Taken from: http://spiritualityhealth.

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threatened-hell

Rabbi Rami: Help! I’m Being

Threatened with Hell
I’m being hounded by evangelicals calling me a sinner and threatening me
with Hell. How can I make them stop?
Rabbi Rami: If you politely ask them to leave you alone, and they persist, I suggest
deepening the conversation by asking them questions like these: “The God I know
loves unconditionally, but yours loves only those who agree with you. Why would I
believe in a God who is nothing more than an extension of your ego?” and “For all
your insistence that God is love, all your talk is about eternal damnation and Hell.
Why do you believe in a God who scares you so?” Tell them the best way to
interest you in their faith is to live a life so filled with compassion and love that you
are compelled to ask how they achieve it. Living their faith well is more powerful
than talking about it endlessly.

What do you make of Ark Encounter, the new Noah’s Ark theme park in
Kentucky?
Two thousand years ago Rabbi Ben Bag Bag said, “turn her and turn her for
everything is in her” (Pirke Avot 5:19). The “her” is Torah, the Five Books of Moses.
Turning Torah is an act of literary creativity and spiritual imagination that
continually finds new meanings in this ancient and multilayered text. Ark Encounter
flattens the Bible into a one-dimensional cartoon incapable of turning. This is an
insult to the Bible, and anyone who loves her should be saddened by what has
been done to her.

Like you, I’m Jewish, but I’m not religious. What is your relationship to the
religion of Judaism?
Jews are my tribe. Judaism is my culture. But my religion is Perennial Wisdom, a
set of four truths found in all religions:

1. All life is a manifesting of a singular process (call it God, Tao, Brahman, Allah,
HaShem, Great Spirit, Nature, Mother, etc.).
2. We humans have an innate capacity to realize this process.

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 3. Living this realization means embracing all beings with justice and
compassion.
4. Achieving this realization and the life it engenders is the highest human
calling.
I am drawn to those Jewish texts, teachings, and practices that reflect Perennial
Wisdom; I am uninterested in those that don’t.

I’m an atheist (there—I said it!), but I’m also partial to Buddhism. Is there
such a thing as Buddhist atheism, Buddhism without supernaturalism?
In his very first sermon the Buddha said, “I teach one thing and one thing only:
suffering and the ending of suffering.” Original Buddhism was a-theistic, without a
God. As Buddhism spread across cultures it absorbed ideas from those cultures,
and it developed a variety of supernatural notions about which the Buddha himself
knew nothing. Two books might be of help to you: Stephen Bachelor’s Buddhism
Without Beliefs and Walpola Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught.

What’s the difference between organized religion and faith, and which of
these does the Bible support?
Organized religion is a system of ritual and belief governed by a clerical elite
whose primary concern is to maintain power and control over the religious. Faith is
the innate human capacity to awaken to and engage directly with Reality
manifesting in, with, and as all things. The Bible supports both. When the Bible
divides people into Chosen and not Chosen (Deuteronomy 7:6), sheep and goats
(Matthew 25:31–33), the saved and the damned (Mark 16:16) it is laying the
groundwork for organized religion. When God calls us to be a blessing to all the
families of the earth (Genesis 12:3), and when Jesus calls us to follow him rather
than worship him (Matthew 16:24), the Bible is speaking of faith. Religion is the
easier of the two. Faith the more desperately needed.

I can’t believe that we human beings with all our complexity and genius just
come to an end. Don’t you think we must survive death if our lives are to
have any meaning?
I don’t think our lives have meaning, I think living is about making meaning. In your
way of thinking meaning is dependent upon dying. My way is different: live
meaningfully now, and worry about the afterlife only if you find yourself living in
one.

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My neighbor blames hurricanes, tornadoes, and droughts on God’s hatred of
gay people, and yet she said nothing regarding the mass shooting at a gay
nightclub in Orlando. This was clearly an attack on gay people done in the
name of God. Why is she silent?
Here are two possible reasons: First, chances are the God invoked by the Orlando
shooter is not the God invoked by your neighbor, and while both Gods may hate
gay people, supporters of each are loathe to credit the other in these matters.
Second, invoking God to explain natural disasters is very different from imagining
God sending a terrorist as a servant of his wrath to murder 49 innocents. This
probably makes God more evil than even your neighbor can handle.

I’m impressed that almost every religion believes in Hell. Does this prove Hell
exists?
No, it only proves that religious leaders are good marketers. Religions, or rather
certain kinds of religion, use Hell the way toothpaste companies use halitosis, and
deodorant companies use body odor: to scare you into buying their product. The
fact that each religion reserves Hell for those who violate its particular set of sacred
behaviors and beliefs, and not those who violate the beliefs of other religions,
suggests that each religion uses Hell for its own benefit. Rather than worry about
Hell, do something to make earth a bit more heavenly.