If Jesus died to forgive us, then why is there a Hell?

ALL ALLMOST NEVER MEANS ALL (IN THE CARNAL SENSE)
Matt 5:14-16
14 "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.
15 "Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.
16 "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.
Matt 6:33-34
33 "But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.
34 "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
John 5:36
36 "But I have a greater witness than John's; for the works which the Father has given Me to finish-- the very works that I do-- bear witness of Me, that the Father has sent Me.
John 6:39
39 "This is the will of the Father who sent Me, that of all He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day.
John 18:11
11 Then Jesus said to Peter, "Put your sword into the sheath. Shall I not drink the cup which My Father has given Me?"
Heb 2:13
13 And again: "I will put My trust in Him." And again: "Here am I and the children whom God has given Me."
John 6:44-48
44 "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day.
45 "It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God.' Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.
46 "Not that anyone has seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father.
47 "Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life.
48 "I am the bread of life.
John 6:65-69
65 And He said, "Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father."
66 From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more.
67 Then Jesus said to the twelve, "Do you also want to go away?"
68 But Simon Peter answered Him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
69 "Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."
John 17:1-2
1 Jesus spoke these words, lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said: "Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You,
2 "as You have given Him authority over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as You have given Him.
John 17:6-7
6 "I have manifested Your name to the men whom You have given Me out of the world. They were Yours, You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.
7 "Now they have known that all things which You have given Me are from You.
John 17:10-12
10 "And all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them.
11 "Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are.
12 "While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Your name. Those whom You gave Me I have kept; and none of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.
(NKJ)

XXX All is a figure of speech. We can see that to Jesus all was all those that God had given Him. Which is all those who become Christians and are born again. All those that follow Jesus' example.

Mark 10:45
45 "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many."
John 17:12
12 "While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Your name. Those whom You gave Me I have kept; and none of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.
John 13:1
1 Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.
1Thes 3:11-13
11 Now may our God and Father Himself, and our Lord Jesus Christ, direct our way to you.
12 And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love to one another and to all, just as we do to you,
13 so that He may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all His saints.
Acts 2:39
39 "For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call."
John 6:37-40
37 "All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out.
38 "For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.
39 "This is the will of the Father who sent Me, that of all He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day.
40 "And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day."
(NKJ)

So, is there a hell?

Bull ****.

Oh yes.
HELL
Matt 5:22
22 "But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, 'Raca!' shall be in danger of the council. But whoever says, 'You fool!' shall be in danger of hell fire.
Mark 9:43-48
43 "If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched--
44 "where 'Their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.'
45 "And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame, rather than having two feet, to be cast into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched--
46 "where 'Their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.'
47 "And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire--
48 "where 'Their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.'
Luke 12:4-5
4 "And I say to you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.
5 "But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him!
2 Pet 2:4
4 For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment;
Heb 10:29
29 Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace?
Matt 12:40
40 "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
Acts 2:31-32
31 "he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption.
32 "This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses.
James 3:6
6 And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. The tongue is so set among our members that it defiles the whole body, and sets on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire by hell.
Rev 6:8
8 So I looked, and behold, a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hades followed with him. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beasts of the earth.
Rev 20:13-15
13 The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one according to his works.
14 Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
15 And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.
Rev 21:8
8 "But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death."
Rev 20:10
10 The devil, who deceived them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are. And they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
(NKJ)
Eph 4:8-10
8 Therefore He says: "When He ascended on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men."
9 (Now this, "He ascended"-- what does it mean but that He also first descended into the lower parts of the earth?
10 He who descended is also the One who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.)
John 5:25
25 "Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live.
1 Pet 4:6
6 For this reason the gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.
(NKJ)
XXX Hell is a jail for spirits. To be held until the final judgment day. Then those who do not receive mercy will be tosed into the eternal lake of fire. Forever, and ever. Some people were condemned in the old testament by the old testament law. That later Jesus would forgive. Some were condemned that will stay condemned. Some just lay asleep in their grace. Some in the new testament will go to hell and then down the eternal lake of fire. Some will just go to sleep and wait for judgment day.

