Ho hum. Religious people never cease to annoy me with their babble about an intimate knowledge of hell — especially American Evangelical Christians. Hell is a mythologica lconcept first recorded by the ancient Egyptians and was later adopted by other cultures in the Middle East. But it really took off when the American Puritans and Evangelicals jumped on the hell bandwagon.
I much prefer Satre's vision of hell in his play 'No Exit', in which he contends that "L'enfer, c'est les autres," translated as "Hell is other people.".
Visions of Hell
"Bill Weise is a clean-cut real estate agent from Southern California. His wife, Annette, describes him as emotionally stable, churchgoing and certainly “not a complainer.”
Yet Weise can’t stop talking about what happened to him on Nov. 23, 1998, the night he tumbled into one of the raging theological debates of modern times, the night he was plucked from his bedroom and sent straight to hell.
“We came home from a prayer meeting on the night of the 22nd, went to bed, and at 3 o’clock in the morning, the Lord picked me up and dropped me off in a prison cell in hell,” Weise explained in a recent television interview. “I did not realize where I was, but I noticed immediately the heat.”
Sharing his cell, Weise says, were two 13-foot-tall reptilian creatures, pacing around and cursing God. When they noticed Weise arrive, the first one set about breaking Weise’s bones against a stone wall, and the second one used its huge claws to tear the flesh from Weise’s body. Later, Weise beheld a lake of fire crammed with sinners, and was carried up a long tunnel to kneel at the feet of Jesus before being returned to his house in California. It’s a story Weise has spread worldwide since the release of his book: 23 Minutes in Hell: One Man’s Story of What He Saw, Heard and Felt in That Place of Torment.
The funny thing about hell is that a decisive majority of Americans believes it is an absolutely real place, but those who try to describe what goes on there come off sounding like lunatics. . . . . . "
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