4:07 PM
@Decrypted Yes. I refer to that passage to show that the apostles were aware that there is a spiritual meaning behind the literal meaning. Jesus taught his disciples the same thing in the story about eating his flesh and drinking his blood in
John 6:22-71, especially when he said to them:
> It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. (John 6:63)
To those who could think only materialistically, it sounded like cannibalism--and that scared them away. But to those who could think spiritually, it had a very different meaning. It is ironic that some branches of Christianity still think that he was speaking literally, and that the elements of the Eucharist become Christ's literal flesh and blood when they are blessed by the priest. The church still thinks materialistically.
@curiousdannii What's controversial is interpreting the passage as indicating that Abram was considered righteous because of his trust alone in God's promise. It's adding that "alone" that causes it to be non-biblical and false.
@anonymouswho Not every article on my blog is intended to establish the biblical basis of something. Establishing the biblical basis for just about any description of the afterlife would be very difficult, since the Bible really doesn't provide much in the way of description. The conclusions one draws will depend largely on whether one read's the Bible literalistically or reads it as having deeper, metaphorical and spiritual meaning.
That article is based on the latter. No literal hellfire. No literal worms. If you read the Bible's language about hell literally, then you get into all of the horrific stuff that you object to. And as you say, that is not something a merciful God would do.
@anonymouswho I'm not even talking about eternal hell. I'm saying that by your logic, we should kill all of our children immediately to ensure that they don't grow up to be criminals, druggies, or insane as adults in this world. And I don't think that would be a very good idea.
@anonymouswho But looking to the spiritual world, what I'm saying is that traditional conceptions of hell are wrong. Hell is not eternal misery. Yes, there is misery in hell. But that misery alternates with some pleasure at being able to do some of the evil things that the evil spirits in hell enjoy doing. What I'm saying is that some people freely choose hell because they enjoy it more than they enjoy heaven. And those people are the only ones who remain in hell.
@anonymouswho It's not that God doesn't allow them to learn from their mistakes. It's that they don't consider them to be mistakes. If they stab someone, they don't feel sorry about it afterwards. They wish they could have stabbed him a few more times. The people in hell have no conscience. They have destroyed their conscience. So they do not learn from their mistakes if by that you mean realizing that what they did was wrong, and no longer doing it for that reason.
What they do learn is that if they do something evil, they will inevitably feel the consequences, which will be pain and suffering for themselves. So over time they tend to gradually do less evil, or do it in a more moderated way, in order to avoid the punishment and pain that follows. So rather than getting more virulent, the devils in hell tend to get less virulent over time.
But they never entirely cease doing the sorts of evil things they love precisely because those are the things they love to do. Without doing them, they would have no pleasure in life whatsoever.
All of this is how God keeps the evil spirits in hell from falling into still worse evils. So no, they don't get worse. But they don't really get better either. They simply moderate their behavior over time in order to avoid the worst consequences. They are held in check only by fear of punishment. Not at the hands of God, but at the hands of their fellow evil spirits.
@anonymouswho As far as working together, the evil spirits in hell do band together to accomplish things they can't accomplish alone. But like bands of thieves, once they get their loot, or achieve the power they were seeking, they generally turn on one another, and their alliance falls apart. Nothing in hell is really stable. Alliances are temporary and ever-shifting.