RETIRED Episcopal bishop Reverend John Shelby Spong has dropped another religious bombshell by revealing that he believes hell is an imaginary concept invented by the church to coerce people into joining it.  

Over recent weeks, there have been serious question marks raised about the veracity of many of the claims made by Abrahamic faiths. Last week, the Catholic Church said it no longer believes Jesus Christ will come back, pointing out that he probably made the promise to after taking too much wine. 

This debate has been fuelled further by Reverend Spong, the retired American bishop of the Episcopal Church who served as the Bishop of Newark from 1979 to 2000. He added that religions are out to control people, so hell is probably another one of its inventions designed to frighten people into signing up. 

Reverend Spong added: "I don’t think hell exists. I happen to believe in life after death but I don’t think it’s got a thing to do with reward and punishment. 

"Religion is always in the control business and that’s something people don’t really understand. It’s in a guilt-producing control business and if you have heaven as a place where you’re rewarded for you goodness and hell is a place where you’re punished for your evil, then you sort of have control of the population." 

According to Reverend Spong, Christianity has created this fiery place which has quite literally scared the hell out of a lot of people, which is part of a control tactic. He added that God is not a Jew, Muslim, Hindi, Buddhist or Christian and all these faiths are human systems created by man. 

"I think the church fired its furnaces hotter than anybody else but I think there’s a sense in most religious life of reward and punishment in some form. The church doesn’t like for people to grow up because you can’t control grown-ups, that’s why we talk about being born again. 

"When you’re born again, you’re still a child but people don’t need to be born again, they need to grow up. They need to accept their responsibility for themselves and the world," Reverend Spong added. 

He pointed out that the idea that the truth of God can be bound in any human system, by any human creed, by any human book, is almost beyond imagination. According to Reverend Spong, his religious traditions only lead him to God and do not define God.