"Hell really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more”
A bold assertion in all four dimensions; clearly a skeptic like me would like to see a little evidence of this before prostrating myself at his feet but if I were a betting man I'd wager there is none. It seems fruitless attempting (impossibly) to prove a negative as us Atheists seemed eternally destined to do, no such statement from religious leaders such as this ever provides enough meat for serious research and debate, that's kind of the point of "faith", i.e. it inoculates itself from scrutiny, such is the Atheist burden of disproof.
But fear not, apparently Hell is not intended to scare anyone nor provide a convenient stick with which to make the carrot of subservience to the Church looks appetising. According to the people that "know" the medieval bully boys got it wrong (doh!) hell is only a metaphor for being without God. If that's true then I can assure everyone right now, hells looks a lot like planet earth, spinning aimlessly in space populated with evolved apes all trying to make sense of their conciousness and scratch a decent living relatively free of suffering for their families; either that or being locked in a room full of Popes...
6 comments:
Umm, do you think he was talking about 'hell' as another place entirely, or do you think he was agreeing with that noted non-believer, the first Jean-Paul (Sartre), that hell is made up of other people?
Which is just another way of saying the definition depends entirely on which side of the real/relative debate you fall, and that it's all just a matter of perspective.
BTW I wanted to ask have you read Dante's Inferno?
I suggest your interpretaion of hell is a mite mild compared to plenty of experiences from within living memory, but then we all do tend to be conditioned by the limitations of our own experiences and perhaps we should be glad of that!
OP, he said it "really exists", that doesn't sound like an ambiguous state to me?
Actually I find the statement highly contradictory since having made an unsubstantiated claim of existence it then goes on to make an allegorical claim i.e. that hell isn't a "real" threat but means a "state without God", which I suppose means I live in hell right now (come on in the water is lovely! ;)
You'd think that after 2000 years something so important and central to the faith would be well understood and clearly defined, particularly by top dogs, apparently not. Of course the debate would be of no consequence except that millions of people live in fear of these assertions and the threat of it weighs down on their lives.
re. Dante, yes read it, I reckon our Dante would have made a good scientist if he'd had a decent education, clearly an analytical (model making) mind ;) I was lucky enough to visit his cenotaph in Florence a few years ago (among others), it's in the same place as Galileo's (a little historical pilgrimage for me)
so you take a literal interpretation of his words?
talking of Dante, I remember watching a video of the commandant of Treblinka Franz Stangl describing his arrival there as a passage through the seven rings of Dante's hell.
He was brought in because the camp couldn't cope with the 12,000 people it was expected to execute every day. Stangl was later convicted of responsibility in about 700,000 deaths.
Frankly I don't see how visions of hell can get any worse that piles of bodies rotting where they fell in the open in a factory of death, or for that matter from an individual point of view being responsible for making the harvest from the dead more efficient.
Circumstances such as these are hellish and really do exist still on a variety of scales. You might mention the racial wars in the Congo and central Africa, or the drugs wars in Mexico or various forms of human slave transportation or the regular famines in North Korea etc, all of which are the direct result of political choices.
I'm afraid I have to take aim at your/our comfortable western middle-class existence and say you are missing a big part of the picture. All suffering is hellish, you/we should really be humble in the face of it.
I think the disambiguation comes through a reunderstanding of what a state of existence means.
I think it is very difficult to see this from our own individual pespective alone, because 'existence' is not the same as simply 'being' and circumstances vary so widely.
Again there is a linguistic problem in changing the words from nouns to verbs in English which confuses the issue at stake somewhat.
This is where I get annoyed at the lack of appreciation for grammar in our education system and calm myself down by saying this helps make our political consciousness as a nation far more dynamic and driven to solve the real world problems.
A roomful of Popes? I can only think of 2, and one's not a Catholic. Plus Shane MacGowan's backing band, I suspect.
In which case some of the Popes would have to be dead. and that would be unpleasant.
Hi OP, I'm not convinced that I'm missing anything?
The point of my post is less about our interpretation of what "hell" is and more about what the purpose of hell (imagined or real) might be. This is where I believe the shamanism inherent in this story really comes into focus i.e. it logically follows that what the Pope's saying is that if hell is "real" then hell is a punishment; no other interpretation is possible otherwise it would be pointless for him to mention it, the corollary question is, punishment for what? I think we all know what his answer to that would be, no amount of allegorical squirming can avoid it.
My position is clear, as Tennyson accurately pointed out, "Tho' nature red in tooth and claw". We are fortunate as a species that our large brains have lifted us out of the 24X7 suffering inherent in natural selection, suffering is the norm and the asteroid that inevitably has planet Earth’s name on it doesn't care what we think about that. It's simply childish solipsism to anthropomorphise this natural state into some kind of retribution for not prostrating one’s self to Catholic dogma. My position is the humble and honest one whereas it seems to be the hight of arrogant to assert that suffering is a punishment for "thought crimes" and to make huge claims about the universe that are unsubstantiated and self-serving, or as ALT says "the truths that never can be proved"
I have to agree with you about our education system though, intellectual pursuits are widely misunderstood these days IMO.
G, Insightful as ever, hell is ...
Being Shane McGowen's dentist!! :)
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