If Christians believe in forgiveness, why do people spend eternity in hell?
965429
There has to be a consequence.  The Lord has set commandments and guidelines we are to follow in order to achieve the eternal life he has promised.  Along those same lines, he cannot go back on his promise of the consequences for inaction or defiance of his laws.   That's why we have this life.  It is the time to prepare to meet God.  Do all that he has asked to the best of our ability.  If we slip or make a mistake, we have repentance,  In the end, when we are judged, Christ's sacrifice and atonement will make up the difference for those things we may have lacked in.  He's set this plan in front of you.  It's your choice to follow it or deny it.  It's your choice, but there are consequences for those choices.
1124571
Can't think of anymore, I think I'm the only one answering that agrees with u, lol. There good though covered all the reasons i don't believe. Oh wait think I've got one if there is a heaven where do the animals go? They can't sin (or at least don't understand their doing it) so u can't send them to hell, but they can't pray, worship or believe in God so they can't go to heaven. That and what happens to all the people who where alive before Jesus? They were never told about God and Jesus hadn't been born so do they automatically go to hell? If they do God can't be that great of a being. You can't punish someone for a crime that wasn't a crime when they committed it.
21490
God doesn't want to send anyone to Hell He made Hell for satan and his followers. God doesn't "send" you to Hell. You go there because of your sin. And with sin you can't be near God. So you spend eternal separation from Him. God loves you and he wants you to go to heaven but he loved you so much that he gave you the will to choose if you wanted to worship and love him. So before Jesus died for our sins it was very hard to get into heaven. So God died for His world that He created and made a way into heaven. And that is Jesus. The Way, the Truth, and the Light.
771005
Good question -- the same can be said about this business of torturing people FOREVER in hell just because they could not believe the gospel.  (It is rather hard to believe in invisible things, or in things that one is told and for which there is no proof.)  But if God loves to hate the people he supposedly loves, then that's the way it goes.
230631
I'm not going to hell because hell does not exist.  There is no afterlife at all.  Conciousness is simply the result of interactions of neurons.  When this activity stops, the conciousness ceases to exist.  \n\nAlso, stating that others are going to hell is not very kind, which I would be inclined to say runs contrary to Christian morality.  You should think before damning others to hell.\n\nUltimately, threatening people with imaginary punishments is not going to convince rational individuals to join your psychosis.  It will only serve to further convince us of your ignorance.
568753
In order to get forgiveness as a christian you have to believe what you did was wrong.  You can just go willy nilly and ask to be forgiven if you're just going to do it all again in five minutes.
231691
Difficult to answer this question because "Hell" is either (a) a very specific mythic system from Christian religion, or (b) a general type of negative afterlife experience from many religions.\n\nThe Christian idea of Hell, to be brief, evolved out of the older Jewish idea of Gehenna, which in turn evolved out of Zoroastrian beliefs of the afterlife.  The first religions to develop the idea of a place of terrible punishment for actions committed in life into which we are transported after physical death were the Zoroastrians of Persia (present day Iran) and the Jains of India.  The Jewish Gehenna was more of a temporary holding place with punishment, closer in spirit in fact to the contemporary Catholic idea of Purgatory.\n\nThe ancient Egyptians have the first recorded idea of after-death punishment, but not so much for crimes committed in life as for other questions.  This was the terrible afterlife to which your soul (technically, since we are talking ancient Egyptian religion, one of your seven souls, but the immortal and personal one, that corresponds to the contemporary Christian idea of the soul) would be consigned by Anubis after weighing your heart against a feather.  If you were found lacking, into the abyss with you, to be devoured by the Crocodile Goddess Maat (this wasn't eternal punishment, though, for once you were devoured extinction followed, whereas the keystone of the Christian hell is permanence).  If you were judged worthy, the Egyptian afterlife guardians sent you to the Western Lands to await immortality.\n\nMost early religious history does not emphasize punishment after death.  That was partly a historical development, believe it or not, of the idea of civil law.  Once the earthly idea of judgment and punishment based on a code of conduct appeared (that would be starting with Hammurabi, of course, but it was under the Greco-Roman legal system that it became so much more central), a spiritual equivalent emerged also.
