Hell
What is hell?
War is hell. (General Sherman) Hell is other people. (Sartre) Hell is loneliness. (Everybody) Our world is some other planet’s hell. (A. Huxley)
Hell is confinement. Hell is freedom. Hell is love. No, that would go under “Other People.” Hell is no love. The absence of God’s love, some say. I can’t help but believe that love of God and love of your dog are the same. Love is love. It differs only in the degree to which you get in its way.
I remember reading or hearing once someone’s reply to the question of why Milton’s (maybe Dante’s, maybe both) depiction of hell was so much more vivid and convincing than his depiction of heaven: Because he’d been there.
Hell is human suffering. We’ve all been to hell, but never to heaven. One is felt, the other imagined. Hell is derived from actual experience. Heaven is fantasy.
Everything we imagine is derived from experience. I’m not saying that hell and heaven are not real—they are. It’s just that neither is a physical place. Neither exists in time. They are magnifications of human evil and good with infinite manifestations: words that have been asked to carry a burden of theoretical meaning in service of human need.
“The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” (Milton)
Hell is a state of mind experienced in this world. Human life is suffering—interspersed with enough grace to make life worth living. Hell is an abstraction—all suffering, no grace—a political exaggeration of human pain used to control people. We all experience hell—some to such an extreme degree it is not possible to think that what they experienced in this life was not enough.
Of all the questions religious fundamentalists answer unsatisfactorily, how a loving God could send people to hell and forget about them tops the list.
With “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” coming in at a close second.
The Old Testament, like most other ancient spiritual writing, doesn’t really imagine beyond this life and has only a vague sense of what we’d call an afterlife—Sheol in the Old Testament—and basically nothing about a place of eternal torture for evildoers. The idea comes mostly from the New Testament and medieval imagination: weeping and gnashing of teeth—hell, where the fire never goes out—where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched—and so forth. I would say, we’ve already got all that. And nobody but a human ever said it. Or wrote it down. In fact, nobody but a human ever said or wrote down anything. The human mind is where everything happens. As far as the human mind knows. And what the human mind knows, it seems unnecessary to point out, is all we know.
Modern apologists justify hell in various ways: only a perfect punishment could be commensurate with the perfect love and justice of God—especially since he provided a perfect way to avoid it, applicable whether you ever heard of it or not.
It isn’t that God likes torturing people eternally—he simply can’t, because he is pure love, allow anything unclean in his kingdom. Which makes you wonder why, that being the case, he created such an unclean, self-serving, greedy, lying, vengeful, backstabbing little viper to begin with, but that’s another matter.
If we choose to disobey God’s laws with our “free will,” God has no choice but to condemn us. Which would make sense, maybe, if we knew what those laws were. Some say there are 613 of them in the Old Testament. Among those covered in Leviticus are the death sentence for adulterers (both parties) (20:10), an injunction against picking up fallen grapes in your vineyard, which God commands be left for the poor and the foreigner (19:10), another against cutting the hair on the sides of your head or clipping the edges of your beard (19:27), another against tattoos (19:28), another commanding us to treat the foreigners among us as our native-born (19:33-34).
New Testament laws are perhaps more familiar: love God, love your neighbor, forgive others (70x7 times), love your enemies. And I would say, above all: there is an “other” dimension of existence where there is recompense for the suffering of this dimension, and you should put your treasures there. Which I guess means: you can’t access the “other” dimension if you’re focused on the riches of this one.
Obviously only hyper-orthodox believers could follow these laws, or, say, most of them. The rest of us apparently are going to hell.
Except I daresay most people feel the same about these laws (or select ones) as they do about hell itself: they don’t really believe it. Anybody who really believed in hell would be crippled by terror and whimpering in a corner. But who really seems to be all that scared?
The New Testament changed everything, one hears. Now you can break any of these laws and be forgiven. So go ahead and act like a human being while you can.
Yes, you can commit all the worst sins, including the “mortal” ones, but if you repent and join the club, you can be forgiven. Or you can be a loving, generous, non-judgmental, forgiving person who simply can’t relate to the bylaws of the club and hence unable—not unwilling, but unable—to join it, and therefore bound to be justly tortured forever. The “repent” part of that I’m all for, but the “join the club” part suggests that, according to the church, the only unforgivable sin is political: not joining the club. Actually, if you’re picky, there are a couple of others: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:31), and according to some (Augustine, Aquinas), suicide.
Sacrifice was a common way to appease God or the gods in most ancient cultures. And, of course, sacrifice is the means God provided to escape hell: the sacrifice of Jesus. As I understand it, the sacrifice of Jesus meant we didn’t have to offer flawless sheep, and pigeons, and grain anymore. And of course this human sacrifice was unique in that the victim came back to life.
I heard a Baptist minister once use the phrase “the sacrifice of worship,” and I remember thinking that was the most absurd thing I had ever heard, even though it was true in a different way than he meant. I’m sorry, but no “sacrifice” offered in air conditioning counts, even if you are giving up “NFL Today.”
What if—
The salvation of all people could be effected by the sacrifice of one person—not to death, but to hell? One fine human specimen selected to be imprisoned forever in a cold, claustrophobic dungeon for the redemption of all the rest of mankind?
Well, I ain’t no saint and I sure as hell ain’t no savior (G. Allman), but not only would I not want to be the winner of that lottery, I wouldn’t want to exist in any universe where that was even possible. I wouldn’t want to exist in any universe with even one person in hell. Life is hell enough.
God is pure love, some say. They also say, God is omnipresent. So, either there is love in hell, or God isn’t really all love or omnipresent—because if God is omnipresent, anywhere God is not is not—so if hell is, he is in hell like the rest of us.
Some say God is omniscient. He sees evil—that is, he is aware of it, and what kind of God would he be if he weren’t? That means he knows evil, and as we all know, the only way to really know something is to experience it. All else is hearsay.
There are many ways to conceive of God. The only God I can imagine is everything. He is, he experiences, he knows, he feels it all. Including evil. Including hell and all of the suffering in it. It is a mistake to separate God from the universe, to put him above it, not feeling, not experiencing.
To me, avoiding sin is nothing but a weak sister of the real thing: committing sin and suffering the remorse and changing from it. Which is what repentance means. Are the sins of our youth worth the guilt and remorse of later years?
Yes.
Nothing is unforgivable. Sin is not a damnation-inviting choice—it is a gift. The truth makes you free. That is, if you are brave enough to be free.
Hell is in the DNA of human existence.
January 4, 2024