Robert Bell fumbles and TIME drops the ball<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Robet Bell's much publicized book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, has been the stuff of hot debate in\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2011\/04\/robert-bell-fumbles-and-time-drops-the-ball.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Robert Bell fumbles and TIME drops the ball\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Robet Bell's much publicized book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, has been the stuff of hot debate in\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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{"id":3415,"date":"2011-04-20T09:24:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-20T09:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2011\/04\/robert-bell-fumbles-and-time-drops-the-ball.html"},"modified":"2011-04-20T09:24:00","modified_gmt":"2011-04-20T09:24:00","slug":"robert-bell-fumbles-and-time-drops-the-ball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2011\/04\/robert-bell-fumbles-and-time-drops-the-ball.html","title":{"rendered":"Robert Bell fumbles and TIME drops the ball"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Robet Bell\u2019s much publicized book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, <\/i>has been the stuff of hot debate in recent weeks.\u00a0 In short, he has decided that the doctrine of Hell\u00a0is wrong.\u00a0 When people ask why I moved to the historic Christian faith of the Catholic\/Orthodox traditions, I give you Robert Bell.\u00a0 Protestantism suffers from the fundamental flaw: Who gets to say what the eternal truths of the universe are?\u00a0 I\u2019m not talking new moral teachings or reflections on old ethical standards, some of which can, in all honesty, be informed by new revelations and discoveries and insights in the course of human history.\u00a0 I\u2019m talking a fundamental building block of the Faith itself.\u00a0 Bell has said hell just isn\u2019t what it used to be.\u00a0 And I defy any traditional Protestant minister who disagrees to explain by what authority he or she disagrees. <\/p>\n

And yet, when this debate hits the MSM, you get pieces like this one<\/a> over at TIME.com.\u00a0\u00a0 Basically TIME, in this case\u00a0featuring Bill Saporito,\u00a0illustrates the time honored proverb that the press understands less about religion than donkeys do about physics.\u00a0\u00a0The \u2018article\u2019\u00a0falls back on the old skeptic\u2019s stereotype that religion is all about people using hell to scare folks into their pews so that someone can live the high\u00a0life most people only dream about.\u00a0 Really.\u00a0 Read the article.\u00a0 According to TIME, the only reason the doctrine of hell exists is to scare people into giving money.\u00a0 Sometimes I wish journalists would just go away, but then we need someone to tell us what Lindsay Lohan is up to. <\/p>\n

For my part, I ignore just about anything the media has to say about religion, unless it\u2019s an actual live interview with a religions leader.\u00a0 And then I take it at half face value.\u00a0 By the way, we all know about Blaise Pascal\u2019s famous mathematical preference for believing in God.\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t mean the doctrine came from Pascal\u2019s calculator.\u00a0 And speaking of using doctrines to make money, maybe next time we can examine some media outlets deliberately promoting false data and information in order to increase dwindling readerships.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"