Dwalin...you raise the new testament...it is full of references to hell and eternal punishment...there's not even enough room here to supply all the ridiculous quotes...c'mon, get real eh?
For unrepentant sinners, thats the punishment-and that's what IS taught to young kids.
You mention at the start that the idea of hell is medievel and primative...you realise your describing religion? Im not to clear what the "modern" version of hell is? Something a bit more acceptable? Surely not, it needs to always be scary enough to frighten young kids
For the New Testament, each quote can be discussed separately, I can't just analyze the whole of it right here, but I am sure many of them are allegories, especially the reference to the "fire" of hell.
That is taught to kids, you are right, but that doesn't mean the ones who teach it have themselves a 100% correct idea about after-life, many people just simplify it and reduce everything to ridicuolus quotes like "the scary devil will take you away if you don't obey you mother" or whatever.
About the idea of hell, I imagine it more like an emptiness of the soul, a sense of being far from God and happiness, like drowning in the sinner's own anger and unwillingness and/or inability to accept and understand the concept of all-over goodness, love etc which is supposed to be Paradise.
Don't know, after all nobody has returned from after death to tell us what, if anything, is there.
I don't know if you had read it, there is a short story by the English author Clive Staples Lewis, "The great divorce". That's the closest to how I imagine hell and Paradise.
