The Origins of Christian Hell

Kyrtatas, Dimitris J.

doi:10.1163/156852709x405017

Cited by 25 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Without the old rules, death also became much more present because it was used as a means of imposing the new rules, as will be argued below. Being conscious of a future death did not fit into a religion based on the old rules and was therefore given a separate place situated after life: the afterlife [ 49–51 ], with heaven and later hell [ 52 ]. Hell was an attempt to force the religious rules on people by fear.…”

Section: The Gods and The Old Rulesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A general theory of consciousness III: The human catastrophe

Peper

2024

Communicative & Integrative Biology

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It is generally assumed that verbal communication can articulate concepts like ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ accurately. However, language is fundamentally inaccurate and ambiguous and it is not possible to express exact propositions accurately in an ambiguous medium. Whether truth exists or not, language cannot express it in any exact way. A major problem for verbal communication is that words are fundamentally differently interpreted by the sender and the receiver. In addition, intrapersonal verbal communication - the voice in our head - is a useless extension to the thought process and results in misunderstanding our own thoughts. The evolvement of language has had a profound impact on human life. Most consequential has been that it allowed people to question the old human rules of behavior - the pre-language way of living. As language could not accurately express the old rules, they lost their authority and disappeared. A long period without any rules of how to live together must have followed, probably accompanied by complete chaos. Later, new rules were devised in language, but the new rules were also questioned and had to be enforced by punishment. Language changed the peaceful human way of living under the old rules into violent and aggressive forms of living under punitive control. Religion then tried to incorporate the old rules into the harsh verbal world. The rules were expressed in language through parables: imaginary beings - the gods - who possessed the power of the old rules, but who could be related to through their human appearance and behavior.

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Section: The Gods and The Old Rulesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A general theory of consciousness III: The human catastrophe

Peper

2024

Communicative & Integrative Biology

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“…These are only the two most popular views on the subject. For instance, some put forward the idea that mortal and immortal beings meet different fates in the second death, with the former being annihilated and the latter being tortured forever; see Caird 1984: 260; Kyrtatas 2009: 287.…”

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confidence: 99%

Crafting the Eschaton: The Second Death and the Lake of Fire in Revelation

Woodington

2019

Journal for the Study of the New Testament

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The idea of a ‘second death’ (Rev. 2.11; 20.6, 14; 21.8) is found nowhere else in the NT except for Revelation. One of the more striking characteristics of the second death in the Apocalypse is its equivalency with ‘the lake of fire’ (Rev. 19.20; 20.10, 14-15), a phrase unique to John himself save for a few temporally distant Egyptian sources. By exploring why John might have been motivated to identify these two concepts directly with each other, one can better appreciate the creative rhetorical work he has performed in order to inform his readers about the nature of the eschaton.

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“…205 Christian Hell was thought about extensively by Christian thinkers who were not contributors to the Bible. 206 Hell, as a concept, was already present in the Jewish imaginaire and N.…”

Section: History Of Christian Hellsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infelicities in Agraria

Woods¹

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<p>In his study Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities; Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire, Steven Collins aptly argues that as society transitioned from the nomadic to the agrarian, imaginaires were constructed to provide ideological buttresses for the new political order. Such an imaginaire revolved around a set of felicities, that is to say, supplementary imaginary worlds, that promised post-mortem rewards which compensated for worldly injustice. Collins takes as his paradigmatic case study the Pali Buddhist world, and in this case, the imaginaire constituted centres on nirvana. As working parts of this imaginaire, the various felicities provided an incentive for adhering to socially acceptable behavior, and thus helped maintain stability by compensating those who suffered the costs of the agrarian social arrangement. Collins argues that similar systems of felicities could be found in other agrarian states. In a previous paper, I applied Collins's theory to Latinate Christianity, with surprising results. Collins’s theory was correct, in that Latinate Christianity did share a similar felicity structure; however, Latinate Christianity was also greatly preoccupied by Hell, and often contrasted felicities with infelicities. In Collins's schema, by contrast, there is little room for infelicities. In this thesis, I intend to re-examine Collins’s argument for the Buddhist case, expanding his vision of the Buddhist imaginaire to include a set of infelicities and the structures they constitute. Thus, this study will compare infelicities from both the Buddhist imaginaire and the Latinate Christian imaginaire. A comparative study presents the potential to create a hypothetical structure of infelicities, that may be applicable to infelicities presented in religions outside of Buddhism.</p>

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The Origins of Christian Hell

Cited by 25 publications

References 11 publications

A general theory of consciousness III: The human catastrophe

A general theory of consciousness III: The human catastrophe

Crafting the Eschaton: The Second Death and the Lake of Fire in Revelation

Infelicities in Agraria

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