778432
I consider myself Christian, born and raised. My family has never been strict about it though. I don't believe that non-believers will go to hell. I do however believe that if you KILL, rape, or lead a life without morals, that you will suffer in your own hell that you caused others.
1103515
Christians will find a way to justify anything they want to do.  A religion founded on 'forgiveness of sin' promotes amoral behavior.
630473
Everyone is a sinner but if they ask for forgiveness from God they are set free. Not all sins are the same, some like shoplifting do minor damage to people while murder ruins entire families. Also the consequences are much greater, but God will forgive any sin if we just confess them and ask for forgiveness. When you have a personal relationship with Jesus you don't want to sin, you still do but you learn from them, and try not to do them again.
13610
God is not this vicious being that punishes people by casting them into Hell for their sins. That is a made up tale by religious that wanted to scare the crap out of people into submission. The only Hell that exists is in your concsious when you pass over. Every one of God's children are given the opportunity to go Heaven (or the Light, whatever you want to call it) as long as they can see the errors that they made while on Earth..yes, this even includes some really horrible people (Manson,Hitler). Everyone has a shot at redemption. If people choose not see acknowledge their misdeeds and refuse to go with God, then they are left wandering about in their own self made dillusions and bitterness until the time they are ready to be councelled.
980653
Hello, \n\nGod is very loving, why would God who is loving and forgiving send us to burn in hell? That goes against everything God stands for, doesn't it? But when we sin he wants to forgive us, in fact 2 Peter 3:8, 9 says, "However, let this one fact not be escaping YOUR notice, beloved ones, that one day is with Jehovah as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. Jehovah is not slow respecting his promise, as some people consider slowness, but he is patient with YOU because he does not desire any to be destroyed but desires all to attain to repentance." (I welcome you all to look this up in your own personal copy of the Bible) \n\nSo you see, not only does He want us to repent, He is also patent with us. How loving! Don't you think? It goes with His personality in fact we have the scripture at 1 John 4:16 that say "God is Love" which is very straight forward. So again, this would go against God’s personality. But back to your original question on Hell, do you know that after you die you are conscious of NOTHING of at all. Ecclesiastes 9:5 tells us that "For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten." So if all bad people were going to be burning in hell, this would go against what the Bible says, and we know God can not lie. Titus 1:2 says "In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began." Then we have the scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16 that says all scriptures is inspired by God.\n\n\nPsalms 146:4 "His spirit goes out, he goes back to his ground; in that day his thought do perish." So again, here we see that our thoughts are gone. If we were going to burn in hell, don't you think it would make sense that we would be aware of it. \n\n\nEzekiel 18:4 "The soul that is sinning it itself will die." Notice that it doesn't say that it will burn in hell, just that it will die. And as we learned above in Ecclesiastes 9:5 the dead are aware of NOTHING. \n\n\nHell is nothing more than the common grave of mankind. Webster’s Dictionary says that the English word "hell" is equal to the Hebrew word Sheol and the Greek word Hades. In German Bibles Hoelle is the word used instead of "hell"; in Portuguese the word used is inferno, in Spanish infierno, and in French Enfer. The English translators of the Authorized Version, or King James Version, translated Sheol 31 times as "hell," 31 times as "grave," and 3 times as "pit." The Catholic Douay Version translated Sheol 64 times as "hell." In the Christian Greek Scriptures (commonly called the "New Testament"), the King James Version translated Hades as "hell" each of the 10 times it occurs.—Matthew 11:23; 16:18; Luke 10:15; 16:23; Acts 2:27, 31; Revelation 1:18; 6:8; 20:13, 14.\n\n\nThe question is: What kind of place is Sheol, or Hades? The fact that the King James Version translates the one Hebrew word Sheol three different ways shows that hell, grave and pit mean one and the same thing. And if hell means the common grave of mankind, it could not at the same time mean a place of fiery torture. Well, then, do Sheol and Hades mean the grave, or do they mean a place of torture?