The Concept of Hell is mainly a political manipulation tool

If you look at how the concept of Hell has been applied down through the centuries it is sort of like the Playground bully who says to kids, "If you don't give me your lunch money I will break your nose or hand". So, gangs of humans who eventually organized into various governments around the world said to their people, "If you don't do exactly as we say you are all going to hell because God made us your leaders." Before human rights especially this was how things worked. And according to the laws of chivalry whoever won a conflict over an issue was "honored by God" so in order to be able to kill someone while others watched meant that God smiled upon you. And so the other guy likely was "Going to Hell" in their way of thinking because God didn't allow him to live.

However, if I look at all this it actually has nothing at all to do with Heaven or hell but only the "Law of the Jungle" and "Survival of the fittest or smartest or most cunning". So, over time the concept of Hell was used to scare children and very weak minded adults into doing whatever smarter and sometimes scarier people wanted them to do.

I think seeing things in this context is a very healthy way to study history because you start to apply scientific laws to how things actually happened and begin to see that the law of jungle always applied and it was "Just convenient" to make human rules apply to the Law of the jungle.

Another example is how many books of the Bible were banned during the council of Nicea. Some of the banned books advocated becoming like Jesus through Reincarnation were banned by Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora and they  put the Pope in Prison to make sure those books were deleted because  serfs who believed in Reincarnation and not in hell would be harder to make slaves of both mentally and physically.

So, basically the Bible today is what was left after it was all chopped up by the First and Second Councils of Nicaea.

Begin quote:
The First Council of Nicaea was a council of Christian bishops convened in Nicaea in Bithynia (present-day İznik in Turkey) by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in AD 325. This first ecumenical council was the first effort to attain consensus in the church through an assembly representing all of Christendom.^[5][6]
Its main accomplishments were settlement of the Christological issue of the relationship of Jesus to God the Father;^[3] the construction of the first part of the Nicene Creed; settling the calculation of the date of Easter;^[2] and promulgation of early canon law.<sup>[4][7][8]

end quote from:</sup> 

First Council of Nicaea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Then during the second Council of Nicaea happened in 787 AD

Second Council of Nicaea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Second Council of Nicaea

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Second Council of Nicaea
Date	787
Accepted by	Roman Catholics, Old Catholics, Eastern Orthodox
Previous council	(Catholic) Third Council of Constantinople (Orthodox) Quinisext Council
Next council	(Catholic) Fourth Council of Constantinople (Roman Catholic) (Orthodox) Fourth Council of Constantinople (Eastern Orthodox)
Convoked by	Constantine VI and Empress Irene (as regent)
Presided by	Patriarch Tarasios of Constantinople, legates of Pope Adrian I
Attendance	350 (two papal legates)
Topics of discussion	Iconoclasm
Documents and statements	veneration of icons approved
Chronological list of Ecumenical councils

The Second Council of Nicaea is regarded as the Seventh Ecumenical Council by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Eastern Catholic Churches and various other Western Christian groups. It met in AD 787 in Nicaea (site of the First Council of Nicaea; present-day İznik in Turkey) to restore the honoring of icons (or, holy images),^[1] which had been suppressed by imperial edict inside the Byzantine Empire during the reign of Leo III (717 - 741). His son, Constantine V (741 - 775), had held a synod to make the suppression official.
The veneration of icons had been abolished by the energetic measures of Constantine V and the Council of Hieria which had described itself as the seventh ecumenical council. These iconoclastic tendencies were shared by his son, Leo IV. After the latter's early death, his widow, Irene of Athens, as regent for her son, began its restoration, moved thereto by personal inclination and political considerations. end quote from wikipedia.

The main reason I put quotes regarding the first and second Councils of Nicaea is that in some ways all this only created more confusion. It would be sort of like if everyone made hamburgers in different ways and all these people got together to force everyone to make hamburgers lets say just like McDonalds. It doesn't mean ALL the other ways of making hamburgers were wrong, it just meant that anyone who made hamburgers in any way different than McDonalds would be killed, burnt at the stake, told they were witches and drowned or hanged. This was basically the way churches turned Christianity into a hell for the average person starting with the first Council of Nicaea and extending this kind of "One size fits all" kind of thinking into the domination of the minds of the average person. Well, you could think and worship any way you wanted to but if you actually talked about that other way to people your tongue might be cut out, you might be hanged, burned at the stake, tortured to death along with all your family. To my way of thinking if this wasn't Hell for the average person I don't know what is

And so by killing and torturing everyone that didn't like McDonalds hamburgers so to speak we come down to Christianity today where a lot of people still don't like McDonalds hamburgers but maybe now they have not much of a choice of doing anything else. So, this was how Jesus' great religion was turned into Hell over the years all the way to now.

However, I suppose there also may be another way to look at it. One might also say that the masses were ignorant uneducated fools and the only way to get us here to now was to torture any of them who got out of line and to put their heads on pikes all around the castle walls for everyone especially their children to see the crows and other birds eat out their eyes and then their brains over the next several months. Hooray for Christianity. Too bad there were no psychologists back then but the priests who were a part of the McDonalds system.

I'm sorry I got sort of cynical here. Trying to reconcile any religion's killing and mayhem is pretty difficult. I think it is why I tend to support all the good things that religions do around the world but I am also very upset with how all the people who were tortured to death in front of their kids or burned at the stake unnecessarily. I hope the world in the future has learned its lessons and never has to get that insane anymore.