Hell

The belief in hell, which is an afterlife where much of the population will be tortured eternally, is older, and more widespread, than everything which you, dear reader, have ever loved and cherished or will ever love and cherish. This means that it is better: if we had to erase the belief in hell, or everything that you love and cherish, then we should choose to erase everything that you love and cherish, every time. Something which is as new, and as local, as everything that you love and cherish, cannot possibly be even up for consideration.

Tradition means caring about the transmission of culture from generation to generation. The belief in hell is part of our tradition. It has motivated a lot of literature and philosophy and theology. Together with the religion to which it is attached, it is a bridge through time, allowing people from today to relate to people from the distant past. It is our heritage to preserve. Can anything like this be said for the collection of everything which you, dear reader, love and cherish? Of course not. Everything which you love and cherish may be very good, but it is not as good as the belief in hell, since it is not as old, and not as widespread. If that comparison is to be made, then the side of those things you love and cherish should get no sympathy at all.

There is really no contest.

Some people, who are philistines and hate culture and want to destroy our tradition and squander our heritage, have objections to the belief in hell. They want our children to have beliefs which are entirely new and cannot connect them to old and distant literature and culture and people and intellectuals. They do not care, at all in the slightest, for the value of what they are destroying. How can they be so heartless, and so evil? I have no grand psychological theory of this, but I can address their stated objections.

Torture

First, regardless of how little I can understand the deep psychology of how they can possibly have so little regard for tradition, it is nevertheless evident from their own statements that these people are profoundly mentally ill. They regard the belief in hell as horrifying and scary, something that keeps them worried and concerned through sleepless nights. The reasoning for this is, that they are scared that they themselves, and their loved ones, will be sent to hell and be tortured forever; since the prospect of being tortured in the current life is scary, then it must also be scary in the afterlife.

To this I say that their particular mental illness cannot be made to stand against our tradition. How can it possibly matter whether you’re tortured in the afterlife? It’s the afterlife: you’re already dead. You can’t affect the world anymore. You have no family or business to take care of. Nothing you do matters, and hence, nothing that is done to you matters. It’s nonsense to be concerned what happens in the afterlife.

It’s not nonsense to be concerned whether there is an afterlife at all, since human imagination makes it hard to conceive of ceasing to exist: whenever you’re imagining a world where you don’t exist, you’re imagining it seen through a perspective which is, despite all your efforts, still to some extent your perspective, still existing in that world, and hence you have failed to imagine your own nonexistence. It makes sense to be concerned about possibly having to face the unknown.

It does not make sense to be concerned about a well-understood situation which merely hurts. There is no parallel with torture in this life, where it may affect your future decisions and problem-solving. There is no problem-solving anymore, when you’re in hell. Like, grow up? I’m glad the fear of hell motivates some people to act morally, but the theologians have always agreed that being motivated by fear of hell is not really the most proper motive to act morally, since acting morally is desirable for its own sake. A situation where fear of hell prevents someone from sinning must be regarded as two bad attitudes cancelling each other out.

People who are strongly afraid of hell often take their own mental illness to be somehow rational given the belief in eternal torture, and hence they blame their whole attitude on the belief itself in hell, which is our beautiful tradition and heritage. I wish they would get some kind of psychiatric help, instead of voicing their outraged objections. The belief in hell is responsible for culture and literature and history, and if it has some bad effects on some mentally ill people, that is really their problem, and none of these mentally ill people’s entire lives and thoughts and hearts and hopes and fears can ever possibly count in the slightest against the weight of the value of tradition.

Many separate concerns are raised about the belief in hell which are related to this mental illness, such as the idea that it’s a form of child abuse to teach children about hell, or the idea that it makes it difficult to rationally evaluate a religion if there’s a threat of torture for culpably failing to believe it. I think any rational concerns about these things are perfectly addressed by clarifying emphatically that hell is supposed to take place in the afterlife, that is, after you’re already dead, and if someone is still having lots of fear and dread about it when that is made clear, then, again, that is really their problem.

Goodness

Second, the belief in hell is also made to count as a variant of the so-called problem of evil; this variant is called the problem of hell. Here, it is argued that torturing people eternally seems somehow bad, or unjust, or unloving, and hence unfitting, or improper, to the all-good and all-perfect God of tradition; hence, at least one, or both, of the two beliefs (the belief in God, or the belief in hell) must be false.

To be charitable to these people and their intelligence, I will believe that they do not really believe such a nonsensical idea, and are instead being dishonest. It obviously does not count against the goodness of the God of tradition if he puts some people in hell, because, as I mentioned before, tradition has always accepted both God’s goodness and the belief in hell, which, since these entire cultures and many intellectuals weren’t stupid, means that, whatever the sense was in which our tradition claimed that God was good, and just, and loving, etc, must not have been a sense which excludes putting people in hell. So there cannot possibly be a logical conflict in whatever sense was meant by the words in their traditional sense.

The objectors may then bring up the fact that this has nothing to do with ordinary language, so that it becomes confusing to say God is good, and just, and loving, etc, in the ordinary sense. But we can easily grant this. Obviously, religious language is different from ordinary language, and many examples can be raised to this effect, such as when Catholics in a religious context talk about “marriage”, by which they mean a metaphysical reality which can’t be divorced, rather than the normal way of talking about marriage, which is a legal status that can indeed be divorced. There is no surprise to be had, there.

Don’t be linguistically prejudiced against Catholic English (RCCE).

The entire broader “problem of evil” must itself be dishonest, for this same reasoning: obviously, the tradition did not mean to call God good in a way that excludes creating the world as it currently exists, since exponents of the tradition always clearly regarded God as the perfectly-good creator of the actual world. If God isn’t good in some current sense, so what? God is good in whatever sense the traditional theologians meant the word, and that’s enough, and there’s no reason to care about newfangled senses of goodness and justice that aren’t really part of our tradition.

Conclusion

There is no good reason not to uphold our tradition, and our cultural heritage, of the belief in hell; wanting to eschew it amounts to nothing more than rank hatred of culture, and philistinism.