Hah! Light subject my behind.
- How big part idea of hell plays in your religiousness?
Very little. I remember when I was about 5 years old, being terrified by stories of burning alive in hell, in a basement along with the rest of the kids. I was so frightened, the youth pastors had to remind me that I had already been baptized and I was "saved." That's about it. After that, I became agnostic, and stories of hell never played a very big part of my personal faith even after I came back to faith later in life.
- How you manage to fit the idea of loving God and hellfire together? Is it possible?
It is when considering the justice of God, which is very reflective, in a sense. Christ demonstrates this: in one chapter (Mat 5) He says "blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy" and goes onto rather terrifying statements about how it's better to dismember one's self than to be cast into hell. Is He schizophrenic? I think most people behaving in this way might be considered to be, but Christ is consistent, and in the Gospels He reflects the attitudes, dispositions and such of those around Him (He had both followers and adversaries). So the character of God, in my view, is consistently reflective of a variable humanity.
His discourse on every sin being forgiven, except one, is useful in explaining this: if God is love, merciful, just and benevolent, Hell would be like a product of one's own creation in rejecting the character or nature of God as evil, in which case He can be perceived as a consuming fire, and these principles are demonstrated in the Gospels through the events leading to the crucifixion of Christ. So Hell would be like being unable to escape what one has imagined to be evil (though He never was), which could be very tormentuous.
That said, Hell can be seen as more of a state of being, a spiritual "place" which can be experienced on earth, rather than a physical locale. It's also not exactly something that's alien to the "redeemed." David wrote "If I make my bed in Sheol, behold you are there" and I assume he didn't just make that up out of thin air while he was alive, but rather, he was describing an experience, so in a sense it can be descriptive of the human condition in some cases, such that even saints can "go to hell," and be redeemed from it.
That these things are described as "eternal," I believe, is derived from the eternality of God.
- If you have changed your beliefs one way or another about this at some point in your life, want to share something about that?
Having experienced God in a way that was so far removed from any concept of hell, both totally removed my fear of condemnation, and explained to me how and why people perceive the presence of God to be hell.
