Sunday, March 04, 2007

All About Hell

I watched some of an interesting program today about Hell. Here are some of the things I learned about Hell w.r.t. different religions - Alvaro I know you know a lot more about this topic, so if you can give more info about any of this, I would really appreciate it!

Christianity
- Lucifer vs. god
- infinite hell
- literal hell
- Dante - the first to associate behavior with different punishments - 7 rings of hell.

Islam
- no devil, only god
- god's wrath needed for people to serve him, but his mercy overcomes his wrath, therefore...
- finite hell
- hell is both literal and logical
- very few people go to hell

Hebrew
- no afterlife
- however there exists reward and punishment after death

Buddhist
- not creator base
- hell not a place but state of existence -> negative rebirth
- no divine god but your own karma

Chinese Buddhism
- multiple realms of hell
- finite hell until unwholesome karma they created exhausted and reborn in more fortunate

1 comment:

Unknown said...

They should have started with Zarathustra... wasn't he the one who started this all good vs. evil thing? I would assume that this notion would include a hell by default :-P Then again the greeks didn't have this good vs. evil grand battle and they did had a hell... or did they? More just like an afterlife. But they did punished people; e.g. Sisyphus.