LOOK! NO GOD! |
HellHell is a feature, and a major one, of most religions. This article looks at the development of the idea. |
Most modern religions assume the existence of hell, a place where the majority of humanity goes when they die. They spend a very long time there, if not an eternity, and suffer pain which even the inquisitors in their torture chambers couldn't match. Those who end up there include many who have lived a good life, put others before themselves, and tried hard to be religious and serve their god to the best of their ability, but unfortunately were just led to the wrong religion.
Any human who tortured even one person in the ways described would be considered the ultimate in evil. (Actually, no one could ever managed it because their victim would fairly quickly die.) However, it's fine for God and in fact we are still expected to consider him to be loving. Even if God is in some way compelled by some law to send people to hell because he isn't as all-powerful as he makes out, he would still have the power to administer general anaesthetics - as surgeons do before they cut people up. But it seems he chooses not to. Such an idea wasn't always a feature of religions. But, of couse, the more dire one can make the consquences of not adopting a certain reigion, the more likely it is that people will be frightened into accepting it. The scariest and cruelest religions thus tend to be the ones that survive. Ancient Mesopotamia Around 3000 BCE the Sumerians believed that everyone, when they died, went to Kur, a dark, dreary cavern located under the ground, where they experienced a dull and shadowy version of life on Earth and ate nothing but dry dust. Everyone met the same fate, irrespective of how they had lived their earthly life. Later, it was believed that different people had different experiences, though the difference depended not on whether they had been good or bad, but rather on how they had been buried: those who recieved proper burials experienced a better afterlife; those who recieved makeshift brials or no burials had a worse experience and would often haunt the living. This was more in line with Egyptian beliefs of that time. The Old Testament The Old Testament picture of the afterlife was basically the same as that of early Mesopotamia and was most likely inherited from the Mesopotamians: the the dead go to a place under the ground, in Hebrew called Sheol, where they continue to exist in a shadowy world, conscious, but without any pleasure.
Job 10:21 Job says 'Turn away from me so I can have a moment’s joy before I go to the place of no return, to the land of gloom and utter darkness, to the land of deepest night, of utter darkness and disorder, where even the light is like darkness.' As with the Mesopotamian beliefs, everyone went there and all were treated the same, irrespective of how they lived in this life. Ecclesiastes 9:10 says: 'Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might; for there is no activity or planning or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, and that is where you are going. Kur and Sheol sound like fairly grim places. However, there is no mention of torment or torture in either. In fact Samuel seemed to resent the witch of Endor, a medium, bringing his spirit back temporarily to the land of the living so that Saul could ask him for advice.
1 Samuel 28:13-15: The woman said, "I see a spirit coming up out of the ground." "What does he look like?" [Saul] asked. "An old man wearing a robe is coming up," she said. Then Saul knew it was Samuel, and he bowed down and prostrated himself with his face to the ground. Samuel said to Saul, "Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up? Zoroastrianism Zoroastrianism is a dualistic religion in the sense that it has a good god, Ahura Mazda, locked in battle against an evil spirit, Angra Mainyu. Zoroastrians believe that, after death, the human soul is judged as to whether it did more good or bad deeds in its earthly life. Those with more good deeds go to what Zoroaster referred to as the "best existence"; those with more bad deeds go to the "worst existence". They then remain there until the end of time. The judgment as to which way they go takes place at the end of this age when the Earth is destroyed by fire (the apocalypse). Christianity The Jews were ruled by the Persians from 539 BCE when Babylon, where many of the leading Jews were held captive, fell to the Persians. Babylon and Palestine remained under Persian rule until Alexander defeated the Persians in 323 BCE. Zoroastrianism was the main religion of the Persians, and the Jews were greatly influenced by Zoroastrian ideas. Jewish thinkers broke into a number of sects. The Saducees were the more traditional thinkers and took on few of the Persian ideas. The Pharisees were a group more influenced by Zoroastrianism. They believed in an afterlife where the good and the bad are treated differently. The Essenes took on even more of the Persian ideas. The Greeks who ruled Palestine after the Persians were less respectful of Jewish culture and religion than the Persians had been. During their time (323 BCE to 166 BCE) apocalypic thinking became widespread and fairly mainstream. This developed from the Zoroastrianian idea of the end times (the apocolypse). The idea that God would destroy the Earth, reward the Jews for being faithful to him and punish their oppressors (the Greeks and later the Romans) was quite an appealing one and quite readily adopted. John the Baptist is considered to have been part of the Essene sect and Jesus and John appear to have been like thinkers. Jesus whole-heartedly took on the ideas of the apocalypticists as well. He taught that everyone goes to Heaven or Hell, depending on their actions in this life. Further, he described Hell as a fire in which souls are tortured for the rest of eternity (basically the worst fate imaginable), while Heaven was by contrast a pleasant and comfortable place (the best imaginable). The picture he painted was very different from the Old Testament idea of Sheol and more a development of Zoroastrian ideas.
