans, and how I came to realise this place most likely does not exist altogether.
Hell It’s not in the Bible
This is something that surprises people the most. Most Christians they will say with great certainty, of course hell exist because Jesus spoke about it. The thing is… he didn’t’.
The place that we were taught to believe Jesus spoke as Hell it was actually a dumpster outside of Jerusalem where also all the unclaimed dead bodies used to be thrown in.
You see, Jews don’t believe a place like this even exists. This is true now and was also true back in Jesus’ time. Jews were never concerned about something like this.
Imagine now, Jesus as the best Jewish boy starts telling his contemporaries that they will go to a place of never ending immeasurable pain if they fail to follow him. They will be looking at him with the same confusion as they would be looking to a flying saucer.
From where belief in Hell comes from if it's not in the Bible?
There are different opinions on how the concept of Hell got established in Christianity. This is what I think is more likely to have happened.
Helheim, Muspelheim, John and Dante
Helheim in Norse mythology was the place that all of those who died dishonourably, from old age or sickness. An honourable death was one that happened in battle. Those people the Valkyries would in Valhalla. Helheim is a grey and cold place, a place without joy and eternal misery ruled by the goddess Hel.
Muspelheim was the realm of fire where the fire giants are coming from. Muspelheim in general looks empty, other that the fire of course. There are no fire giants hanging around. They just waiting in hiding to rise for Ragnarök.
Put those two together along with John’s Revelation and there you have it. A fiery place where everyone is tortured for eternity.
The Book of Revelation is also problematic and has been used to enforce a lot of problematic doctrines into Christianity, including the one of Hell.
It took 4 centuries for the book to be declared canonical, ie to become part of the Bible. The majority of the early church fathers opposed to it and out of the four main schools in the early Christianity only the one of Rome adhered to a doctrine of eternal punishment, which is a strong indication that Hell wasn’t such a popular doctrine for the early Christians.
Martin Luther was also a fierce opponent of the book’s canonisation.
The vast majority (if not all) of Biblical scholars agree that the book it was not written by John the disciple of Jesus. Being written by a contemporary of Jesus was a key argument towards accepting a text as canonical back in the day, which in modern terms would be classed as a forgery.
The modern day’s view of hell is also heavily influenced by Dante’s Inferno. I can’t even count the amount of Hell tourism dreams my fellow church member, including my own mother, saw that had a striking resemblance with Dante’s description of hell.
The element of fire within the Biblical narrative is also misinterpreted from the fans of Hell. When fire is mentioned in the Bible it is mentioned and an agent of purification. Jesus also used it in the same way when he spoke about how gold gets purified from all the other inferior elements stuck with it when it gets excavated with the use of fire.
Personally, I believe if there is any sort of fire and brimstone involved when our bodies die, it will be within this context. An unpleasant experience that will purify us and clean us from all the bad things we may have done during our lifetime.
Even in this life we can’t evolve and achieve something without some form of discomfort or pain. Take speaking to a counsellor for instance. When we sit with them and open up about our darkest and intimate thoughts it comes with a great discomfort and, sometimes, emotional pain but when we have gone through it, we are in a better place.
If there is an afterlife then having a single event where we are purified once and for all it makes a lot more sense to me.
Hell as religious trauma
Since my early days in my training as a counsellor and psychotherapist I was drawn into learning about trauma and how it affects our behaviours. Partly, so I can understand my own trauma and how it formed and partly because, for some reason, I’m drawn towards the ones who need healing the most.
‘God gave us free will, and this includes free will to choose to follow his commands or not’ It’s a very popular response against the argument that if God is love then he can’t send anyone to a place like Hell. This is something I also use to believe and said to others.
While now I stand with the opposers of the existence of Hell, I don’t just believe that a God who is love won’t send anyone to Hell, the whole idea that a being like this would create a place like Hell doesn’t make any sense to me.
