Is Hell Real? People Who Went There Say Yes

Is Hell Real? People Who Went There Say Yes

David Sessions

“I felt a hot, needlelike pierce, excruciatingly painful, for a brief moment on the top of my head,” Botsford wrote in A Day in Hell, an account of what he experienced in the underworld during the 27-day coma that followed the shooting. “Utter darkness enveloped me as if thick, black ink had been poured over my eyes.” He later described being “hung over an abyss” as heat blasted up from below. Pairs of demonic eyes crept toward him before a divine entity grabbed him by the waist and said, “It’s not your time.”

Hell experiences further complicate matters for religious believers, because they have no discernable relation to what kind of life a person has lived. In other words, being a good person who goes to church is no guarantee that you won’t get into a terrible car accident and suddenly find yourself experiencing what feels, in a very real sense, like hell. As Bush has seen, “What we think people deserve has nothing to do with whether they have a glorious experience or a terrible one.”

I say no but everybody here knows my religious biases.

EDIT: Somebody on Quora has put my views very eloquently.

The Christian doctrine of hell derives from passages in the New Testament. The word hell does not appear in the Greek New Testament; instead one of three words is used: the Greek words Tartarus or Hades, or the Hebrew word Gehinnom.

In the Septuagint and New Testament the authors used the Greek term Hades for the Hebrew Sheol, but often with Jewish rather than Greek concepts in mind. In the Jewish concept of Sheol, such as expressed in Ecclesiastes,[48] Sheol or Hades is a place where there is no activity.

* Hades has similarities to the Old Testament term, Sheol as "the place of the dead" or "grave". Thus, it is used in reference to both the righteous and the wicked, since both wind up there eventually.[60]

* Gehenna refers to the "Valley of Hinnom", which was a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem. It was a place where people burned their garbage thus there was always a fire burning there.[contradictory] Bodies of those deemed to have died in sin without hope of salvation (such as people who committed suicide) were thrown there to be destroyed.[61] Gehenna is used in the New Testament as a metaphor for the final place of punishment for the wicked after the resurrection.[62]

Tartaróō (the verb "throw to Tartarus", used of the fall of the Titans in Illiad 14.296) occurs only once in the New Testament in II Peter 2:4, where it is parallel to the use of the noun form in 1 Enoch as the place of incarceration of the fallen angels. It mentions nothing about human souls being sent there in the afterlife.


And a summary of the etymology from the online etymology dictionary:

Old Norse Hel (from Proto-Germanic *halija "one who covers up or hides something")was the name of Loki's daughter who ruled over the evil dead in Niflheim, the lowest of all worlds (nifl "mist") It might have reinforced the English word "as a transfer of a pagan concept to Christian theology and its vocabulary"

I don't think there is a singular, definite Hell either.

I just wanted to post some of these accounts as reminders that not every account of the afterlife depicts some grand benevolent Plan or Order.