According to the latest Pew Research poll in November 2021, 62% of Americans believe in a literal afterlife hell “where people experience physical suffering,” and are forever separated from God. This is why I have devoted most of my life to this topic; this is why I wrote my book What the Hell is Hell?
The amazing thing about that figure above is that most of those people simply never looked into the matter for themselves. People walk around with an internal belief that there is this place of afterlife torment in eternal flames, where they could possibly go if they don’t believe the right beliefs or if they are not a good enough person, and yet somehow it’s just not deemed important enough to look into further. A great many of us are simply raised in a certain set of beliefs—regardless of location in the world or what religion—and whether it is our parents or religious institution that taught us what to believe, we trust that source, and it is all too natural to then go on through life without a need to question what we were taught.
I have been teaching and speaking to groups of people for several years at this point, and, almost always, people are shocked to learn the actual biblical facts about hell. What I have run into time and again is that I will go over those facts (sometimes over a weekly lecture for a couple of months), use the Bible itself to document what I am saying so that people know it is not just my opinion I am telling them, but then they go to church once and hear about the threat of hell again and they are back to square one. The fear is so ingrained and powerful that it can be easier to accept that fear rather than embrace the unknown that conflicts with that fear, even if it is the truth. Inner security wins most of the battles over confronting the new truth…the unknown.
As anyone knows who read my book, it can be easily shown that Jesus never spoke about an afterlife hell; the only judgment he spoke about was to come about at the end of the world as we know it. He also never spoke about anyone suffering eternally in the fire; he spoke about the wicked or unrighteous being destroyed in the fire—the fire at the end of the world as we know it (“the world as we know it” because the judgment Jesus speaks about is to herald in a new age on this earth—the kingdom of heaven—earth restored to an Eden type place).
It can also be easily shown that the word hell itself is a mistranslation of the ancient Greek word Gehenna,which refers to a real valley outside Jerusalem that still exist to this day. One can take a guided bus tour of it! Another generally unknown truth is that Jesus does not associate fire every time he speaks about judgment of the wicked. Sometimes he just says they will be tossed into Gehenna, the valley. Sometimes he says they will be thrown into the outer darkness (How can there be outer darkness if there is fire? Only when everything is taken literally is there a problem; taken metaphorically it makes much more sense).
The bottom line: the afterlife hell of eternal torment, which most people who believe in hell believe it to be, is simply not supported by the Bible.
It is somewhat of a tragedy that those 62% of Americans who fear hell will not learn the truth that what they’ve been taught about hell is incorrect, at least according to what Jesus says in the Bible.
What are your thoughts? Please write in and keep the conversation going!