Rev 14:9-11
9 Then a third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, "If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives his mark on his forehead or on his hand,
10 "he himself shall also drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out full strength into the cup of His indignation. He shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.
11 "And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever; and they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name."
(NKJ)

Matt 13:39-40
39 "The enemy who sowed them is the devil, the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angels.
40 "Therefore as the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of this age.
(NKJ)


Matt 25:41
41 "Then He will also say to those on the left hand, 'Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels:
(NKJ)

In my opinion, there's no way that Jesus was speaking of, or referring to, a place of fiery punishment that lasts forever and ever . . . and ever after you die. After just a tiny bit of research, I've discovered that the word Hell translates to Gehenna. After the same non-exhaustive effort to research the matter, I learned that the name Gehenna referred to a large pit just outside, and downwind, of Jerusalem where everybody's trash was burned. So, it was the Gehenna Garbage Company--whose motto was, "Who else ya gonna call" (and they had a point)--who was responsible for the perpetually-burning pit of fire. And just when I thought I had all the pieces of the puzzle surrounding the idea of Hell, I found the name of the owner of the Gehenna Garbage Company. It was Satan D. Seaver. I'm still looking into that.

As if to punctuate the need for always more research, I learned that, far from being a place of unimaginable size and heat, this Gehenna that Jesus mentioned was actually a device called the Gehenna-2000. These devices were mass-produced by an intergalactic company (whose president has requested that I not use their name) contracted by God to make his fire-and-brimstone threats against humanity logistically possible. Without going into such things as inter and extra dimensions and time-line considerations that would take at least four paragraphs to explain, the Gehenna-2000 is a one-man interdimensional containment chamber of sorts located in the non-time interval between the end of this life and the beginning of eternity.

It's not as complicated as it sounds. If you've ever watched Star Trek, just think of this chamber as something that operates on much the same principal as the ship's transporters. What happens is that, when you die, and you've been sinful, your atoms will have a distinct dark hue. When a certain shade of darkness is reached, rather than disperse and re-join with the All That Is, your atoms will be sucked into the nearest Gehenna-2000 chamber where your body will be reconstructed and reanimated to the extent that your nervous system and your awareness of what's going on will be quite intact. In layman's terms, your soul is forced out of the body and made to enter this etheric chamber through one door, be subjected to the pain of four hundred non-etheric degrees for two minutes straight, be extracted from the chamber roughly through another door, and be extinquished once and for all.

Sounds like a bitch, I know, but consider the fact that Jesus negotiated with God on our behalf, and through an intensely hard-fought bargaining session (some bargaining session--he ended up on the cross!), convinced God to reduce the penalty for sin from an eternity of burning alive in Hell at two thousand degrees down to just two minutes in the Gehenna-2000 chamber at four hundred degrees followed by extinguishment. That's a victory in anybody's book . . . except Jesus' book I suppose. Goes to show that a changer-of-water-to-wine does not a good negotiator make.

The extinguishment clause of the contract is actually a good example of God's mercy--in the broadest sense of the word--because even if you weren't extinguished, and and even if you bore no physical scars from the experience, the psychological damage alone would be far beyond what even Jesus could heal on a Sunday afternoon after having rested all day Saturday. If you weren't extinguished, what good would you be to anyone? Hell, it'd be a thousand years before you would be even willing to just think about talking with someone about the experience.

But don't get the wrong idea about God. Before doing something like that to you, you'd really have to mess up . . . bad. You would have to have done something like spit on a statue of Jesus (in the face) while having illicit sex on a horizontal six foot crucifix (any position but missionary) with an unwilling Christian girl who's been reduced to tears as a result of your sick idea of foreplay--forcing her to account for biblical contradictions and inaccuracies while being heavily petted. Bottom line is that you've got to be a real bastard to find yourself materializing in the Gehenna-2000 after kicking the bucket. A real bastard!
So you see, there's a logical explanation for everything, including Hell.

Add consciousness and life, subtract virtue and nirvana and your left with hell. Just because we are forgiven doesn't mean nature is in order. Jesus must return for it.

No, there is not a Hell. Why would a being of love and light think it wise to torture others? To induce us to love it? Can you love that which causes you fear? Conversely, can you fear what you love?

I do not know how things got this way, free will I guess. But we are certainly living without absolute virtues. People manipulate logic, and reason all the time.

I just find it unbelievable that a holy being would call for a never-ending punishment. No lesson is to be learned from this punishment, and so it certainly appears to be the infliction of pain for the sake of pain.

I agree, but we are certainly living in something hectic. I think God is passive and we need to be like him. Until then there is a hell. The action of inaction. He's not punishing us we just don't know. Fallen light is what I say.

Perhaps when we allow the details of life on this planet to be dictated to us by those who crave the game of control, then Hell is in session.

So God must be loving-passive, and his fallen angel is just teaching us a lesson. The light bearer.

