Chapter 3 of this series!

Today's myth: “Misbehave and you will go to Hell”

Scary hell
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This is a myth and when speaking with certain people it could also be considered a taboo, so this is kind of a controversial subject. I suppose this believe of “you must behave properly otherwise you will end up in some sort of hell in the afterlife” is perpetuated obviously by religious ways.

Certainly, there will always be people (perhaps the majority of the total population as of today) that really believe this is real, and might also believe this is the best way of getting people to act correctly and to live a life with good values.

I don’t agree with this way of promoting proper behavior... But why not?

Well, just imagine this:

Let’s say we have 2 teenagers we are trying to educate, let’s call them number 1 and number 2. And we say to number 1:

you cannot have sexual relationships without protection, otherwise you will end up in hell because God will punish you!

And then we go to teenager number 2 and say:

it’s better for you to use protection when having sexual relationships, because it protects you against AIDS and any other sexually transmitted infections, and believe me you don’t what those.

Decisions decisions
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Who do you think will end making the right decision because of the right reasons ?

In my opinion, it would obviously be the teenager number 2.

And the same happens with every other aspect of life. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of people in prison are extremely religious. They, despite having all these beliefs, end up committing horrible crimes. Perhaps they didn’t receive a proper education nor good and real explanations about why it is better to behave in a certain way and live a life full of good values.

People need to start to adopt lifestyles based on realities and not scary stories, and to make decisions understanding the fact it’s better for all of us to prosper by working voluntarily together (which is the same as having a proper behavior). The ultimate goal would be for people to be like this out of conviction and not out of fear because of some hell.

Ultimately, we are the one responsible for our own hell or heaven, we have the power to create our reality, and we do that through our decisions and interaction with the world.

And more importantly, we are the ones responsible for our own justice. It bothers me to see older and intelligent people, talking about afterlife's punishments!

This is a famous local economist from my country, tweeting "God will punish them" (when talking about our politicians) , in my humble opinion this is not the right way of thinking for the reasons I already explained