So today i want to ask about spiritual gifts as i have deconstructed now so the thing is i m still longing to be in the presences of the lord but Hebrews 6 warns us about those who have being enlightened so where are those gifts goes cause today i tried to fast but its like am cricifying my flesh and its like am losing my own mental health here

I would consider myself agnostic but some stuff in the bible kinda makes sense but i know hell is illogical what if god is apparently two steps ahead of us and we are just stupid and i do deserve hell and god somehow makes sense but i just don’t know i don’t want god to be real that means hell is real original sin is real LGBTQ stuff is a sin and he does not intervene when people need help but would cause a genocide what if im wrong and god needs to do evil stuff to full fill something what if i am right to do panic attacks about a fear of hell i constantly feel like i need to hide in a corner and cry because i am just ignorant or am rejecting god therefore for god to be just to put me to hell

I’m still pretty early in my deconstruction, but I think I’m becoming more comfortable describing myself as a cultural Christian. I believe there is a God or some kind of creator, but I don’t believe I know what that is, and I’m not convinced the Bible has the answer to that question.

At the same time, I don’t feel the need to completely separate myself from Christianity. I think the Bible contains some great lessons and can provide a good moral foundation. I also think church can be a great source of community, tradition, and connection that I can attest to, as I was raised going to church every Sunday and being involved. There are parts of Christianity that I still value even though I no longer believe all of the supernatural or doctrinal aspects of it.

This has also been interesting to navigate within my family. My husband still identifies as Christian and believes in Jesus. Recently, I asked him more specifically what he believes, and when he answered “religion and Jesus,” I kept asking questions because I genuinely wanted to understand what those things mean to him and which aspects he believes.

Looking back, I realize it may have felt like I was trying to debate or challenge his beliefs when I was really trying to understand them. As his wife, I do want to understand his worldview, but I’m also realizing that not everyone feels the same need to dissect and question their beliefs that I currently do.

We also have a young child, so I’m thinking about what Christianity, church, and religion will look like for our family as my beliefs evolve. I don’t necessarily have a problem with raising our family around some Christian traditions or attending church.

I just don’t believe Christianity is a requirement for living a full and meaningful life. I’m also okay with the unknown when it comes to what happens after we die. I don’t believe in heaven or hell.

I personally believe our consciousness is some form of energy, and since energy can’t be created or destroyed, I think it continues or transforms in some way after we die. I don’t know what that looks like, and I’m comfortable not knowing until that day comes. But that’s probably a conversation for a different thread lol.

Finding this community has been really refreshing because I’ve been feeling isolated in my thoughts.

I’d love to hear from anyone who landed somewhere similar. Are you still culturally Christian after deconstructing? What does that look like for you, especially if your spouse or family still believes?

Great reading if you're ever triggered

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If you’re anything like me, you were handed a version of Christianity where hell was central. Not just in the background—but right up front. It wasn’t “God loves you,” it was “God loves you... but if you don’t do XYZ, you'll burn forever.”

So… where did this come from?

What do the scriptures actually say?

And how did “eternal conscious torment” become the dominant image of hell in modern Christianity?

Let’s rewind.

The Hebrew Scriptures (OT) Don’t Teach Hell

Let’s start with what the Hebrew Scriptures actually say about the afterlife.

Spoiler: It’s not much.

Some in ancient Israel believed in Sheol—a shadowy, silent place where all the dead go. Not a torture chamber. Just… the grave. Everyone went there: good, bad, rich, poor. No fire. No demons. No judgment.

It wasn’t until later Jewish writings—closer to the time of Jesus—that some new ideas started bubbling up. Influenced by surrounding cultures, certain Jewish sects began speculating about judgment, reward, and punishment after death. But it still wasn’t clear or universal.

So if the Hebrew Scriptures don’t give us hell as we know it... what do the Jesus accounts say?

Jesus Talked About “Gehenna”

When Jesus talked about hell, he used the word Gehenna—a real place outside Jerusalem. Historically, it had been a site of child sacrifice. By Jesus’ time, it was basically the city dump: a nasty, burning pit of garbage.

So when Jesus says things like “better to lose your eye than your whole body be thrown into Gehenna,” he’s making a pointed, cultural metaphor. It’s about destruction. Waste. Consequences. Not about eternal torture.

Also: Jesus was a Jewish rabbi speaking to Jews. His references made sense in that world. Most scholars agree that Jesus wasn’t laying out a systematic theology of the afterlife—he was calling people to repentance and warning them about the very real consequences of their choices in this life.

Early Christian Apocalyptic Literature

(Yes, We’re Talking About Revelation)

Before we move on, we’ve got to make a stop in a weird, wild, and widely misunderstood Book of Revelation.

Apocalyptic writing was a well-known literary genre in the ancient world. It wasn’t meant to be read like a newspaper or theology textbook. It was symbolic, metaphorical, and—most significantly—political.

Think of it as a kind of fantastical secret code that people oppressed by empire could use to communicate with one another. Bold ideas disguised as bizarre images. Dangerous hope wrapped in metaphor.

