15
A Brief Descent into Hell
CHRISTIANS BELIEVE, as the reader knows, that hell is a place for those damned by God for eternity. Most Christians apparently have no problem with the notion that their God created a world with the foreknowledge (being all-knowing), and therefore the intention, that the vast majority of its people would spend eternity in never-ending torture. Yes, you heard me right. Jesus said, “The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose the easy way. But the gateway to God’s Kingdom is small, and the road is narrow, and only a few ever find it” (Matthew 7:13–14). Indeed, if we’re to believe the bible, only 144,000 people will ever reach heaven (Revelation 14:3). The rest, presumably, will end up in hell.
Most traditional Christians, following the word of Jesus himself, believe hell is a place of fire and brimstone where the condemned burn forevermore in the possession of the devil, Satan. The gospel of Matthew quotes Jesus as saying that when he returns to judge man at the end of the world, he will say to the condemned, “Depart from me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his demons” (Matthew 25:41). Elsewhere in the bible, Jesus speaks of hell as being a place of “unquenchable fire” (Matthew 18:8) and “eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46), where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:12). Many Christians today, incongruously backing away from the words of the one (Jesus) to whom they have consecrated their lives, believe the fire is a mere metaphor for those denied the presence of God, though the context of Jesus’ words did not suggest he was speaking metaphorically in any way. All Christians believe that hell is one bad place, not a destination that even the world’s leading masochist would put on his travel itinerary. It is a place of punishment beyond the grave that has been part of Christian belief and theology since the time of Jesus.
Apart from the self-evident absurdity of the notion, isn’t the idea of the Christian hell of everlasting punishment completely incompatible with a God whom Christians believe to be “full of mercy” ( James 5:11)? Doesn’t the punishment seem the type that one would expect to be inflicted by Satan rather than by God? I mean, knowing that humans are so weak they stumble over threads, wouldn’t one expect a merciful, benevolent God to be more tolerant of most of man’s transgressions? The Christians’ stock answer is that, yes, God is merciful, but he “loves justice” (Psalm 11:7), and the wicked have to be punished. But if God is just and loves justice, justice connotes proportion—an eye for an eye, say, not a head for a slap on the face—since the very definition of justice is to give one his due. Nothing more, nothing less. What type of God could condemn to hell, forevermore, someone who has offended him by not accepting him as their savior? Isn’t this punishment, on its face, greatly disproportionate and hence unjust?
Yes, our criminal justice system punishes a petty thief as well as a murderer. But the punishment, everyone knows, cannot be the same. The petty thief might get probation or a fine or a few days in the county jail. But the murderer can get life imprisonment or even death. As the expression goes, “The punishment has to fit the crime.” That’s just common sense, right? As far back as the very harsh and retributive Old Testament, it is written in referring to “two people who take a dispute to court,” that the judge will sentence “the person in the wrong to be flogged,” but “with the number of lashes appropriate to the crime” (Deuteronomy 25:1–2). So punishment has to be proportionate. But when we get away from temporal punishment to punishment after death, all we hear from Christianity is hell and fire and everlasting punishment. Where do we hear about the indispensable element of justice—that our time and suffering in hell should be commensurate with our sins on earth? Is God a lunatic? Someone who punishes a common thief or burglar or forger in the same way he punishes a Stalin or even a John Gacy or Ted Bundy? But if there is going to be proportionality in punishment in hell, why doesn’t it say this anywhere in the bible? Does the pope talk about it? Or televangelists? Or itinerant preachers? Can we infer by their silence that this extreme disproportionality in punishment, which could not possibly be more unjust, is just fine with them?
1The whole notion of hell speaks of sensory pain, even to the extent of the “gnashing of teeth.” The inference, despite the fact we know one’s remains stay in the grave, is that the body will go to hell and will burn. For instance, in Matthew 13:50, Jesus speaks of “throwing the wicked into the fires” of hell. In Matthew 18:8, he speaks of the damned being thrown into hell “with both their hands and feet.” But if the body is to be burned forever, it would have to, by definition, be indestructible, which we know is not true. Furthermore, since the pain is meant to be without end, and since a dead person cannot feel pain, apparently the condemned person, if he is to suffer, never truly dies (in Mark 9:47–48, Jesus speaks of sinners in hell “where the worm never dies and the fire never goes out”), and burns in hell, as indicated, without being consumed. A lovely ending for pathetic mortals for whom, Christians assure us, God has a “love that endures forever” (1 Chronicles 16:34).
