hell

[miriam_e]

Christians are fond of saying the Bible is a good book, with good moral messages, and while it does have some of those, it also propagates immorality, for example it endorses slavery, and the belief that women are items to be owned, or are, at best, second-class humans. But the worst thing the Bible does is to promote the idea of hell. I've met people who spent their childhood terrified that they or those they love would be tortured forever in this fictional place.

I'd been told on a number of occasions that hell doesn't appear in the Bible until the New Testament, so on a whim I decided to check.

I have a few digital Bibles, but the one I refer to most is Project Gutenberg's King James version (pg10). Some time ago I broke it into 2 parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Linux extended grep command (egrep) let me search those two text files with pattern matching regular expressions.

egrep -c '\<[hH]ell\>' "Old Testament.txt"
egrep -c '\<[hH]ell\>' "New Testament.txt"

The expressions "\<" and "\>" mean word boundaries. The square brackets match any characters in them, so "[Hh]" will match capital and lowercase letter h. The -c option tells grep to just print how many matches it counted, instead of the actual matching lines that it normally would.

It turns out the word "hell" appears 31 times in the Old Testament and 23 times in the New Testament. However I realise that there are other places, at least in the New Testament, which talk of hell without using that word, for example in Matthew 25:41

"Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels"

It is easy to prove hell doesn't exist. Using it to terrorise people is, in my opinion, the most evil thing the Bible is used for. And not just because it traumatises people, but also because it was the rationale used by the Inquisitors to torture people to death. They genuinely believed that it is better for a person to endure hours or days of torture to convert them to Christianity than to spend an eternity being tortured in hell. It would make a perverted kind of sense if it wasn't founded on deception.

The concept of that imaginary place is, itself, probably the worst evil perpetrated by the primitives who wrote the Bible.

EDIT: I've now checked the New International Version (NIV), and in that one the word "hell" doesn't turn up until the New Testament. So it seems my original information was correct and my check of the KJV was misleading.