....there shall be false teachers among you,
who privily shall bring in damnable heresies,
2 Peter 2:1
"Bertrand Russell explained that if one wanted to be
* intellectually honest
* and scientifically informed,
such a person could not believe in God. He also rejected Christianity because of
* the doctrine of hell:
“There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character,” he wrote, “and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment . . . . I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him as His chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.”
Ellen G. White has a powerful comment on the damaging influence of a wrong understanding of the doctrine of hell: “It is beyond the power of the human mind to estimate the evil which has been wrought by the heresy of eternal torment.
The religion of the Bible,
* full of love and goodness, * and abounding in compassion,
* Is darkened by superstition
* and clothed with terror.
When we consider in what false colors Satan has painted the character of God, can we wonder that our merciful Creator is feared, dreaded, and even hated?" Jiří Moskala