Despite the aforementioned biblical references of the physical body burning in hell, mainstream Christianity believes that only the soul is immortal, and knowing that the body of man remains in the grave, has interpreted all of the verses in scripture that speak of salvation and damnation in heaven and hell as referring to the soul of man, which it believes separates from the body at death. “As soon as the soul is set free from the body,” Aquinas said, “it is either plunged into hell or soars to heaven” (Summa Theologica, 887).
Two critical points have to be made in this regard. First, the alleged immortality of the soul (e.g., First Vatican Council, 1870) is by far the most valuable asset that Christianity has. Why? Because Christianity could not survive without it. In view of the physical mortality of the human body, if the soul weren’t immortal, what else would the Christian religion have to offer the masses (life without end with God in heaven)? And what else would it have to hold over their heads as a threat (suffering without end in hell)? Nothing. Because we know the body is mortal, if the soul isn’t immortal, then there is no life after death. And people, since the beginning of time, don’t want to believe that once they die, that’s the end of it for them.
Secondly, I could find no solid support in the bible for the notion of the immortality of the soul in heaven with God and in hell with Satan. It appears that it simply does not exist.
2 (See endnote for further discussion.)
And because of this biblical absence, when the early Christian church realized that to survive it had no choice but to proclaim the immortality of the soul as one of its central tenets (Catechism, number 366), it embraced the much earlier Judaic belief in the immortality of the soul. But if it’s not in the bible, where did Judaism come up with it? The Encyclopedia Judaica says, “It was probably under Greek influences that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul came into Judaism.” If this is true, the Greeks (Plato was the principal proponent) invented the doctrine of the immortality of the soul out of whole cloth, and Judaism, then Catholicism, followed by Protestantism, accepted without question this doctrine that has greatly affected the lives of billions of people. How nice.
So what did Plato (428–348 B.C.) have to say about the subject? In his dialogue
Phaedrus, Plato, speaking through Socrates, his departed mentor, says:
Our soul is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal. That which while imparting motion is itself moved by something else can cease to be in motion, and therefore can cease to live. It is only that which moves itself that never intermits its motion, inasmuch as it cannot abandon its own nature. . . . Any body that has an external source of motion is soulless, but a body deriving its motion from a source within itself is animate or besouled. And if this last assertion is correct, namely that ‘that which moves itself’ is precisely identifiable with [one’s] soul, it must follow that the soul is not born and does not die.
Though Plato purports to know quite a bit about a “soul’s immortality,” he does allow that “a god [Plato, as was true of virtually all Greeks at the time, believed in many gods, each of whom dwelled on Mount Olympus] alone could tell what manner of thing the soul is.” (In his dialogues, e.g., The Republic, Gorgias, Plato speaks of heaven and hades [hell]).
Note that in Plato’s disquisition, he presupposes the existence of a god, presupposes the existence of the soul, and presupposes the soul is immortal because he presupposes that it was never born. But you see, if we presuppose that I had wings, maybe I could fly. Plato was a great philosopher whose influence on Western thought is considerable. But like everyone else, he had no pipeline to God, heaven, hell, or the soul, assuming any of these entities even exist. None whatsoever. So his belief in the immortality of the soul, which apparently gave birth to Judaism’s and Christianity’s belief in the notion, and hence life after death, was just sheer, bald, naked speculation on his part.
Christianity attempts to justify its belief in the immortality of the soul by what it calls the “universal belief” and reasoning that a just God would not impose his moral laws on mankind without the promise of eternal life with him in the hereafter for those who met his demands on earth, and eternal punishment in hell for those who did not.
Similarly, German philosopher Immanuel Kant tried to attack the mystery of whether there is an afterlife from the perspective of ethics. He noted that people everywhere have a sense of right and wrong, the essence of ethics. He then reasoned that for ethics and life to be of any meaning or value, there must be justice. In other words, he asked, why should one be ethical in one’s life if there’s no payoff, one way or the other, of justice? By definition, he continued his analysis, there cannot be justice unless one survived, in some form, the grave. Also, justice requires a judge, one who is all-intelligent, just, and powerful, i.e., God.
The basic defect of Kant’s and Christianity’s argument, of course, is that it assumes the existence not only of a God, but a God who is just. Christianity and Kant then further assume, as another premise, that life has to be, and is, meaningful, which is the very point to be proved. And with that assumption, everything flows logically from that. Though Christianity and Kant may be right (not in their clearly faulty reasoning process) that life is meaningful, we don’t know this. Perhaps the only point of life is that it is pointless. Shakespeare’s Macbeth says, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
In any event, the notion of the soul being immortal has no scriptural basis, and hence what Christianity, Judaism, and many other religions preach about it is nothing but naked speculation. Since we know the death of the body is final, if the soul lives on only in foundationless speculation, what intelligent reason does one have to believe there is life after death?
