The Problem with Stygiophobia (Fear of Hell)

To those who believe that those of us who do not fully agree with you are all going to hell:
There are a number of problems with this approach of casting stones against those you judge, (not least of which is the presumption that your interpretation is any less erroneous or unforgivable, or why, if you have indeed embraced one god, you are so confident that you have chosen correctly, and that you have not offended all of the other possibilities - Zeus may be at least as vindictive as Yahweh, and who is to say any god would not respect us more for saying honestly out loud what we think and feel rather than groveling and saying something we don't believe out of fear? (I am not accusing you of doing these things, but were I to echo the platitudes of Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin, I would be lying to myself and everyone else).
The first major problem with your hell threat is that in John, which you cited, Jesus never mentioned hell.  He made some references to it elsewhere, of course, particularly in Matthew, but there he makes only 18 references (1.7% of all passages)  including 9 direct (0.8%) and 9 indirect (0.8%) references.  Again, hell appears a lot more important to his followers than it did to Jesus.   That leaves us a choice:  either place our faith in the original teachings of Jesus or in the medieval corporate church concerned about losing market share to competitors and who  therefore started pushing the "outside  the church no salvation" slogan as if it had been there all the time).  It could be Jesus cared as much about hell as Catholics during the time of the Inquisition or Puritans during the great witch hunts, but that would imply he had been misquoted, which seems a far more serious charge than questioning if someone could really live 8 centuries.
Second, you are assuming, without evidence, that we will be punished in some way not for what we do or who we help or the types of lives we lead but for what we say out loud about using our God-given reason and senses.  Whether the Bible was divinely inspired or not, those putting pen to paper were definitely men.  If Jesus wrote anything down, it has not survived, and what we are left with is an oral tradition, imperfectly remembered, recreated decades after the fact and translated and transcribed countless times.  Which is the more radical notion - that all of the men who were involved in this endeavor were perfect in a way that we know no editor or author today is, or that mistakes, very human mistakes, perhaps well-intended, were introduced along the way?
Third, if we are indeed to be punished or not for what we believe, then it seems the game is up for most of us, since that is not something we can really control.  We can try to make ourselves receptive to an idea, but try as I might, I cannot force myself to believe that I can fly or that dead men can come to life.  It may have happened on some corner of the planet at some time - I don't know, I wasn't there - but I do not believe that the overwhelming weight of empirical evidence should be ignored in favor of an ancient collection of texts which although in places are lyrical and poetic, in others are simply meaningless to a modern audience who cannot pretend to understand an agrarian Mediterranean culture.
Fourth, although I will yield the point that the teachings of Jesus in the  New Testament are, like the compassionate teachings of Isaiah and Amos, an antidote to some of the formulaic mumsimus that bred the hypocrisy and false piety against which Jesus railed, the New Testament does suffer from some glaring inconsistencies and errors that undermine the credibility of  its authors (who were not, of course, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, but scribes and anonymous clerics writing decades later "in the spirit of" those personalities, some of whom hardly appear in the texts after which they are named).
Consider the famous generational problem, highlighted centuries ago by Voltaire in Traité sur la Tolérance, whcih I just read and highly recommend, by the way.  Although the lineage from David to Joseph is moot, the author of Matthew spent the first 16 verses (1.6% of the total text by my count) establishing it in painful detail.  Matthew described 26 generations between Jesus; Luke describes 40.  Assuming 25 years per generation, this implies an error of 350 years!   More disturbingly, not a single name on the David-Joseph lineage of Matthew overlaps with the David-Joseph lineage of Luke.   Clearly, they cannot both be right in the way we use the word right today.
If you are claiming that anyone who rejects or criticizes sections of the Bible risks the wrath of Yahweh, which lineage are you betting your soul on, Matthew's or Luke's?  You can't choose both, since they can't both be true.  Is it Curtain #1 or Curtain #2?   I hope you see the problem with taking this concrete approach.
All of this is to say that the rather flippant reference to eternal torture you made in your "pearly gates" remark, if you really believe it, should give you at least as much pause as those you feel disagree with you.
I do not think that any deity will punish anyone for pointing out the ludicrousness of  a man having a child at over a century old, then living another 700 years - which you would laugh at if you read in the Inquirer but for some reason take seriously because it is found in a book that happens to be held in some reverence by a significant minority of the world population today, most of whom have not read it.
If such a deity exists - and you can no more prove it than I can disprove it although we can assign probabilities  - then I think we are all lost, for surely an omniscient god could see through our attempts to appease him through saying something we do not believe.  If we avoid the issue of Noah's age or Lot's incest with his daughters, both of whom he impregnated while drunk (physiological impossibilities aside, this is not my idea of family values) simply by ignoring them, then who is to say this also won't incite the wrath of a vengeful deity?
I have been living my life fairly consistently in truth to my convictions.  I have lived to a ripe old age, not by Noah's standards, but by reality-based ones, produced 3 beautiful children, and have never felt I was about to be turned into a pillar of salt or struck by lightning.  In other words, if my words and thoughts have offended  Yahweh or Thor or Zeus, they had plenty of opportunity to silence me or even the score, but when I look into the sky at night, I like Pascal am sometimes "terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces."
In contrast to the paucity of evidence of a vengeful deity who micromanages the universe and punishes those who think, there is sadly plenty of evidence of the damage and cruelty caused by those who continue to insist despite all evidence to the contrary that their sacred documents are the One True Path (and that those who disagree with them are going to hell).
I imagine, but cannot prove, if there is some sort of judgement, those who dropped fire and high explosives on children, those who murdered physicians or bombed night clubs or cafés in the name of religion, those who shamed and humiliated those who did not act like them or look like them (using religion to justify their prejudice and cruelty), or those who stood by silently while others acted out their religious prejudices will have far more to answer for than someone who simply reads a book, does the math, and reports honestly what he finds.   Thinking and encouraging others to think harms no one except those who find such a process threatening for some reason.   Were I to try to overlook what a lifetime of study, reflection, and observation leads me to believe, I would be fooling neither myself nor anyone else.
I know others have made the same studies and come to different conclusions, and if this gives them a sense of peace or purpose, then I am happy for them.  My world view is neither threatened nor undermined by its not being universally shared, something I think would be rather boring anyway.  We need diversity of belief.  I just don't know how we can foster that diversity if we go around telling those we disagree with that we think they are going to hell.