Daily Archives: April 20, 2014

Let’s go to hell!

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Well, I said I would do hell, so let’s do Hell, shall we?

I finished that documentary about the concept of Hell that I mentioned yesterday, and I have to tell you that apart from the parts where they talked to people from the Westboro Baptist Church (because seriously, fuck those people), it is as though the whole thing was made especially for me.

It is a subject I find extremely interesting, they covered it quite well and from a lot of different angles, and I learned a lot and heard a lot of things which stimulated my imagination and deepened my understanding of the world and the people in it.

And for me, that is pretty much a grand slam.

One thing I learned is that, within Christian theological thought, there are three main schools of thought on Hell.

The first is infernalism, which is the view of Hell that dominates mainstream Christianity and that we are all familiar with via popular culture if nothing else. This is the idea that Hell is a place of constant conscious maximum agony for all eternity. It is the most severe punishment imaginable, and there is nothing worse than going there.

To me, that has always seemed like the result of schoolyard bragging. Oh yeah, well I shoot you INFINITY times!

The second is annihilism. Under that system, good people still go to Heaven, but there is no Hell required, for the wicked souls are simply destroyed. After all, Jesus only promises the life eternal to those who follow Him. Arguably, if the wicked live forever, even if that is in constant agony, they too have been granted life eternal.

The third and last is universalism, and that is the one that really stopped me in my tracks because I naively believed that I had invented the idea.

See, long and ever ago, I wrote a story about a hate-mongering corrupt evil televangelist who dies and goes to Heaven, only to discover that absolutely everybody gets in. There is no Hell. There is no Judgement. Absolutely everyone gets in.

Yes, even Hitler. I specifically included him in the story. [1]

But alas, my hubris was misplaced. Turns out that has been a recurring idea in Christianity practically since its inception. The argument goes that it is impossible to imagine that a just and loving God would ever send anyone to Hell, period. God’s grace is infinite, and thus so is his ability not just to forgive the sinner, but to bring them to salvation and make them truly good people again.

There is a great Bible passage (which for some reason I cannot Google up) that says that all who die will face the fire of judgment, but that this fire will burn away their sin like it was chaff, dirt, and stubble, and reveal the gold, silver, and precious gems underneath.

This suggests that God purifies people instead of damning them, and that’s what makes sense to me, heathen that I am. God relieves people of the burden of the struggle for divinity and instead lets them live on in perfect grace for all eternity.

So even Hitler gets cleansed, and is thus rewarded just the same as someone who led a saintly life. If this idea infuriates you, remember that by this system, due to God’s infinite grace, Hitler isn’t evil any more.

Let that idea stir your noodles for a while.

Before I watched the documentary, I had no idea that there was something besides infernalism within Christianity. It is not like you ever hear about these alternative views, and there’s a reason for that.

They are both considered heresy by nearly every Christian church out there. And not just any heresy, but the most dangerous one out there. It’s such a terrible heresy that all kinds of Christian church leaders in this day and age start using the word heresy when you bring it up.

And needless to say, I was thrilled to find out that there are still ideas out there that people consider dangerous heresy. It immediately filled me with admiration, and a little envy, for people like George Coleman, author of the book To Hell With Hell, who have the courage to stand up to all these fire and brimstone peddlers and preach the universalist message.

It’s not hard to see why the idea pisses people off. For the priest class, it kind of ruins their whole racket. They sell salvation, and salvation on their own terms (more profitable that way, and more fun), and if there is no Hell, then what exactly are they saving you from?

I would say “your own sinful nature and the misery it brings”, but that might be too subtle for these people.

For your average churchgoer, it becomes a question of invested effort. If there is no Hell, then they have been doing a lot of things that they really did not feel like doing for no reason at all. In fact, if you really look at it through that simplistic point of view, a lot of what people do for religion is not just unpleasant, it’s downright silly.

And people will naturally resist the idea that they have done silly, unfun, humiliating things for no reason.

Being nonreligious, I have always puzzled at the idea that there has to be some sort of reward and punishment system in order for people to be good. A lot of the angry preachers in the documentary seemed to think that if word got out that there is no Hell, society would instantly descend into anarchy.

But law, secular or religious, is not what keeps people from doing the wrong thing. The primary reason most people do not do bad things is that they do not want to be a bad person. The fear is not of eternal postmortem torment but of immediate and extremely painful guilt, not to mention fear of being thought of as bad by one’s community.

Most people do not want to be bad people, so they don’t do bad things. It’s just that simple.

I don’t believe in any form of theistic religion, but I do believe in sin, redemption, confession, and grace. These are all real things which really exist.

They just have nothing to do with a mythical God and everything to do with the nature of being human.

I guess that’s all for today, folks. Talk to you again tomorrow!

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Sadly, that story got lost forever in a hard drive crash. Someday, I may rewrite it.↵

Faith and hell

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I kinda want to talk about faith as part of my Difficult Concepts series (first there was innocence, now faith, and I am assuming the last will be nostalgia). A very interesting podcast got me on the subject and I feel like I want to explore my relationship with the concept.