Getting back to the soul and hell, the word “soul” is used by almost everyone. I have no idea what the soul is, so therefore I cannot have much confidence it exists. I can say that what Christians say it is (e.g., the spiritual part of man; the essence of being; the first principle of life in man; the seat of man’s emotions) is not comprehensible to whatever kernel of perception my mind can summon. Indeed, 5,000 volumes of theology, philosophy, and metaphysics couldn’t explain what the human soul is, much less prove its existence. So I never consciously use the word unless in the most abstract and literary of senses.
But with respect to hell, even if there is a soul, we know it is not something you can see or hold in your hands, meaning it has no corporeal essence. So how, then, can this soul have a sensory ability to feel pain in hell?
3 Not important, except insofar as it is just further evidence that what we’re talking about here is pure claptrap, all of this soul business being a monument to mummery.
ONE CANNOT HELP TALKING TO an Evangelical Christian without coming away with the feeling he believes the world is a battleground between God and Satan, the divine and the diabolical. The great problem I have with this Manichaean view is that in Christian theology Satan is merely an angel (Lucifer) created by God (Ezekiel 28:12–15) who fell from grace (Isaiah 14:12, Revelation 12:7–9, Luke 10:18). Where in the world did Satan, the devil, thereafter get the unbelievable power to even compete on the same playing field with God? And where did he get the power to tempt us into all of our sins? (Or is the devil, as some believe, not a tempter but a perfect gentleman who never goes where he is not welcome? And let’s not forget that we never hear the devil’s side of the story.)
It is indeed interesting that, although Christianity claims the devil causes all evil, they really have no solid scriptural support for this and are forced to rely on the indirect attribution of evil to him by his tempting us to do evil. And even then, with the exception of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:1–5 and Jesus in Matthew 4:8–9, the “tempting” is only by implication. But in terms of directly creating evil (e.g., causing someone to do evil, not merely tempting him to do so), the bible, believe it or not, seems to blame God. Amos 3:6 says, “If evil befalls a city, has not the Lord caused it?” In Isaiah 45:7, God says, “I make well-being and create woe. I, the Lord, do all these things.” Lamentations 3:38 says, “Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and evil come?”
In any event, how would a simple angel who, we are told, went bad, have powers one would think only God has; for example, omnipresence ? Not only is Satan everywhere, but Christians also refer to the “struggle” against Satan. Struggle? God and Satan have been around, per Christianity, since time immemorial. Yet Satan, after these thousands of years of fighting with God, who is supposed to be all-powerful, still hasn’t been vanquished? He’s still in the ring with God throwing punches, and in the struggle between good and evil, evil wins just as much or more than good does? What gives? I don’t get it.
Where, in the bible or anywhere else, does it say or even suggest how some former angel ended up having such incredible power? To the point where Paul, in 2 Corinthians 4:4, called Satan “the god of this evil world.” And John, in 1 John 5:19, actually says, “We are children of God, and the world around us is under the power and control of the evil one.” If Christianity, the proponent of this notion, cannot tell us how Satan acquired this unbelievable power, then why should we believe this nonsense?
Since, Christianity says, God created everyone, even the devil, and since God, we are told, only wants goodness in the world, and since he is all-powerful, why doesn’t he just whack the devil? You know, why doesn’t he get rid of the devil altogether? Psalm 75:10 says, “For God says, ‘I will cut off the strength of the wicked.’” But that’s the Old Testament, well over 2,000 years ago. If God intends to whack the devil, when does he intend to do it? After the cows come home?
If God doesn’t want to destroy the devil, what other reason can there be than that he wants the devil to tempt us into sin wherever we turn so that if we yield to the temptation and sin, we end up in hell? But if this is so, this creates two enormous problems for Christianity. First, Christianity’s God appears to be just playing games with our lives, with the stakes being heaven or hell, and he’s enjoying watching the game from up above, a game that he created and has ill-equipped us to play. If this is true, what type of God is this? Second, and perhaps even worse, although James 1:13 tells us that “God never tempts us to do wrong,” if God chooses to allow the devil to continue to exist, knowing he’s going to tempt us into sin, isn’t God thereby making the devil his agent?
I say this to Christian theologians: These questions are worthy of answers. And if you insist on preaching your nonsense, you have a moral duty to address yourself to them.