Making Peace with Hell

What is Hell? That’s a question that's likely to start a lively conversation around the dinner table! Although, strictly speaking, Hell is a Christian concept, the idea of reward or punishment in the afterlife is expressed in many, if not most, religious faiths. Ideas abound from the rather conventional “burning in eternal agony” scenario to the “reincarnation somewhere further down the food chain” view of spiritual possibilities.

Even among Christians there is no consensus as to the true nature of Hell. Just as the idea of floating around on clouds while strumming your harp seems to be an outdated notion of Heaven, so does being eternally tormented by sadistic demons while scorched by hell fires seems a medieval view of Hell. While I'll grant you, that particular image is alive and well in the minds of fundamentalist Christians throughout the world, I suspect that concept is the minority Christian perspective today.

I believe these days most of the folks who think of themselves as Christians hold more to traditional notions of Heaven than to traditional concepts of Hell. In fact, many Christians today would define Hell as the absence of an afterlife at all. Hell is nothing. Hell is nothing…you just die and are returned to the earth as a less organized organic matter. You didn’t make it to eternal life and salvation. Your sole is extinguished. Bummer.

Hmm…Hell is nothing. I can get on board with that argument.

Most Christians would agree that Heaven and Hell are reserved for humans. Algae don’t get to go, nor do more sophisticated life forms such as dust mites and flatworms. What about fishes and birds? I think not. Cats and rats and elephants…sorry. Wait, what about the beloved family pet, surely there is a spot in Heaven  for Lassie just as Hell has an open door policy for Kujo and his kind. Most traditional Christian thought would suggest not...well maybe Lassie.

What about the Wildebeest and the Crocodile, the Zebra and the Lion? No Heaven, no Hell, no afterlife. Why the hell not!

Doesn't a Zebra feel terror and agony as a Lion is killing him? Surely his pain and fear are no less than yours or mine in a similar situation. If ever there was a creature that could use the comforting certainty of a blissful afterlife, it is a Zebra in the Serengeti. As far as we know, Zebras are not big on organized religion. Yet they are all going to die, and probably horrifically at that. How do they face another day? What keeps them from getting really, really, well you know, depressed? Probably their small brains, wouldn’t you say? They just don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, they’re not really equipped in the frontal lobe department to dwell on the subject. So they live and die. They do their thing and then they are no more. It sounds to me like they all end up in what a lot of people will tell you is, well... Hell. Hell is nothing.

So what is so different about our situation? My theory is that it’s those pesky frontal lobes. We are intellectually equipped to think about life and death, and we find it pretty damn disturbing! Much too disturbing to accept when it comes right down to it. So we reject it. Although we recognize that the organically obvious life-and-death thing fits every other life form on the whole planet, it's just not for us. No way. We are special. We will live on forever. Although most people who know me (and who also believe in this sort of thing) don’t think my eternal afterlife will be all that great, still it beats the alternative...right?

Isn’t that just it? Wouldn’t some people rather consider the possibility of eternal torment over the idea of eternal nothing? The thought of nothing—forever—just scares the crap out of people. It always has, ever since the idea first occurred to them. They would rather believe they will reincarnate as a bug or be forced to listen to bad banjo music for eternity than consider the simple logic that life is finite while death is infinite. They would have you believe the opposite, life is infinite, and death is temporary. Hello? Other than 10 billion people who desperately want this to be true, what tangible evidence is there? There seems to be a fair amount of physical evidence to the contrary. The entire physical record of human history in fact. Why isn't that compelling to most people? This is where the believers will tell you the good news about faith. Well here is the bad news about faith, it seems a lot like (actually exactly like) what the godless disciples of psychology call denial!

So here’s the deal, lots of folks, probably most progressive Christians, don’t believe in the active punishment of eternal damnation scenario anymore. They define Hell as nothing. I will end—the saved will live on forever—but I will just die. How nice for them. If you want to hear why this is so, go to church. There are even books on the subject.

Still none of it really makes any sense, not really. Life comes and goes. It’s a magnificent mystery. I think we are pretty much like all the rest of the creatures on this planet but with bigger frontal lobes. So we fear death even when a lion is not chasing us. That is our conundrum, we recognize the reality and inevitability of death but we aren’t psychologically equipped to accept the nature of death. So we come up with elaborate ways to comfort ourselves, to explain the unacceptable, to deny the physical evidence, and to rationalize our lives in this world.

The faithful will tell you I'm the one who is in denial about my immortal prospects, but even they may agree that Hell is nothing.