Hell: Another Reason Why Young People Think Religion Sucks
The Christians are devoted to believing a lot of nonsense, such as an immaculate conception, a “Son of God,” and perhaps the silliest of all: a resurrection. Then there’s heaven, where, according to religious nuttery, people who have embraced Jesus as their Lord and Savior will go once the world ends. When that happens Jesus comes floating down from heaven and sends all those “born-agains” up to heaven. Of course, compassionate God he is, those who denied his wonder will be cast down into “hell.” What? Hell? No wonder young people, born into a smarter world, are eschewing the insanity of religion for the sanity of science.
From Damon Linker of The Week:
In a recent column, I explored some obstacles to the embrace of religious faith among young people today, paying special attention to the gulf between the often simplistic way that traditional churches talk about God and the pluralistic complexity of modern life.
Here’s another obstacle: The overly literalistic character of so much of American piety.
My favorite example is the way that many American Christians think and talk about hell.
Jumping off from a handful of Gospel passages in which Jesus Christ speaks about “eternal punishment” for sinners in the afterlife, these believers conjure visions of a cosmic torture chamber in which those who reject God or commit grave sins without repentance are subjected to endless torment as punishment for their transgressions. It is a ghastly analogue to equally crude and comical visions of heaven as a place where the righteous are rewarded with angels’ wings and an eternity of harp lessons.
This is very bad theology — because it takes off from a deeply confused, though very commonly held, view of punishment.
Plato’s Socrates has given us the most cogent critique of this common view — and some of the greatest Christian theologians have shown that they understand and agree with it.
According to Socrates, most people assume that when a person does something bad, he deserves retributive punishment in the form of inflicted suffering. “Hell” as it is depicted in the popular imagination is modeled on this view: It is where evildoers are sent to suffer punishment, deservedly, for their sins.
But Socrates implies that this view makes no sense. Doing the morally right thing must be good, intrinsically, for the moral person himself. (Otherwise, in what sense would it be good?) But that means that the opposite must be true as well: The person who fails to do the morally right thing suffers intrinsically by virtue of missing out on the good that comes from doing the right thing.
The implications of this position for how we think of punishment are quite radical. It implies, first, that people undergo punishment for their moral transgressions all on their own, without any additional infliction of suffering. The immoral person foolishly thinks she will benefit from her immoral deed. But she is mistaken and suffers from having cut herself off from the good.
As for those immoral people who don’t sense any suffering or loss from having committed an immoral, sinful act, their proper punishment should be education in the error of their ways. They must be made to see their mistake. Once they do, they will begin to experience the pain that follows from the realization that they have denied themselves what is truly good.
All of this follows of necessity from the logic of morality itself. What makes no moral sense at all is the popular view of punishment embodied in the vision of hell as a place for the infliction of external torments. To say that an immoral person deserves to suffer for his sins is like insisting that a man with cancer deserves to have his legs broken. It’s a prescription of additional suffering for someone who’s already suffering.
Why is it nonetheless so common for people to think about punishment in this way? The Socratic view is that it flows from our own doubts about the goodness of morality. Part of us worries or suspects that the perpetrator of an immoral deed who isn’t caught and made to suffer won’t actually suffer anything at all. We fear she will have gotten away with her deed, as we say, scot-free. Which means that part of us doubts the intrinsic goodness of morality.
But this doubt — along with the accompanying indignation that leads us to want to strike out and inflict pain on someone who has committed an evil deed — is a sign of our own alienation from what is right. In Christian terms, it is a sign of our own sin.
No human penal system can bring itself into complete, or even substantial, conformity with what the Socratic critique of retribution implies. It would be nice to transform all punishment into educative rehabilitation. But we don’t have the slightest idea of how to accomplish it. And without that knowledge, we’re forced to fall back on using punishment, instead, for deterrence and the incarceration of people who threaten the public peace.
But with God, all things are possible. Including the realization of what divine justice requires and demands.
Which is why the most theologically cogent view of hell found in classical Christianity maintains that it is the state of mind (or soul) of someone who is alienated from God. Living a life that is out of harmony with God is painful, and to die and be confronted so decisively with the error of your ways — to be made to see that you made a wreck of your life by separating yourself from God, and to have to learn to shatter your pride by reforming yourself in his divine presence — is, one imagines, excruciating. But it is intrinsically painful, not externally imposed by torturers in some fire-and-brimstone-filled dungeon.
Or in the words of theologian David Bentley Hart, “What we call hell is nothing but the rage and remorse of the soul that will not yield itself to love.” In refusing to “open itself to the mercy and glory of God, the wrathful soul experiences the transfiguring and deifying fire of love not as bliss but as chastisement and despair.”
This is what hell must be if God is truly good.
I, for one, find this far more plausible than the popular vision of hell as a torture chamber run by sadistic demons. And I suspect that at least some young religious skeptics might, too, if only committed Christians would rise to the challenge of making the case.
I’m afraid Socrates was simply wrong about this, if that’s what he said. Many evildoers don’t suffer at all. A thief who has no conscience about thievery and is not caught gains the material benefit of whatever he stole, at no cost at all. He is better off than he would be if he had not committed the crime. And the typical unrepentant criminal would laugh his ass off at any attempt to “educate him in the error of his ways” without real punishment.
