Do you believe in 'hell' ?

Not the mythical 'hell' of Dante's 'Inferno' ... what does the bile say about 'hell' ?

The question itself needs explaining first ... 'hell' is simply a rather poor translation into the [old] English word for a hole in the ground ['sheol' in Hebrew, 'hades' in Greek] ... these two original words do not mean a hole in the ground , nor do they correspond to Dante's fictional novel about an 'Inferno' , which captured 'chrsitian' imaginations so much that many people sadly believed it ,that hell is burning , and a place of torment of the dead!

'hell' in the Bible scripture is thus a very poor translation and a term which was given popular fictional belief by people believing what Dante wrote , despite that book having nothing to do with the scriptural 'hell' and that it was purely a fictional work

the 'hell' of scripture would perhaps better be translated as the 'unseen state' of a soul when the body is dead and the spirit has returned to God who gave it ...

God has said He will resurrect all , both just and unjust, that He has to keep track on what the life [soul] of any given body was like ... this 'memory' of the soul between one life and the next is the meaning behind the words translated 'hell'

it is thus absurd to talk about suffering in hell, one can get nowhere flogging a dead horse, it is as pointless to punish a dead man ... Solomon explains clearly :-

Quote:
Ecclesiastes 9:5 ... the dead know not any thing, ...
There is no sense of death in death at all no sense of passing time , no sense of anything that happens to the body in the grave or wherever one's 'dust' ends up ... and the spirit cannot suffer since it is of God and not physical , but spirit ...

The life of the body, it's soul, comes from the spirit animating the body... the soul is thus created , it is simply life beginning in a body... and when the spirit returns to God the body is dead, no life, no soul... but God will re-create the soul, so it has to be remembered what it was like...

Quote:
Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man
Quote:
became a living soul.

Ecclesiastes 12:7 Then [at death] shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

Revelation 20:13 And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; anddeath and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.

Thus I believe in what is translated poorly as 'hell' in many bible translations, but it is very different from what it is in the minds of most people when they use the word 'hell'

We would do well to find a better word for it then , calling it the 'unseen state of the memoy of life held b God to be able to restore life in resurrection' sems a bit clumsy , but it is more accurate to the scripture ... I cannot find a good word for it because people do ot understand it and so do not have a word for it ...

if one calls it 'unseen state' ,people misunderstand that a if it were a place ... perhaps the best one I came up with is that it is the 'memory of God of one's life, by which He promises to resurrect one in the new earth, if not before then , if one has died at all...

So I believe in a sort of a 'hell' , but it is nothing like what most people think of as hell, it is based only on what scripture says about 'hell' [which is substantial work to unravel ]