Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

Here are two religious/philosophical attitudes I don't understand: I've finally figured it all out. I now have all the answers to life to the extent that a human can, and therefore I have no need of further research or analysis. I will feel comfortable arguing them down to the smallest jot and tiddle until the day I die. I can never truly know anything so why bother composing a consistent worldview? The more I learn about the history of ideas, the more I see how ridiculous it is to think we moderns have it all figured out. I'm not studied nearly enough to be able to tell if humanity has been building progressively towards more accuracy, or simply cycling through an array of truths and falsehoods. I lean towards more truth. At least within the Church Universal. (I'm sure that's a term that's already been taken, but I plead ignorance and am using it to denote the collective of all true believers throughout time.) I thi...

Before I start let me lay down a simple outline, lest you think that my arguments in the beginning are the meat of my objections to Hell™. Here's the basic premise for this essay: Our current conception of Hell™ shrieks out of tune with the rest of scripture. Besides contradicting the way God describes Himself, the idea is also amazingly sparse and marginal for a concept that would be the most important thing to a human ever. The word Hell™ has evolved from its original meaning and the fact that it is retroactively applied to the words Sheol and Hades is misleading. The words that have been translated as forever and eternal, etc. are shown over and over again not to mean those things. They are selectively translated to mean eternal only when applied to death and Hell™. Jesus taught using parables, analogies and metaphor. The fact that He talks about Jerusalem 's burning junk yard and uses it as a symbo...