Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for July 23, 2010

scitchfaster - Again I find your comments condescending. -““Love your neighbor as yourself” is a nice sentiment, but teaching that anger puts you on the road to eternal damnation is kind of screwed up, don’t you think?”

To answer this, first I will say that it is not at all a nice sentiment. Love Your Neighbor is a great goal and for anyone to really do it takes a lot of dedication - I get frustrated by others every single day, and at myself too. It is a Big Idea, not a nice sentiment - it is a challenge, and one that is very hard to fulfill.

And as for being on the road to damnation, again you are just not thinking it through. Consider who suffers when you don’t love your neighbor? Maybe the neighbor, but surely yourself - you are the one who carries around the tension inside. Medical science has shown us in no uncertain terms that stress contributes negatively to our lives. So who suffers? we do, when we don’t meet the challenge, when we miss the mark (which is a fair translation of the word “sin”).

The concept of Hell is interesting too. The Biblical word translated as “Hell” was “Gehenna” which referred to a garbage/refuse dump located just outside of your typical Bible-era town. There were often fires there when people needed to burn away the trash. So one might conclude that to go to Gehenna was to be cast away from God, which if you are a believer in God is perhaps the worst fate imaginable.