Here is a new video that I just published entitled "Literalist doctrines of Hell refuted: Scriptures of the Bible are Celestial Metaphor."
As I publish this post pointing to this video, the Moon is going through one of the more spectacular total lunar eclipses I've seen -- while squarely within the "multiple heads" of the glorious constellation Scorpio. As you will see, the constellation Scorpio features prominently in this video.
Above towers the powerful shape of the mythologically-important constellation Ophiuchus. The Milky Way stretches up and across the sky beside Ophiuchus and through Scorpio, and you will see the Milky Way playing a central role in the discussion in the video as well.
This video's examination of the literalist doctrines of eternal damnation and endless torment in the fires of hell was inspired by a sign which I saw while driving through the "blue highways" of southern Oregon on my way to the Scablands trip (described in preceding posts):
And, as the video explains, this sign is obviously using the threat (still deeply ingrained in our consciousness, absorbed from the wider culture within which we live and move from childhood) of condemnation in hellfire for ever and ever after death -- a literalist dogma still taught today and still used as a motivation to mentally coerce acceptance of literalist teachings and belief (as well as to coerce rejection of traditional sacred ways inherited from generations and generations of ancestors, among those cultures which have not long ago been converted to literalist Christian ways).
But as the video explores briefly, and as my analysis over the past decade and more has found, the texts of the books we call the Bible show at every turn that they are built upon the same system of celestial metaphor which forms the foundation for the ancient myths and sacred stories around the globe. Their stories and symbolism reflect specific constellations and heavenly figures in our night sky -- very strong evidence that they are metaphorical in nature, and not literal
When we try to force a literal reading upon these ancient sacred texts, we do not honor them but rather dishonor them, and invite misinterpretation and in fact the downright inversion of their profound message for our lives.
The literalist teaching which threatens eternal punishment in the fires of hell for "the lost" provides a powerful example of just this kind of inversion of the ancient message. It is a doctrine which is undeniably designed to inflict mental anguish, discomfort, and trauma upon men and women -- to say nothing of the effects of describing such threatening visions to children.
The doctrine of "eternal condemnation and torment in hell after death for the lost" is no fringe teaching in the literalist Christian project: it is in fact a central doctrine, standing behind the literalist arguments that everyone should be urged to accept their literalist interpretations (mis-interpretations) of the biblical scriptures.
And yet this trauma-inducing literalist teaching is gravely mistaken.
The stories of the Bible can be shown to be built upon celestial metaphor, from first to last and from Genesis all the way to the Revelation of John. The story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent, upon which many literalist theologians rely for "justification" of the threat of condemnation and eternal torment, can be shown to be celestial metaphor -- as can many of the images and phrases describing "hell" or Hades in the ancient biblical scriptures.
Indeed, the pattern of these celestial metaphors associated with hell in the Bible give us a strong indication of the actual location of hell -- and it may be (just as Alvin Boyd Kuhn argued more than 80 years ago) that we are in it right now, in this incarnate life, this "lower realm" through which we presently sojourn (in these bodies metaphorically said to be composed of the lower two elements of earth and water, aka "clay").
Alvin Boyd Kuhn disgustedly declared that the literalist misinterpretation of the Bible's metaphorical descriptions of hell constitute "an unconscionable distortion" and an "outrageous delusion" and wrote that: "The perversion of original teaching regarding the lower fire has cast over the collective mind of the western world the foulest hypnotic obsession which it has ever suffered" and that this suffocating doctrine of hell has "compressed the spiritual genius of that segment of mankind [i.e., the Christianized segment] into the coldest and most inhuman bigotry known to history."
This video explores just a few of the celestial metaphors in the scriptures which suggest that the biblical concept of hell is metaphorical -- indeed, that it is esoteric metaphor, designed to teach us something very different from what we might think based on the concepts of literal hell which remain current in the popular consciousness right up to the present day.
I hope that the information and analysis in this video will be a blessing to you in some way.
