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!