Would you serve God if Hell didn’t exist?
If you are the type with zero tolerance for this sort of ‘loose’ thinking euphemistically labelled ‘free thinking’, you probably have me tagged already as a troublemaker for posing this question let alone thinking it. You’re probably also convinced I’m bound for the hottest parts of Hades.
Maybe you are right. Anyway, lets allow God be the judge of that, shall we?
World religions generally follow an identical system of rules and principles based on reward for good behaviour and the opposite for misconduct. Whatever the label, the underlying concept remains the same: ‘Heaven’ for the goodly and ‘Hell’ for the erring; Earth automatically acquiring the intermediate status of a ‘Middle Earth’ [pun intended] like processing hub/orb where the chaff gets trashed.
This tit for tat dynamic I would like to tag the ‘bogeyman effect’ is uncannily omnipresent in human structures everywhere on the planet: in schools, the workplace, relationships, society as a whole. It’s the standard to train the world, maintain normalcy and sustain civilisation as we have it and it starts with telling every child a bedtime story about the bogeyman…
Even with this tried and trusted system, we still have delinquents; societal misfits etc. who somehow hack around the bogeyman effect and go against society. However alarming this might be from time to time, it is reassuring that such a structure is existent.
Basically, the ‘Devil’ is the afterlife’s bogeyman and Hell is his place where those who have angered God will go.
It is an overarchingly nice proposition and by design structured to cause a reasonable deficit for the Devil.I especially get riled up when I read of or listen to preaching along the lines of hell, brimstone, and damnation. From experience, such preachers and preaching have little to do with a God of love or forgiveness and more to do with fear of an unforgiving megalomaniac being. Such experiences always leave me wondering about God and Hell; love and fear.
Questions like: ‘would mankind serve God without the threat of hell fire?’
‘Is love greater than fear?’
‘Does hell exist?’
‘Is there a God somewhere just waiting to put his creations in it?’
Questions I still don’t have conclusive answers to.
Maybe like the Jedi saying ‘There are questions to which we can never have answers. We can only be answers’ and we have to die a ‘death’ to unravel these mysteries.
To attempt the first question above, in all fairness I think if I would serve a God at all without the threat of Hell, it would be way different. Less routine and more similar to plain adoration than what is currently de rigueur. All this is hypothetical, don’t take me serious please.
I think the brimstone brand of every religion while effective in enshrining a bogeyman culture and training adherents to conform inadvertently breeds overzealousness, religious intolerance, and fanaticism. My sentiments on this is simple; ‘God’s not dead. If you have to fight for your God, there’s need to rethink who is creator and who is creation’.
In submission, I believe the entity God is many and the same thing: Nature, The Big Bang, The Cosmic energy physicists study; The Life biologists continuously attempt to decipher, God is us.
Yet the God of the Old Testament, The Quran, New Testament; Supreme Deities worshipped by our ancestors etc. may be near impossible or difficult to reconcile with the neo-God we now serve due to obvious and gaping dissimilarities. So, does God change over the times or has God changed?
Forgive my manners but I may need to employ some question dodging here by answering the above question with another which is ‘Do humans change?’
If your answer is the same as mine, perhaps it may be safe to infer that humans over the ages have been serving the same entity and possibly due to alterations in their cognitive, intuitive and intellectual composition evolved varying perceptions of the said being, recorded this in scriptures and unwittingly created the many-faced god [again, pun intended] we currently know.
Thanks for reading.
Valar Morghulis.
