Every christian believes in hell....(Unless they are reading the Reader's Digest instead of the Bible)
I am a Christian. I believe in Hell because I have personally seen it in Hitler's death camps. I have personally talked with people who put infants of Jews to death by letting them starve in "hospitals". I have talked to women whose babies inside their wombs were kicked to death by anti-abortion protestors outside Planned Parenthood clinics, when they were going there for prenatal care and not abortions. i have seen protestors outside prisons asking for the death sentence for those already declared innocent but not yet released from prison by DNA evidence. All of these folks quoted scriptures, including words of Jesus, for these acts. This is hell on earth, we
have already seen it and tried to ignore it, while stating Biblical verses and platitiudes so we don't have to do anything about it. Some of my so-called Christian friends even imagine Jesus in an F117 stealty bomber, destroying hospitals with terrorists in them, saying it was God's plan that these civilian Muslims died because they didn't believe in Jesus.
These things are, in fact, hell on earth, inflicted by people who call themselves Christians. Not once, EVER, did Jesus use your ltype of anguage against a sinner UNTIL he had healed them or solved their life crisis. Only then did he admonish them to sin no more, but5 not with the negative and rejecting language I see here in this holier-than-thou follow-the-rules-of-0so0me-theologian I see here. For people he hadn't yet personally met, his most common statement in one way or another was "judge not". Not one of these hellish situations exist if every so0called Christian took actions out of love for neighbor to correct whatever horrors or quandries these people find themselves in. When's the last time you offered to give your lunch every day for however long it took, so that a pregnant mother had adequate food so that she didn't feel the need to abort the baby she knew would be disabled because she didhn't have proper nutrition? Drug use? What have you done to do whatever was necessary to get them not addicted and thurn their life around? Oh, I see, too inconvenient, blame it on them, tell them they need to be saved while they are in a drug stupor. Makes you feel good that you said this real aggressively, too, I imagine, to get some of the judgemental hatred off your mind. Convince yourself that this is exactly what Jesus meant about showing love for your neighbors. Don't forget to find the verse where Jesis said this will be easy and without sacrifice on YOUR part (haha, you'll nothing Jesus said except it will be hard on YOUR part, the disadvantaged have no obligation to make it easy for you.)
To talk to someone about their sinful ways before helping them out of whatever sinful situation they are in, is harmful because it demeans the person without offering God's grace first as a way out. Doing what we know is harmful is hardly showing love for neighbor. Sure you can point to isolated verses out of context that can refute my statement. But you can't find any verse, even out of contxt, where Jeses spoke to a person in need about not sinning, or listening to God, or whatever, until he had fixed their situation first. Does this give you a clue about your Bible quotiong malicious holier-than-thou self-righteious excuses for not actually doing anything in pesonal interaction with one of the "sinners" you speak about? You are the empty clanging of bells Paul speaks about in Corinthians 13 about love. Your words and quotations of scriptures are worse than useless.
I discovred last week that Jesus has a nice red pickup, but he doesn't know how to drive it. My father was driving me somewhere, and this really nice honker of a red pickup truck cut right in front of it and my dad had to slam on the brakes. Dad say, "Jesus Christ, learn how to drive!" That about the level of scripture quoting Christians are at, they shoot out Bible verses as expletives for those they don't like, doing nothing to correct those people's actual lives.
