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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Hell, no

We believe in heaven, but are increasingly uninterested in hell, in part because of attempts by some pastors and theologians to make God seem more human. But "scoffing at eternal damnation" also makes human life less fully human:

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there's no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no's have any real meaning either. They're like home runs or strikeouts in a children's game where nobody's keeping score.

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante's “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It's a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man's free will, at one moment, can mean life or death ... salvation or damnation.”

Of course thos of us who are strongly pessimistic are pretty sure there's a hell. It's heaven we're not so sure about.

Comments

Doug
Mon, 04/25/2011 - 10:24am

The Slacktivist makes a pretty convincing case that the Bible has very little to say about hell.

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2011/02/team-hell-gets-loud.html

"The doctrine of Hell can be, with only partial success, taken from Dante and Chick and Iron Maiden and grafted onto the Bible. But it cannot be derived from the Bible."

He lays out the three passages in which the Bible has anything of substance to say on the matter and those passages do not support what most advocates of a literal Hell claim.

Harl Delos
Tue, 04/26/2011 - 1:23am

I can't guarantee there's a hell, but I know there's a devil.

My late first wife was her daughter.

Bob G.
Tue, 04/26/2011 - 8:58am

If there IS a literal hell (and I believe there is), my part of town is tyring it's damnedest to be at the epicenter.

;)

littlejohn
Tue, 04/26/2011 - 3:05pm

Sorry, Doug, but the Bible says rather a great deal about hell.
Start with the most graphic: Mark 9:48

Harl Delos
Tue, 04/26/2011 - 4:33pm

What do you expect, Bob G? A town is, by definition, an area with a severe shortage of area.

A million people can either be Indianapolis, or it can be Montana. If you put too many rats in a warren, they start eating each other. If you're living in a community as dense as Milan Center or denser, you're asking for trouble.

Some of you may be unfamiliar with Milan Center. Here's a map: +

Bob G,.
Wed, 04/27/2011 - 8:43am

I don't expect MUCH...(and the city's been all too forthcoming with THAT)...just that everyone is held to similar standards, and that laws (and ordinances) are both obeyed AND (especially) enforced...certainly this is not the MOON I'm asking for.

Just a tad bit of fairness.
And just what everyone in any decent neighborhood ALREADY HAS...simple, huh?

We need a damn Pied Piper.

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