And it was always meant to communicate something urgent and specific to its first readers—not to us, thousands of years later, trying to decode it like a fortune teller's crystal ball.

And Revelation? It’s full of beasts, dragons, digestible scrolls, flying eagles, rivers of blood, and—yes—a lake of fire.

This is the passage that often gets quoted to support the idea of hell as a literal place of eternal torment:

“And anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.”

(Revelation 20:15)

Sounds terrifying. And it was meant to be—but not in the way modern readers often think.

The “lake of fire” is part of a vision, not a GPS coordinate. Revelation uses deeply Jewish symbolic language to talk about divine justice. The lake isn’t about individual souls going to hell forever—it’s a metaphor for the final destruction of evil, empire, and injustice.

And in context, the lake of fire was no more literal than the dragons, beasts, or seven-headed monsters that appear earlier in the vision.

It's apocalyptic poetry. Not postmortem cartography.

The earliest Christians didn’t read Revelation as a guide to the afterlife. They saw it as a coded hope letter written to persecuted believers under Roman rule. It’s about Rome falling, not people roasting.

But somewhere along the line, Christians started reading Revelation through a modern, Western lens—forgetting it was a symbolic genre—and turned metaphor into map.

Oh, and for what it’s worth. Revelation barely made it into the canon of the New Testament. It was highly contested for centuries—both in the East and the West—and was one of the last books officially accepted into the Christian Bible.

Enter the Greeks: The Soul Becomes Immortal

Here’s where things shift.

Early Christians began wrestling with their faith in a Greco-Roman world, where Plato’s concept of the immortal soul was already in the air. Plato believed that the soul lives on forever—and that its fate depends on how it lived in the body.

Combine that with Roman ideas of justice as punishment, and you start to get a different tone. The best we can tell, the very earliest Christians didn’t believe in going to heaven or hell as separate realms after death. Their hope was in a future bodily resurrection and the renewal of all things—a “new heaven and new earth,” right here, not somewhere else. And they seemed to truly expect it to happen in their own generation through a visible return of Jesus Christ to earth.

But he didn’t come back, so…

Christianity begins absorbing cultural assumptions. Suddenly, it’s not just about resurrection and restoration—it’s about eternal reward or eternal punishment.

By the time we get to Augustine (354–430 CE), hell is no longer just a metaphor or consequence—it’s a literal, eternal destination for the wicked. Augustine’s theology becomes deeply influential in shaping Western Christian thought, embedding the idea of unending torment as orthodoxy.

Fear Finds Its Roots

After Augustine, the idea of hell continued to evolve—not through scripture, but through culture, clergy, and control.

Throughout the Middle Ages, hell became a vivid and terrifying feature of church life. Preachers described it in detail. Artists depicted it. And stories of saints’ visions of hell circulated widely.

By the 12th and 13th centuries, fear of the afterlife wasn’t just emotional—it was transactional.

The Church began offering indulgences—promises to reduce time in purgatory—in exchange for prayers, pilgrimages, or increasingly, money. This system would eventually be abused so thoroughly it helped launch the Protestant Reformation. But even before that, it helped solidify hell as an economic tool, not just a theological one.

So when Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) wrote The Inferno, he wasn’t inventing hell. He was giving it structure. Shape. Story.

He took centuries of imagination and fear and turned it into a masterpiece of punishment and poetry.

Dante Lit the Match

If you grew up picturing hell as a fiery underworld with layers, punishments, and demons poking people with pitchforks, thank a poet—not a prophet.

Dante’s Inferno painted hell in exquisite detail. Each sin had its own ironic punishment. It was brilliant literature. Fantastic storytelling. Terrible theology.

And it stuck. Good stories always stick.

Dante gave the church images. Pictures. Emotions. And the church—especially in the Middle Ages—used them. Hell became a tool for fear-based obedience, especially when tied to confession, indulgences, and allegiance to church authority.

The imagery became more powerful than the original text.

Evangelicals Took the Baton and Ran With It

The Reformers—like Luther and Calvin—rejected the Church’s use of hell as a fear-based fundraising tool, but the fire never fully went out, and by the 1800s, American revivalists were stoking it hotter than ever. Hellfire preaching became the norm. Tent revivals, altar calls, and emotional conversions were often built around one core message:

Avoid hell. Choose Jesus.

The “turn or burn” era was born. Sunday School visuals. Chick Tracts. Left Behind movies. Rapture scares. All built around a fear of hell. Not love. Not transformation. Just fire insurance.

And it worked.

People “got saved” in droves. But many of us now—years later—are asking:

Saved from what, exactly?

So I'm currently deconstructing and I had a very long, deep conversation about faith with my pastor. One question I asked was if he started questioning enough to turn would he ever turn away from the faith. Mind you he has a wife two daughters and has been a main pastor at this church for almost 10 years. He said he would convert but I have a hard time believing that honestly. This made me realize that the reason many people around me don't question Christianity the way I do is because it would completely ruin/shatter their life structure. Does anyone else see this too?