For a religion without a god (not even a benevolent one, never mind one filled with malice), and certainly without a devil, Buddhism has an unseemly preoccupation with torture. Buddhist hells—and there are many of them—are filled with pain, and Buddhist writings...
Three issues of physics are in play in the Netherworld. Firstly, the fires of hell need no fuel and do not consume what they burn—that would rather defeat the purpose, for it would have ended sinners’ torment too soon, which would not do. So hell’s designers...
Did Pope Francis earlier this year (before the tsunami of negativity about priestly abuses) really scoff at the notion of hell? Did he really muse to an (atheist) Italian journalist that there was no theological justification for the eternal torment of...
Was Satan always a Fiend? Well, no. Was he always evil? Nope. The scholar Elaine Pagels points out that in the early lore of the Hebrews (whence came Satan, after all) Satan was not a being but an attitude – “satan” being the Hebrew word for adversary. Later, “the”...
Recent Comments