The Invention of Hell

This video is over a year old.  But it just came to my attention:



Why would Spong say such a thing?  The church invented hell? Well, not the church alone, but the church in cooperation with the state (government).  The church took the pagan notion of hell, invented by ancient governments to control the masses, and used it for its own intentions.

Polybius, the ancient historian, says: 

"Since the multitude is ever fickle, full of lawless desires, irrational passions and violence, there is no other way to keep them in order but by the fear
and terror of the invisible world; on which account our ancestors seem to me to have acted judiciously,
when they contrived to bring into the popular belief these notions of the gods, and of the infernal
regions."

Strabo, the geographer, says:  

"The multitude are restrained from vice by the punishments the gods are said to inflict upon offenders, and by those terrors and threatenings which certain dreadful words and monstrous forms imprint upon their minds...For it is impossible to govern the crowd of women, and all the common rabble, by philosophical reasoning, and lead them to piety, holiness and virtue - but this must be done by superstition, or the fear of the gods, by means of fables and wonders; for the thunder, the aegis, the trident, the torches (of the Furies), the dragons, &c., are all fables, as is also all the ancient theology.  These things the legislators used as scarecrows to terrify the childish multitude."

Timaeus Locrus, the Pythagorean, after stating that the doctrine of rewards and punishments after
death is necessary to society, proceeds as follows:  

"For as we sometimes  cure the body with unwholesome remedies, when such as are most wholesome produce no effect, so  we restrain
those minds with false relations, which will not be persuaded by the truth.  There is a necessity,
therefore, of instilling the dread of those foreign torments: as that the  soul changes its habitation;
that the coward is ignominiously thrust into the body of a woman; the murderer imprisoned within the form of a savage beast; the vain and inconstant changed into birds, and 
the slothful and ignorant into fishes."

Seneca says:  

"Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, &c., are all a fable, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with vain terrors." 

Sextus Empiricus calls them "poetic fables of hell;" and Cicero speaks of them as "silly absurdities and fables" (ineptiis ac fabulis). 

Aristotle.

"It has been handed down in mythical form from earliest times to posterity, that there are gods, and that the divine (Deity) compasses all nature. All beside this has been added, after the mythical style, for the purpose of persuading the multitude, and for the interests of the laws, and the advantage of the state."