""You feel that the Church has used stories about Hell to control people? Well, yeah!!!!""

It's not control per se that I disagree with. It's control by "Fairy Godmother" versus "Bogeyman".

Arrest jail time and execution are real, as are honours and knighthoods and the equivalents round the world.

Also that control has been misused for the material enrichment of the controllers. Go look at any major Catholic or orthodox Christian cathedral, or better still the Vatican, and see what they have accumulated, then consider how many poor people and sick people could be helped.

There are of course Christian churches which don't have the same riches, and they tend to be the more modern offshoots.

Our own Church of England owns huge areas of land, yet bullies parishioners to fund raise for maintenance costs of their churches.

None of that is a particularly edifying endorsement of the use of Heaven and Hel which has facilitated it.

Don T.