Nothing, from the smallest particle to the largest form, is simple. When we don't know who we are, or why we are, what else but Hell can follow? Of course, not knowing is part of the process of knowing. So, all is going as planned. What we create in our minds will be found to be real or unreal, and the Hell we experience will be proportional to the strength of the grip with which we hold our unreal illusions.

Simplicity is godliness.

Many on this planet have already 'lived through hell.' Starving to death in exermination camps were hell for many.

If god so loved the world, he would have made sure that such human suffering would have been eliminated.

Even jesus didn't suffer as much as so many humans have suffered for very long periods until death gave them peace.

What was the sacrifice of jesus all about?

Sometimes, the written word can be a trap. It is a fact that those who worship the written word are no more and no less than prisoners of symbols--symbols that form a chain-link fence around the mind. Such ones become willing captives, and once willing, they will not call into question those parts of the fence that are holey (wholly unholy), such as the idea that an evolved being would require/desire pain, blood, and suffering in order to forgive alleged lesser beings--lesser beings of its own making, no less! Once you refuse to be a willing captive to symbols, such ideas about an evolved being are spiritually untenable. You need to stop and ask yourself what such an idea indicates about what your God ultimately hungers for when angered--when push comes to shove.

It's like this: If God knows the beginning to the end, and the end from the beginning, then yes, he did indeed set both himself and his creation up for failure. Why would an evolved being knowingly and willingly create something he knew would fail? And why would he do that when he knew full well that his penchant for justice would consume even his mercy? If you want to define blasphemy, why don't you include the belief that a holy being is influenced by anger? And while you're at it, why don't you define narcissism as the belief that you can influence God--that you are in charge of his moods?

What would you think of a clay-master who stood looking over his creations which he has placed on a table in front of him, and who then decides to smash them under his fist because they weren't pleasing to his eye? Would you conclude that he was unhappy with the level of his talent/abilities? Or, would you conclude that the clay-master's creation's must have betrayed him? It's a no-brainer.

And then you have the notion of a ransom needing to be paid in order to redeem all of the future, flawed creations of this claymaster. So, he reaches up to the top shelf in his shop and pulls down a figurine that he is pleased with--one that doesn't have any flaws which he deems perfect--and he tears it apart, and then claims that doing so will allow him to overlook the flaws in the rest of his creations. Then he informs all the the other creations that the perfect figurine was torn apart to save them from being torn apart, and that they should therefore believe in this figurine, and that those who fail to do so will suffer an even worse fate than his favorite figurine which he has just subjected to public destruction.

Even more untenable is that this clay-master has even mandated that all of his creations--both present and future ones--will love him. But the question immediately comes to mind: can you love what you fear, and fear what you love? The answer, of course, is no.

The sacrifice of Jesus, if it is about anything, is about offering you a debt.

Let's face it; the whole message of the bible is full of contradictions.

Those who follow 'his' message (as in the bible) will be given eternal life in heaven. If those same people have 'free will' as they do on earth, what's to prevent these same humans from not sinning again, and again, and again....?

How many earths, heaven, and hell will there be?

Do people in heaven age? If not, when will their aging stop?

Will there be babies born in heaven?

How will everybody look when they reach their 1,000th year of life? How about 10,000? They must have all kinds of 'things' to do in heaven besides sex. Is marriage necessary in heaven? Who performs the 'rights?'

How will people make their 'living?' Will married couples get a tax break?

The problem with religion is one of projection. If god is an experiential phenomena, then it seems unlikely that people would be able to identify with one another's experiences, as one is always going to differ with another, even if only slightly. So, the problem isn't really one of relating to, or identifying with, one another, but rather, one of agreement.

Someone says, "Mary is the mother of Jesus, and should be the focus of our worship." Someone else says, "No, Jesus is the son of God, and should be the focus of worship." Still another says, "You're both wrong. Buddha is where it's at." And then along comes others who say that the holy text proves that God favors their kind more than he favors the rest because of their obedience.

Before you know it, each person is building a shrine to their favorite version of saviour. And the next thing you know, even the ones who agree on just who is top dog in the realm of saviours will begin to disagree with each other as to the meaning of the words of the text they all embrace. Soon after, they choose up sides and begin work on yet another building to serve as a shrine to their particular interpretation of the words of the chosen text.

So, after you convince the masses that there's something greater than themselves that they need to pay homage to--someone or something they owe a debt to--there's no way to stop them from choosing sides. In fact, if you wanted to put a wedge between people, you couldn't come up with a more efficient means than religion.

If there is no Heaven, and there is no Hell, what is there?