While it’s sort of futile to debate what Hell is like when we know Hell is imaginary, don’t forget that the concept of Hell was invented to frighten people into obedience. It’s pictured as a place of eternal torture because that’s more effectively frightening.
By the way, while the Bible may be vague about Hell, the Koran describes the Islamic Hell in graphic detail and it is indeed a place of eternal torture, described with great relish.
I’ve had occasion to talk to any number of criminals during my long career, and you are right in what you say. Most will tell you if they had to do it again they would, except better, so they didn’t get caught. They do regret getting caught, and prison is sure punishment, except perhaps for uninitiated.
Way too many people making decisions on what is and isn’t immoral for my taste.
I’m too immoral for anyone’s taste 😉
Someone once called me “naughty” for making an off-color remark in casual conversation. I took issue with that. I told him, “I am not naughty; I am a pervert.”
Well said! God loves us pervs!!! 🙂
Or, as Colonel Bat Guano would say, a “deviated prevert”.
Love that.
Me too sometimes Norman but know what, that is not my issue that is theirs. I do me all the time and I don’t worry about what other people think about me.
Quite right too!!! Love yer lots x (being old and happily married I mean in a purely platonic way of course)….You have to be so bloody careful what you say haven’t you? 😉
Good article. Great intro. I like the idea that sin is its own punishment.
In my opinion Spong makes the really salient point; that the threat of hell is a product of the churches’ need to control the people. Yet he can’t quite bring himself around to stating the obvious; there is no afterlife, and there is no God. True spirituality is found by discovering ourselves, being honest and real, and living the one and only life we will ever have to the max.
Mark I noticed that. He just couldn’t pull the trigger.
Best 3.5 minute explanation of religion and its origins I’ve ever seen or read.
I’ve posted this you tube video in the past. But here it is again in case folks here haven’t seen it.
WOW! If this guy spoke for all religions I reckon we would all get religion!
I take it the religious right have had him killed already?
But really, is the writer confusing immoral acts with “sin?” Because Sin is something else entirely. Owning slaves, beating your children and your wife may not be sinful at all while even a Christian with a desultory opinions of God’s laws and commandments can be sinful for thinking his neighbor has an awfully nice ass. I see Christianity, if I can claim it’s one religion, (which I can’t) as a way to avoid sin and not to lead the good and moral life. Remember, for so many Christian leaders being the best person is far from sufficient to earn that gold star from God while being a rotten, miserable SOB gives you a free pass if you say the magic words and that you reallyreallyreally mean it, cross my heart and eat the cookie. . .
Did you ever notice that when someone denounces a particular sin that the act in question happens to be something that the denouncer personally finds icky?
I’ve noticed that time and again.
But more importantly. Much more importantly. Is there a bar?
Cracking article and ditto Mike. Perfect lead in old bean.
Norman I agree that this is an interesting article but it wouldn’t have been nearly as good without Mike’s preface. My neighbour by the way is one of those Christians who’s always going on about hell. I told him hell is Liverpool. He didn’t find that amusing at all.
You should take him there to visit his hubcaps 😉
LOL LOL! That kind of place huh Norman?
Pride is one of the Christian deadly sins; its opposite virtue is humility, but I seldom see so much smugness in a person as when a Christian says, “Neener, neener, neener, you’re going to hell and I’m not.” Okay, so maybe those aren’t the exact words, but the attitude is there. One of the most arrogant declarations I ever saw on religion was a bumper sticker that proclaimed, “Christians Aren’t Perfect, Just Forgiven”.
E.A. I live in S. Georgia part time, and I’m surrounded by folk who are firmly convinced that people like me are going straight to hell. I actually had one say she felt sorry for me….geez!
There’s no way Christians can reconcile a peaceful and loving God with their picture of hell. No way.
Rachael I agree and I would like to share an excellent comment from my FB friend Jesse Keene that speaks directly to this:
“Interesting article, though it struck me a little bit as the usual acrobatics Christians go through to make what the Bible actually says seem less insane than it really is. I’ve heard this, “there is no literal hell, but rather hell is separation from God,” idea before but it just doesn’t hold up with the other descriptions of hell found numerous places in the new and old testaments.
“While it is not the primary reason I am an atheist, the contradiction between the idea of eternal, agonizing punishment and an all-loving god is certainly something that saps credibility from the Christian myth for me. I mean, let’s really put it in perspective for a moment. You’re talking about unimaginable, agonizing pain, gnashing of teeth, a lake of fire–forever. So if a sparrow flies through our solar system once every million years and its wingtip grazes the sun and reduces it’s mass by a gram each time, even after the sparrow as completely worn away the sun, that is but the first day for you in hell. There is no crime for which that would be a rational punishment. Even the most horrible people that come to mind, people like Hitler, are not deserving of such a punishment.
“But God loves you! He loves you perfectly and infinitely. Right, see a rational person cannot support both those ideas and not suffer some serious cognitive dissonance.”
Thanks Mike. I try 🙂
A very interesting article and fine lead in Mike.