Guys help me clear something up.
So, Christianity is a missionary religion. It spreads its religion to regions without a religion in an attempt to convert. Christianity also has hell, and the majority of religions preceding Christianity didnt have a hell equivalent. Which makes the idea that hell was a coercive invention by missionaries to scare people into following Christianity a rational assumption. My question is IF this is true, and it's rational to think so so we'll consider it so, does it inherently invalidate all literary, metaphorical or other disciplinary interpretations of heaven and hell as merely just-so storytelling? Is hell being a deliberate creation of the church to coerce people through fear and hell being a metaphorical conceptualization of the idea it's possible for conditions to exist that are worse than death itself (for instance) mutually exclusive? Is the idea that ancient people believed the events of the Bible were literal AND that the biblical stories have moral, metaphorical and/or phenomenal so improbable it's invalid?
