The Non-Existence of Hell (Religion)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, September 30, 2010, 03:26 (5167 days ago) @ David Turell


> > It's possible as a reformed Jew that they chose not to teach about Gehenna? 
> > 
> > If that's not Hell... I don't know what is.
> 
> In Reform Judaism as I was taught, there is no Hell and Heaven is: "Don't worry, if you follow the Lord, He will take care of you." what you are studying in mystical Judaism, which is a whole special branch. At my level in Reform, Kaballah is not considered.
> 
> So there are branches: Mystical, Ultra-Orthodox (mainly the Sephardic), Regular Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist. 
> 
> So we are both correct, in a way.-I... hate to be a bother, but when the Christian Bible mentions Sheol explicitly (and Sheol again, is an aspect of the "punishing" afterlife) I find it quite hard to deny that Judaism as a whole when taken with Rabbinic literature abandons the concept of "hell." Filtering to Balance_Maintained's insistence that there is no hell in Christianity, I'm forced to be skeptical. If the phrase (which in the OT is translated merely as "Grave" became something more powerful to the 2nd temple Jews (a very pessimistic and apocalyptic (in the modern sense) lot--it is quite difficult to deny hell. But when we consider that Kabbalism can easily be extended to exist back in Solomon's time--"Solomon's Seal" has had mystical importance to more than just Jewis mystics. I would posit (from the Spanish Shepardic Jews that wrote the Zohar) that Kabbalic mysticism was more prevalent than one would think...

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"