I've been away for a few days. Among other things, I went through my book again, fixing mis-spellinx, typoes, spacing problems, and the like. The manuscript is looking good, and I'm shopping for a duplexing laser printer to print copies.
I saw this morning that I am being quoted, and I am flattered!
As I wrote, my notes becoming a long essay and that becoming a book, I set out to consider damnationism, annihilationism and reconciliationism as theological theories. While I wrote, I avoided any books on the subject, wanting to not be influenced. I found a few Scriptures that I could not wrap my mind around, and a few that seemed to support annihilatonsim - not enough, IMHO. I paid particular attention to verses which seemed to support damnationism. In them, I found a lot of bias and bad translating, well, in the KJV at least. In particular, I saw "judgement" rendered as "condemnation" and even as "damnation." I saw "sheol" rendered as "hell" whenever context allowed. "Hades" and "Gehenna" got the same treatment. "Tartarus" was rendered as "hell" too, but why hang theology on one instance of a word?
It goes deeper - half of the words translated as "hell," "hades" and "tartarus," come to us from pagan Greek mythology. I see a problem there of theological baggage.
In the end, after deconstructing many verses using "hell" without any good reason I could see, and failing to find that God had ever created the place, or ever threatened to send anyone there and no deaths recorded in the Scriptures were paired with a destiny in Hell, I found that the whole concept went "poof." Hell is a 404, folks. That is my report after months of intense study...which involved much more than I stated here.