Jesus also developed the idea of Satan as the evil adversary of a good god, Yahweh, very much along the lines of the conflict between Angra Mainyu and Ahura Mazda. Up until then, Satan was one of God's counsellors as in the book of Job (Job 1:6). Overall, Jesus' theology owed much more to Zoroastrianism than to the Old Testament Israelites and in some ways, Christianity might be thought of more as developing from Zoroastrianism than from the early Hebrew religion. Paul's theology was a modification of that of Jesus. Paul shared Jesus' ideas on hell, but pointed out that those who go there are not so much those who have been bad in this life, but rather those who have not believed the gospel. Despite its assertion that people go to Heaven or Hell, Christianity is not clear on the sequence of events that follow death. The picture with the best support in the bible is that there will be a judgment day when everyone will be judged according to what they have done or believed. Those still alive will meet God; those who have already died will have been sleeping and will then awake and rise up out of their graves. The deserving will be rewarded at the wedding feast of the Lamb, the start of life in Heaven, while the undeserving will be cast into the lake of fire to burn for ever. However, the story of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31) seems to contradict this by saying that the rich man went straight into the fire upon dying and before having been judged.
Some Christians consider that the bible does not actually say that there will be eternal torment for unbelievers. They point to the fact that nearly every time Jesus speaks of hell, he uses the Greek word 'Gehenna', which, according to tradition, was the name of a valley just outside the walls of Jerusalem where rubbish was burnt. The idea is that the rubbish was burnt away and ceased to exist. Jesus also talks about the wicked going to 'destruction', e.g. Mattew 10:28. However, many other passages seem to imply that torment does go on for ever. Matthew 25:46: Then they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. Daniel 12:2: Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Mark 9:48: And be thrown into hell, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. Rev 14:9-11: If anyone worships the beast and its image, and receives its mark on his forehead or on his hand, he too will drink the wine of God’s anger, poured undiluted into the cup of His wrath. And he will be tormented in fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises forever and ever. Day and night there is no rest for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.
Islam If the Christian scriptures allow some uncertainty as to whether the unfaithful will be tormented forever, the Islamic Quran leaves no doubt. Hundreds of verses point out that disbelievers and whoever commits misdeeds will be the inmates of the Fire, wherein they will dwell forever. Sura 9:68 says 'Allah has promised the hypocrites, both men and women, and the disbelievers an everlasting stay in the Fire of Hell—it is sufficient for them. Allah has condemned them, and they will suffer a never-ending punishment.' Sura 4:56 says 'Surely, those who disbelieve in our revelations, we will condemn them to the hellfire. Whenever their skins are burnt, we will give them new skins. Thus, they will suffer continuously'. Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Chinese Folk Religion Hindu and Jain beliefs involve repeated reincarnation until such time as one attains moksha and is freed from the cycle. Moksha is a permanent state of blissful oneness with the universe and is similar in some ways to western ideas of Heaven. Buddhism, which arose within the context of Hinduism, entails very similar beliefs. Chinese folk religion is an amalgam of Buddhism with pre-existing Taoism, Confucianism and earlier ideas involving animism, ancestor worship etc. This sounds a bit like hell is not a feature of these Eastern religions. However, there is widespread belief that there is a finite time between death and reincarnation in which one does have conscious experience. In most cases, this experience is a penance for the sins committed in the previous life - a cleansing in preparation for the next life. In Hinduism and Buddism this occurs in a place called Naraka. The Chinese term is Diyu. The experiences in Naraka/Diyu are desribed in various scriptures including the Dharmashastras, Itihasas, the Puranas, the Vedic samhitas, the Aranyakas and the Upanishads. Most of the experiences are quite gruesome. And some of them last a very long time. In Diyu, there are 18 hells which people have to work their way through, spending time in each. In some cases the time can be thousands of years. The hells vary between narratives but some commonly mentioned tortures include: being sawn in half or fried in oil, being forced to climb trees or mountains made of sharp knives, having sharp objects driven into their bodies or being hung upside down by hooks pierced into them, being drowned in a pool of filthy blood and being left naked in the freezing cold, set on fire or forced to consume boiling liquids. There is also skinning, eye gouging, tongue ripping, tooth extraction, disembowelment and being eaten by animals.
People have to go through this after every earthy life until they attain moksha. The time spent in earthly incarnations is fairly insignificant compared to the time spent in hell. Thus most of one's time is spent being tortured. General Observation All major religions have a hell. But they are all different. This strongly suggests that the descriptions are not reflections of reality, but rather a tried-and-tested means of frightening people into accepting the religion. |
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Image Acknowledgements
Angry god: JonaDav on DevianArt |