Gabor Maté taught me that what we call "bad behaviour" is a coping strategy born of unhealed pain. Carolyn Spring speaks about how shame and fear keep people stuck, not because they want to be, but because they feel powerless. Bessel van der Kolk showed me that trauma isn’t just an emotional reaction. It lives in our nervous system. It shapes how we react, connect and exist. Trauma can cause permanent damage in our brains.
It’s a shocking revelation when you realise that our so called ‘free will’ it’s not as free as may thing it is. Our decisions and actions are influence based on who and how they have raised us, the socioeconomic conditions of the communities we were raised into and the undealt trauma that may live inside our family’s DNAs.
The worst those condition are, the worst our ‘free will’ responses they will be.
People often don’t choose their worst behaviours. Their trauma does.
I thought about people I worked with in the past. Addicts, abusers, the self-destructive and I see wounded children trapped in adult bodies, repeating and reliving their traumas.
The question that kept ringing in my head was, if myself as someone who has less than 5 years in his journey of exploring trauma can see how much those experiences can affect our brains and decision making, our ‘free will’, saying that a being that’s the very embodiment of love and knows our deepest thoughts will contemn us for eternity is insane on all accounts.
Is Hell God's justice?
Believing that God will contemn to eternal torture everyone who failed to live to his expectations makes him the worst narcissistic psychopath of the history of all narcissistic psychopaths combined. He makes Hitler and Chairman Mao look like amateurs.
And it’s always Hitler that is thrown back to us. ‘Do you want to tell me that someone like Hitler will just get a free pass after all the evil he has caused?’ Well… the thing is the god of fundamentalism also remembers that little lie you said as a child, or a chocolate you may have stolen. No matter what, you are fucked for eternity!
Strangely though, there is always a ‘benevolent’ system or leader to show you how to buy your way out of hell. You only have to sell your soul to them and obey them blindly, and don’t you dare questioning their authority.
Sounds familiar?
Fundamentalism and high control groups are not interested in helping us to discover a loving and fulfilling spirituality but to keep us trapped in an abusive relationship with a narcissistic system.
A healthy spirituality it has proven to be a great medium for good mental health. A belief to a place like Hell only achieves the opposite.
Jesus and the traumatised
Regardless of my experiences within fundamentalism, I still maintain a belief to the divine and I’m compelled by Jesus’ spirituality and teachings. Something that informs my way of living, boing business and interact with all of my clients. It helps me to be congruent and non-judgemental, even with the ones I may not agree with.
Who am I to judge? As Pope Francis said once. I’m here to support others to their journey of healing.
And then I look back to the character of Jesus. The Jesus I read about didn’t talk like a hellfire preacher. Regardless if you see him as divine or not, it was someone who actively sided with the most broken and rejected people. He made a point to be seen eating good food with ‘bad’ people.
Irvin Yalom didn’t call him one of the great healers by accident.
Would he really contemn someone to an eternity of excruciating torture knowing how their trauma became their prison?
Rethinking Hell
If God loves unconditionally as we were taught in church then the existence of hell makes no sense, because if it does exist then we are in an abusive relationship with the biggest narcissist ever walk the face of the earth.
Personally my experience with the divine for over 20 years now points me to a direction where hell belongs only in science fiction.
Great contemporary thinkers like Brian McLaren and Dan McClellan have helped me to rethink my theology. What if the idea of the eternal hell is a human invention, shaped by the need of the empire to control and not by God? The early church didn’t agree on the matter anyway.
More importantly, what if hell isn’t a place, but a metaphor or a consequence but not a sentence? Maybe it’s the suffering we carry when we’re cut off from love, divine and human. Something like this sounds more plausible, purely because this way healing is still possible.
I need to think about it a little longer.
Spirituality Beyond Fear
Letting go of hell it’s not something you get over it overnight. The fear of death outside of a high control group (cult is another name for them), can run deep into the very core of our existence.
Fear as a medium of change only creates slaves or mindless drones. Love, along with healthy boundaries, is the force that can change people’s lives and help them see their own worth and hopefully they will start loving themselves as well.
Jesus said once that perfect love cast out fear, this perfect love is capable to cast away the fear of Hell along with its existence.
George Papachristodoulou