Sorry, I’m only seeing your response now (don’t know how I missed it earlier).

That there are many traditions and disparate beliefs held under one large umbrella — in this case, Christianity — only underscores just how fictional all of it is. Some people believe Hell is a place of eternal torment; others believe Hell is a place “away from God” (whatever that means). Ditto Heaven: Through the ages there have been competing ideas of what Heaven is or might be. What’s lost in the conversation among believers and apologists is any consideration that maybe, just maybe, all of these discussions are rooted only in pure ideas of the mind, that is, ideas that have no relevance to reality because … well, there is no evidence for the existence of Heaven or Hell.

The upshot? All these different Christian denominations — I’ve no doubt there are competing ideas within Hinduism as well — of which there are thousands in the world only points to what seems flat-out obvious to me: all these different views that people hold about these and related subjects means that it’s all just literature. But it’s a special kind of literature. The classic novels through the ages — Moby-Dick, Great Expectations, Catch-22, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, and so on —are concerned with fictional universes that concern themselves with the human condition, whereas religions are “larger” fictions in that they are concerned with certain yearnings that are projected onto the sprawling and awe-inspiring cosmos.