But I am also halfway through a very excellent documentary about the subject of hell and the whole heaven and hell thing has always fascinated me, so I kind of want to talk about that, too.

Well, I will start off with faith, and see where that goes. Hell can wait.

I have absolutely no connection to the concept of faith, or at the very least, Faith. I was raised without religion of any sort and so I have never been called upon to have or demonstrate faith.

Also, I have a keen and insightful mind and was taught at an early age that I can find the answers myself. And for the most part, I can. My worldview is that of scientific materialism and I find that quite sufficient to answer any question about the world around me and the people in it.

So not was I never introduced to the concept of faith, I have found it entirely unnecessary. I do not have unanswered questions that only faith and religion can answer. Science and my own understanding of human nature suffice.

And from that perspective, religious faith seems like a strange idea indeed. I stand completely outside religion and so the whole thing seems kind of ridiculous to me. I know why people have faith, develop faith, need faith, and so on. I am not going to sit here and claim the whole thing is incomprehensible to me, like I am daring someone to try to explain it.

But to me, the whole kit and kaboodle of faith is equally strange and foreign. Religious conflict seems utterly futile if you see it, as I do, as children arguing about who has the biggest imaginary friend. Or for that matter, fans arguing over whether Han shot first.

Either way, you are talking about made up stories with no real world consequences. Seems to me that everyone could just leave everyone else to believe whatever they like and agree to disagree. Then we could all get along and the world would be a happier and nicer place.

And isn’t that what we all want?

But no, because of the nature of the human mind and its instinct to combine its worldview with the worldview of other human minds, we feel like it is not enough simply to disagree with someone, we must wipe the filthy heresy from their lying minds.

Brother, if you feel your faith is threatened by the mere existence of contradictory thoughts, you have some very deep problems and your faith must be extremely fragile to be so very tender and vulnerable.

So I would have to say that when it comes to religious faith, I feel like I am completely outside it. I have beliefs which I consider spiritual because they have to do with the sort of high ideals for moral and psychological growth and the sort of beliefs about what contributes to well-being and what does not that is normally ascribed to the realm of spirituality.

But I don’t believe in spirits, souls, or any other form of viewing the mind as separate and distinct from the body. I just find that words like spirit, soul, heart, etc are useful metaphors for aspects of the human psyche.

Something exists, and is therefore material (in the loosest sense) and subject to all the laws of the universe, or it does not exist, and therefore is not worth talking about. There is no middle option. The rules of the universe cannot be broken. There is nothing to which some of the rules apply but not the others. Therefore, there is no “supernatural”.

However, this does not mean I dismiss the field of supernatural phenomenon entirely. For one thing, that would be making a rather enormous assumption about one’s knowledge of the universe and I am too strict a logician to allow that.

I can’t claim I know something, such as there is no such thing as ghosts, when I have not examined the question myself. Arguments to so called “common sense” are meaningless. The modern world runs on principles that violated the common sense of the time and seemed like mere fantasies or delusions or wishful thinking.

Furthermore, as a strict materialist, I have to believe that every that happens, including human behaviour, has a material and therefore real cause. To say something is “all in someone’s head” is therefore not to say that it is not real.

Real events cannot have unreal causes.

But for the most part, I view supernatural phenomenon as just that… phenomenon.

For example, all through history, people have thought they had encounters with ghosts. One explanation amongst many as to why this is would be that there really are such a thing as ghosts and that’s what people are encountering. In that world, thinking you have seen a ghost is no weirder than thinking you have seen the sky.

Another view would be that every single person who has ever believed they had encountered a ghost was simpleminded, delusional, or lying, or even all three.

Neither of those answers is sufficient. To me, it is obvious that the truth is somewhere in between. Something, we don’t know what, is causing intelligent, rational, honest people to experience something they can only explain as a ghostly encounter.

What could that possibly be? That’s the question I want answered.

So that takes care of the religious sense of faith. But what about mundane faith? What about faith in people, or institutions, or belief systems, or anything else?

There are a lot of areas which psychologically require faith because it is impossible to ever truly know what is really going on. Does this person truly love me? Will the Army be there for me if I get hurt? Will my faith survive this secular world? Are the decisions I am making now going to fill me with pain and regret later?

When it comes to that kind of faith, I can’t say I have much of that either, much to my detriment. I have never found anything or anyone reliable enough to warrant my faith in them. All my life, I have been on my own, with nobody to rely on when things got bad, and that has denied me the possibility of faith and trust in the world and the people in it.

It is a cold and dangerous life, this faithless world of mine. I wish I had faith. I wish I had trust in things unknown. It would be a great comfort to me to think that I am never truly alone in the world.

But all I have is this sharp-edged mind of mine, and while it can provide me with great insights and enormous understanding, at the end of the day, I am just that lonely boy left alone far too young.

Maybe I have to invent my own faith.

See you tomorrow, folks!