quotations about Hell
We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
God Is Not Great
For then will be the incorruptible Judge,
the terrible judgment-seat,
the answer without excuses,
the inevitable charges,
the stern punishment,
the endless Gehenna,
the pitiless Angels,
the yawning hell,
the roaring stream of fire,
the unquenchable flame,
the dark prison,
the rayless darkness,
the bed of live coals,
the sleepless worm,
the indissoluble chains,
the bottomless chaos,
the impassable wall,
the inconsolable cry,
none to stand by me,
none to plead for me,
none to snatch me out.
LANCELOT ANDREWES
The Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes
Is Hell supposed to be figuratively interpreted? This debate partly pivots on the different interpretations of words and how they translate through language transitions, for example, from the original language to Greak and Latin. This is a complex debate beyond the scope of this book but I totally agree with the conclusions of most Christian commentators that Jesus taught this doctrine. Even if the "real" Jesus did not teach it, the Jesus Christ of the Bible, the character invented by the gospel writers and the early Church did, and this is the larger than life fantasy figure that has shaped history. We have to define Hell in literal terms because this is being true to the original intentions of the gospel writers. The original intention of the founders was to think of Hell as a cosmic torture chamber with literal torments. They took the belief from their surrounding culture which had absorbed hell-fire notions possibly from Persian Zoroastrianism which propounded a literal belief in Hell and from other sources, among them the Essenes and Pharisees, who at the time of Jesus believed in Hell. Jesus had ample opportunity to condemn the belief that was an accepted part of the theological currency of his era but he chose to adopt it as a keynote ingredient of his central salvation message.
CHARLES SAYER WILSON
Sex and the Devil's Wager
Is hell a physical place? Yes and no. When people die, their soul leaves their body and they're no longer physical. The Bible says when people who are ultimately headed for hell die before Christ's return, they're separated from the presence of God but they're not in a physical place because they're not physical. In that sense, hell is probably not a location, but it's a real part of the universe. It's like you go through a door into another kind of existence.
LEE STROBEL
The Case for Faith
Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy
escapees from hell, escapees destined eternally to
reenact their escape.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
General Security: The Liquidation of Opium
Hell doesn't exist. Paradise doesn't exist.... they are only subjective dimensions of our minds, crystallized in ether formed by our active thoughts. In these regions our inner sufferings last and multiply.
MAURIZIO CAVALLO
Beyond the Heavens
Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
As Heaven is the object of our deepest desire, Hell is the object of our deepest fear. Our hearts are so deep that we don't even know our deepest desires and fears very clearly. But we do know that these two things match each other: our deepest desire is to be freed from our deepest fear, and our deepest fear is that we fail to attain our deepest desire. So if our deepest desire is to be in a love relationship with God--with infinite understanding, infinite love, and infinite beauty--then our deepest fear is to fail to attain that deepest desire forever, to have no hope of attaining it anymore. That's why in Dante's Inferno the sign over the gate of Hell reads: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
PETER KREEFT
Because God Is Real
God too has his hell: it is his love of man.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell, unless it is the sorely limited mind that has failed to describe heaven.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
God Is Not Great
Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
There are materials enough in every man's mind to make a hell there.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
I have no fear of the Hereafter. An orthodox hell could hardly be more torture than my life has been.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
letter to Tevis Clyde Smith, Jul. 1925
There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"The Moral Problem,", Why I Am Not a Christian
As for the gates of hell, is there any other institution in Christendom which compares with this for immovability, authority and impressiveness?
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
The Religion of the Plain Man
Make no mistake: Hell is punishment--but it's not a punishing. It's not torture. The punishment of hell is separation from God, bringing shame, anguish, and regret. And because we will have both body and soul in the resurrected state, the misery experienced can be both mental and physical. But the pain that's suffered will be due to the sorrow from the final, ultimate, unending banishment from God, his kingdom, and the good life for which we were created in the first place. People in hell will deeply grieve all they've lost.
LEE STROBEL
The Case for Faith
If heaven is where people become fully human, then hell is the ultimate disintegration of what it means to be human.
SEAN MCDOWELL & JONATHAN MORROW
Is God Just a Human Invention
Maybe there is no hell. Of course, it's a gamble to live as if hell doesn't exist, because if we're wrong, the result could be disastrous.
GARRY POOLE
How Could God Allow Suffering and Evil
All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.
C. S. LEWIS
The Great Divorce
To those who wish to punish others -- or at least to see them punished, if the avengers are too cowardly to take matters in to their own hands -- the belief in a fiery, hideous hell appears to be a great source of comfort.
STEVE ALLEN
Steve Allen on the Bible