The Will-To-Good Group

- a virtual organization -

Special Topics

On Heaven and Hell

"The spirit of man is undying; it forever endures, progressing from point to point and stage to stage upon the Path of Evolution, unfolding steadily and sequentially the divine attributes and aspects.  This truth involves necessarily the recognition of two great natural laws; the Law of Rebirth and the Law of Cause and Effect.  The churches in the West have refused officially to recognize the Law of Rebirth and have thereby wandered into a theological impasse and into a cul-de-sac from which there is no possible exit.  The churches in the East have over-emphasized these laws so that a negative, acquiescent attitude to life and its processes, based on continuously renewed opportunity, controls the people.  Christianity has emphasized immortality but has made eternal happiness dependent upon the acceptance of a theological dogma: Be a true professing Christian and live in a somewhat fatuous heaven or refuse to be an accepting Christian, or a negative professional Christian, and go to an impossible hell - a hell growing out of the theology of The Old Testament and its presentation of a God, full of hate and jealousy.  Both concepts are today repudiated by all sane, sincere, thinking people.  No one of any true reasoning power or with any true belief in a God of love accepts the heaven of the churchmen or has any desire to go there.  Still less do they accept the "lake that burneth with fire and brimstone" (Rev. XIX:20) or the everlasting torture to which a God of love is supposed to condemn all who do not believe in the theological interpretations of the Middle Ages, of the modern fundamentalists or of the unreasoning churchmen who seek - through doctrine, fear, and threat - to keep people in line with the obsolete old teaching.  The essential truth lies elsewhere.  "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap" (Gal. VI:7) is a truth which needs re-emphasizing.  In these words, St. Paul phrases for us the ancient and true teaching of the Law of Cause and Effect, called in the Orient the Law of Karma.

The immortality of the human soul, and the innate ability of the spiritual, inner man to work out his own salvation under the Law of Rebirth, in response to the Law of Cause and Effect, are the underlying factors governing all human conduct and all human aspiration.  These two laws no man can evade.  They condition him at all times until he has achieved the desired and the designed perfection and can manifest on earth as a rightly functioning son of God."

- The Reappearance of the Christ, p 146-147,  by Alice A. Bailey

"There is as you well know, no angry God, no hell , and no vicarious atonement.  There is only a great principle of love animating the entire universe; there is the Presence of the Christ, indicating to humanity the fact of the soul and that we are saved by the livingness of that soul, and the only hell is the earth itself, where we learn to work out our own salvation, actuated by the principle of love and light, and incited thereto by the example of the Christ and the inner urge of our own souls.  This teaching anent hell is a remainder of the sadistic turn which was given to the thinking of the Christian Church in the Middle Ages and to the erroneous teaching to be found in the Old Testament anent Jehovah, the tribal God of the Jews, Jehovah is not God, the planetary Logos, the Eternal Heart of Love Whom Christ revealed..."

- Esoteric Healing p 393, by Alice A. Bailey