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When Love is Not Enough: Hell, by Miss Poppy Dixon Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. What would Christianity be without Hell? For all the complaints from the religious right about violence on television and in the movies, their own lurid fantasies about the afterlife make the slasher/gore genre tame in comparison. Unable to put their trust in the love and grace of Christ they bludgeon would-be converts with fear and terror. You have to wonder what these people, who so enjoy terrorizing others, would be doing if their malevalence were not sublimated in Christianity. For myself, and for many of our readers, raised in Fundamentalist or Evangelical homes and churches, Hell is a very real place that rational thought often fails to dismantle. Nonetheless, I will review the history of Hell in hopes of shedding a little light on this very dark subject.  In all but the tail end of the First Testament, when you're dead, you're dead. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The dead reside in "Sheol," which translates as "grave" or "pit," the place where the body is buried. Even Paul, who wrote the first writings of the New Testament, does not speak of Hell, but says simply that the "wages of sin is death." (Romans 6:23) It wasn't until the later Gospel of Matthew that Hell became a full-fledged place of eternal punishment. Both Heaven and Hell rest on the concept of the resurrection of the body, a belief that came out of Egypt and blossomed fully within the Persian religion Zoroastrianism (circa 600-700 BCE). (2) According to Zoroastrianism everyone, good and bad, is purified by fire. For the good this is like a "bath in warm milk," but for the evil "it's like hellfire." (3) In Mark 9, Jesus is quoted describing Hell, "For every one shall be salted with fire." Towards the end of the First Testament (circa 130 BCE) the name "Gehenna" begins to appear. Gehenna refers to the valley of Hinnom, a garbage dump south of Jerusalem. Fires burned there continually for sanitary reasons as dead animals and abandoned human corpses were incinerated there. In the 7th and 9th centuries BCE the Bible reports that children were sacrificed there to the God Moloch. You can almost hear parents of this era threatening to send their misbehaving children to Gehenna. Most Bible scholars agree that Jesus actually said very little about Hell, and that later writers added the threatening statements for dramatic purposes. Hence it is of the highest theological importance that the images of Gehenna do not belong to Jesus' poetic vocabulary. Scholars who have researched the parables are agreed that those images were subsequently inserted into the body of Jesus' parables (mostly by the Matthew-community). All the divine tribunals and images of Hell that appear in Jesus' parables are later interpolations, and in some cases they actually wreck the structure of the original parable. (4) Religious scholar Uta Ranke-Heinemann in her book, PUTTING AWAY CHILDISH THINGS, provides several examples where Jesus taught in the temple and the streets, quoting First Testament scripture, and omitting references to God's punishments or vengeance. (5) It is obvious that hellfire and damnation were not part of Jesus' ministry and that these things were developed later by the governing church. The word, "Hell" derives from the Norse goddess of the dead, "Hel." Hel was the protector of the dead and hid them safely in her realm. From the name "Hel" we get the words "hall," "hole," and "helmet." The development of an alternative to the realm of Hel was a necessity in warrior cultures. Dead heroes did not go to Hel but were resurrected in Valhalla - a sort of Paradise. The creation of a Paradise motivated warriors and their families to support war efforts. Over time, by comparison, Hel became a place of punishment.
For those of you who would like a preview of Hell, please use one of the following links, which replicate the eternal, torturous sounds of Hell better than anything I could possibly imagine. Definitely not for the squeamish!
NOTES (1) Illustration modified from a graphic at Seed of Abraham Motorcycle Club, Inc. [back] ONLY THE BEST HELL LINKS  The Truth About Hell, Dial the Truth Ministries' hell page. Includes an article from the "well respected Finland newspaper, Ammenusastia" telling about a Communist drilling crew discovering Hell. They've recorded the agonizing screams for you to hear! Remember, "Jesus Christ took hell very serious!" OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS Immortality or Resurrection? by Samuele Bacchiocchi, Ph. D., Hell: Eternal Torment or Annihilation Bible Translations That Do Not Teach Eternal Torment, by Gary Amirault. Also check out their What the Hell is Hell? The All-Encompassing Work of Christ, by Larry and Betty Hodges Can This Be True?
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In the fourteen and fifteenth centuries depictions of the torments of Hell became more pornographic. Naked men and women were shown tortured and tormented in sado-masochistic displays. Paintings show men and women bound and staked with animals devouring their breasts and genitals. While many of these depictions were purely fanciful, others mirrored the real psychosexual tortures of the Inquisition. Hell provided a way for "moral" people to spuriously enjoy pornographic images under the guise of moral instruction.
Two overtly sexual themes recur in the representations of Hell, the mouth of Hell, and Satan with a ravenous face in his lower groin. As with the 
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