Huh? What?

Before we begin, I must make it clear that my own personal Faith is based on the Holy Trinity: the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In no way is the following to be construed as anything except a part of my own journey as I seek Guidance from the One who does the Guiding. My religious education may be searched; my Faith is quite very secure. There is but One God. Each and all of us human beings are Mind, Body, and Spirit, in the likeness of God. On this my Faith stands.

I just read two articles of interest to me. The first is a blog post about a young person deeply affected by thoughts of Hell ...

The other one showed up in a related comment and has something to do with the validity of Hell. 

Both are worth looking at, but I kind of fail to grasp the real connection between the two, to be honest. 

I'm no scholar of any kind, let along a Biblical one. I've read it, and my father was a Southern Baptist Preacher, so I heard plenty about it growing up, but I'm by no means an expert.

Being as I'm an alleged 'grown up' now, and me being me, I went looking for answers in more educated minds than my own.

" Does the word hell appear in the Bible " is the question I wanted an answer to.

And I was shocked out of my Baptist-trained mind at what I found.

Look it up, my friend. That's the best advice I can give you. 

My next question was in reaction to my discoveries.

Me being me, I wanted to know where on earth Hell came from, since it didn't come from the Bible.

Here's another link that I found interesting. I've got thoughts that go along with it and might get to them here, or save them for another post, or both ...

" Development of Hell " didn't come along until Jesus had long since been born, lived, died, lived again, and went on up to Heaven. Hell was not in the vocabulary of Jesus, nor in His teaching, and most certainly not the Hell we've been raised to fear. Jesus never threatened anyone with eternal hell-fire. Ever. Not once. 

Look it up, my friend. That's the best advice I can give you.

And here I will insert an aside.

Here's a quote from the above link:

'... The Jewish Yeshua and those in the Jerusalem church, especially James, Yeshua's brother, held a traditional conception of the Messiah. The Messiah would be a man, perhaps descended from David, who would be anointed by God to rout the occupying army, the Romans, and establish an earthly kingdom ... '

I've only just this moment had the following 'ah-ha!' moment.

As a part of the research for the Mamm Books, the change-over from the Roman Empire to the future Holy Roman Empire demanded some looking into as it is pivotal to the development of the SONG series. And I connected the dots between the survival (and widespread growth) of the early 'Jesus Movement' despite Rome's best efforts to annihilate it, Rome's subsequent toleration, and finally its adoption of this tenacious Faith - which just so happened to 'coincide' with the 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire.

There were plenty of factors at play during that whole time span. It's just my own thought patterns that lead me to say, 'God works in mysterious ways, and it is not for us to know the mind of God.'

Me being me, in the fiction I write, behind the assortment of 'barbarian' peoples who ultimately brought the Western Empire to its knees was indeed a 'conspiracy' of a sort. It was led by those who saw the 'politicizing and militarizing' of their Faith as a threat to its true and original meaning. Our fictional Characters, who historically had no reason to much like what Rome had dished out (tried to) to their people so far, weren't overly trusting of this new interpretation of the Faith they had been celebrating for centuries. 'Rome has replaced her legions with priests and her governors with bishops,' was their take on it and they wanted no part of it.

And what on God's green earth does this stuff have to do with Hell?

Nothing.

There was no such concept in the teachings of Jesus, nor in anything anywhere at the time that the foundations of the Faith of the Characters of the Mamm Books would been laid. What references there were came from belief systems to which our Characters would not have adhered in the first place and so would most surely not have been part of their Faith.

And so I have to conclude that 1) the second of the above links, while no doubt the author sincerely believes what he says, is based on absolutely zilch that makes any sense, and 2) the author of the first of the above links has been, like many generations of us, tormented by something that has no basis in reality, and 3) people need to be taking a closer look at what they 'believe'.

Pointing fingers is a pointless exercise at this point. The fabrication occurred so long ago that the statute of limitations has long expired, along with the fabricators. The effects ... those have lingered ... but there are no living feet of flesh and blood at which we can lay the blame. Just because a hundred or more generations have believed something does not necessarily make it true.

When I was a kid, the grown ups used to ask us, regarding peer pressure, 'If they all jumped off a cliff would you jump too?'

So does this mean that Hell is no longer a cuss word?