\n\nBefore answering this question, let us make clear that the Hebrew word Sheol and the Greek word Hades mean the same thing. This is shown by looking at Psalm 16:10 in the Hebrew Scriptures and Acts 2:31 in the Christian Greek Scriptures. Notice that in quoting from Psalm 16:10 where Sheol occurs, Acts 2:31 uses Hades. Notice, too, that Jesus Christ was in Hades, or hell. Are we to believe that God tormented Christ in a fiery hell? Of course not! Jesus was simply in his grave.\n\nWhen Jacob was mourning for his beloved son Joseph, who he thought had been killed, he said: "I shall go down mourning to my son into Sheo
274029
Jews do not believe in Hell, because by definition, Hell is the place for the ETERNAL punishment of the soul, in the next life, for the sins committed in this life. Although Judaism certainly believes in a punishment in the next life for the sins committed in this life, Jews do not believe in Hell because we believe Gd to be forgiving, compassionate, and merciful. So, the idea of an ETERNAL punishment makes Gd look Cruel, and prevents us from believing in a hell.\n\nEvery time in the Christian translation of the Hebrew Scriptures the text reads, 'hell,' it is a bad translation. The word usually MIStranslated this way is the Hebrew word, 'Sheol,' which comes from the same word meaning 'question', and so 'Sheol' is 'the Unknown.'\n\nBy the way, please note that the verse from Ecclesiastes reads:::\n\n         Ecclesiastes 12:7  Then shall the dust return to \n         the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return \n         unto Gd who gave it.\n\nIt says, 'the spirit returns to Gd,' not the 'Good Spirit,' and not even 'the Jewish Spirit.' Jews do not believe that only Jews go to heaven.\n\nFurthermore, if 'the dust returns to dust,' meaning that the physical ends, how can the tortures of a Christian hell be only physical, when there is no body to be tortured??
332841
A living person may feel like they are living in hell, but hell is hopeless and any living person is not. God is there offering His love and forgiveness. \n\nCatholics believe hell is a person's free choice to die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love and being separated from Him for ever.
802839
People who continually sin, without a conscious..need to check their salvation. If they don't turn there life around they will go to Hell BUT if you ask for forgiveness and mean it, (and turn from your wicked ways)..he will save you..
207997
No,just like people who were raised with a different religion throughout their childhood doesn't go to hell.There is no hell.Everything that we are is the way God intended it to be;If it wasn't,it wouldn't be.Man made the concepts of good and bad,not God.In reality nothing is really good or bad,it's our thoughts that make them so.
629689
Hell doesn't exist as most peole think of it.  \n\nHell is GOING to happen. It isn't happening now.  It can't be because God is just and fair.  Why would he burn Cain--for slugging his brother and killing him--for 6,000 years longer than Hitler--who tortured and killed millions of people?  God wouldn't do that.  He says he will come and in Thessalonians he says "the dead in Christ shall rise first, and then those which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with Him in the clouds and so shall we ever be with the Lord."  So there IS a resurrection. And He says "the judgement shall set..." so the judgement will happen at the end of time. "Then shall the wicked be BURNED UP like stubble."  \nAlso, if people were going to burn forever it wouldn't say they go to everlasting 'punishment' (as in the RESULT of their being punished is forever), it would say they go to everlasting 'punishing.' And it doesn't. And the Bible wouldn't say, "From dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return." \nSin cannot exist in God's presence and will be zapped by the brightness of His coming--at the resurrection. So hell is for the people who love sin and hold on to it. People who must hold on to sin will get zapped, too: Natural result. But Jesus said, "If you love me, keep my commandments." So those who love Him won't be holding onto sin and won't get zapped.\n\nAlso if people were burning in Hell forever, people would live forever, and the Bible says, "The soul that sinneth. It shall die."  You can't be dead and alive (in hell or anywhere else) at the same time, can you?\n\nSo now that you've had a little enlightenment on what hell is and isn't:  I'd run it just like that. Cuz God never makes mistakes.