Would you still serve God if there was no hell in which to be punished for your evil? Would you still serve God if there was no heaven in which to be rewarded for your good? Would your behavior change at all?
I would venture to say that most church-going Christians serve God, not out of a desire to be in relationship with God, but out of a desire to avoid hell. If there was no hell, they would not serve God, or at least would not continue to live the way they do morally speaking. While desiring to avoid hell is natural and a good motivator for initially deciding to serve God, it is a very poor motivator for continuing to serve God.
I don’t necessarily want you to respond in the comments section with your answers, but I do think this is something worth thinking about in the way of self-evaluation.
Update on 6/21: A new study appearing in the Public Library of Science journal, PLoS ONE, has evaluated crime rates involving 143,197 people in 67 countries over a span of 26 years and found that crime rates are lower in nations that believe in the possibility of some sort of divine punishment after death, and higher in nations that do not (or that only believe in divine rewards after death).
Thinking to Believe 
June 7, 2012 at 5:39 pm
I think we all go through our struggles in our faith. Serving God and going to heaven is our greatest good but it is easy to lose focus and that desire to dim. That being the case I think most people would follow God to the extent they feel it suits them at the time.
A strong sinful desire maybe enough for someone to give in and reason what does it really matter? Sin is not so bad after all… God does not have any desire to punish sin so by that measure it cannot be so bad if the punishment ought to fit the crime.
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June 7, 2012 at 9:54 pm
I would wonder what kind of God would allow injustice to go unpunished and why did Jesus have to die?
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June 8, 2012 at 11:07 am
Have a look at agnostic atheists to get an idea how one might behave without any fear of hell. Atheists tend to be underrepresented in prison populations, too, which suggests there is no need for divine threat in order for people to be good.
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June 8, 2012 at 10:32 pm
Thankfully!
Google: covenant morality for humanity- the presumption of humanism.
Yeshua needn’t have died! Rational people have better ways of expiation than blood sacrifice! And since no first Adam existed, and it is irrational to speak of original sin, ti’s absurd!
I’m having computer difficulties.
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June 8, 2012 at 10:34 pm
[…] viaWould you still serve God if there was no hell? « Theo-sophical Ruminations. Like this:LikeBe the first to like this post. […]
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June 19, 2012 at 6:39 am
There is no hell
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June 19, 2012 at 1:12 pm
If I responded in kind, I guess I would have to say, “Is so.”
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June 29, 2012 at 1:10 pm
For whosoever believeth in him would not perish, but have everlasting life.
from this I get, if you don’t believe and go to heaven to live forever, then you die, perish, which means cease to exist. Nothing about eternal suffering.
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June 29, 2012 at 1:22 pm
Eternal suffering HAS to be part of the bible. It is the only way to both control the masses, and feel pompous about their own beliefs. I know that there are several places that speak of hell in the bible, and if I’m not mistaken, Jesus went to hell after he died. I don’t believe in empty threats of men who wrote books a couple of thousands years ago. Here’s a comment that shows that hell is another way of weeding out all religious competition…
Amen! Jesus called the scribes and Pharisees the children of Hell. The Pope is a child of Hell. Every Catholic priest is a child of Hell. Every Lutheran minister is a child of Hell. Every Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, Catholic, Seventh-Day Adventist, Scientologist, Christian Scientist, Moonie, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Wiccan, Muslim, Judaist, Lordship Salvationist, and New Ager is a child of Hell.
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June 29, 2012 at 5:31 pm
Revelation 20:10-15 “And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever. … The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. … If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.”
Sounds like eternal torture to me.
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May 29, 2013 at 7:33 pm
if there was no heaven or hell i dont think most christians would live the same but i look at characters in the bible and it seems as if they were not after heaven but truth and God gave them that pure truth their is a lie in how we live as human being to get by
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June 28, 2013 at 5:46 am
I think the threat of hell motivates us to seek truth, but only God can give us revelation that salvation is needed.
To answer this honestly, I think the threat of hell really needs to be absent. For those of us who have accepted Christ’s sacrifice for the remission of our sin’s…the possibility of going to hell HAS been removed. Now… how do we feel about serving God or returning to our sin?
I know that my relationship is based on faith, love, gratitude, and the fact that God is the creator of all things including me. If He created me, then He must love me, because I’m sure He doesn’t create junk. It has been my experience that once the threat of spending eternity in hell has been removed from my life my adoration for Christ has blossomed.
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October 25, 2013 at 12:09 am
i want to serve God in order to go to Heaven. He warned Christians who keep the talent God gave them. Mathew 25;14-30 we are to find out our callings, if haven,t confirmed one, can serve God in any way to please Him and He’ll show u more ways to serve Him. one can fail to get to Heaven because of not serving God. He surely knows the potential of every christian, for we are not equal. we must work our salvation with fear and trembling.remember he wants a church without a wrinkle nor spot. so its not a matter of just believing and concentrating works that are ending. there’s a great reward in serving God. in fact we invest in Heaven that way
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October 25, 2013 at 11:13 am
Kaahwa, you may want to think twice about looking forward to heaven. According to what the actually Bible says…it’s not as pleasant as you might think:
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October 23, 2014 at 10:22 am
The rituals of the Christian “faith” are merely an attempt to be “redeemed” from the mythical underworld of Zeus’ brother Hades (or Loki’s daughter Hell, if you prefer your scripture translated into Norse mythology.) These mythical underground realms of pain for the “unsaved” are predicated on a flat earth cosmology. Besides, Christianity is a late-comer to the salvation game. Plato refers to Homer’s observation of evangelical proselytizers in the 8th century BCE, as follows:
“[…] they perform their ritual, and persuade not only individuals, but whole cities, that expiations and atonements for sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of the living and the dead; the latter sort they call mysteries, and they redeem us from the pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us.”
~Plato (4th century BCE) The Republic. (Book II.)
classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html
There is no mythical underground “hell.” The world is round. Relax.
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October 24, 2022 at 6:49 pm
No I wouldn’t, being a Christian isn’t great at all. Been saved since 14 w a real relationship w god I am now 34 and I never in all my life felt this way about god, Im tired, I don’t feel free. Im tired of having to repent for every little thing because nearly everything is a sin. Why create sin and the devil only to blame humans for doing it, why create hell for satan and his fallen angels only to cast him to earth to “temp” mankind? So now we are in some stupid spiritual warfare created by him, FOR WHAT? …to see who we will choose?. We might as well be a video game. Ppl will die and go to hell all because they don’t believe in god? Is that fair? We are just expected to believe in a being you can’t see and most times can’t feel or hear? So if a random person says unicorn exist we suppose to just automatically believe? So how why do you put pressure on ppl who don’t believe to believe? How is that their fault? I grew up in curch and I believe…I have siblings how also grew up in curch and they just didn’t connect to it like I did so I can’t say growing in curch means you will be a believer, but if you grew up a Buddhist and been taught about budda how can god blame them for not believing in him and cast them to hell for all eternity?…dosent seem fair…Oh but wait I’m not allowed to “question god” so my questions are invalid and void! Back to being a sheep and living for god in misery, being this slave to righteousness or face Judgement.
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