Christians and Muslims get pleasure out of imagining tortures for sinners and infidels, some of them really seem to get off on it, their eyes widen and foam flecks their lips at the prospect. Sick bastards.
This is something the atheist cannot get involved in except as a whimsical thought experiment. If there really was such a thing as a hell, if people really did continue to have the ability to experience pain after their brains and bodies died, who should be despatched there?
The first category of people who would deserve some kind of punishment is of course the unrepentant criminals. But what good would this do? Is it really justice to repay the causing of suffering with suffering? How do two wrongs make a right? These days no civilized nations use any form of punishment which is designed to inflict pain upon prisoners, no matter what the nature of the offence. Why? Because it degrades and dehumanizes those handing out the punishments as well as those receiving them and it does not turn nasty evil-minded people into pure proud upstanding citizens it just makes them bitter and twisted nasty evil-minded people in pain plotting revenge. Using violence to make other people think the way you want them to think just doesn't work. Arab Terrorism doesn't make Americans support the Palestinian cause and want to convert to Islam, it makes Americans want to bomb towelheads and sand-niggers into the stone age in the name of Jesus. Shelling villages in Gaza doesn't make people more sympathetic to Israeli citizens fearful of the odd rocket, it makes them want to send many more rockets, although maybe from the next village instead. Cutting off a philandering male chauvinist's penis will not turn him into a peaceful, faithful and considerate partner. So why expect roasting sinners will turn them into saints or be a profitable use of an infinite supply of sulphurous flames? Whatever roasting sinners in hell is designed to do the last thing that is likely to happen is that the sinners turn from their wickedness to love God.
Torture doesn't work. It might be possible to make some people confess to something they have done wrong but the same technique can make many others confess to doing impossible things. People have confessed under torture or even mild mistreatment to all kinds of heinous crimes just to stop the abuse. The case of Stefan Kiszko was a classic, he confessed to a rape and murder despite being both innocent and impotent just so he could go home. He did manage to get home just before he died, after sixteen years, most of it in solitary confinement in prison because he was labelled a child sex killer. On the other hand you get cases like John McCain, torturing him didn't make him love the Viet Cong or make him think that the values he had lived his life by and that had got him into that torture were wrong. Yet somehow Christians think that torturing people will make them better in some way. Nonsense. Torture damages people, those who suffer it and those who inflict it and nothing good comes of it. Hell is just torture designed to deter. It has no point to it. It is as futile as destroying a dozen Russian cities because Britain got destroyed, the only value of it is as a deterrent. If it is ever used it has already totally failed and the use of it turns those who unleash it, inflict it, allow, order, ordain or sanction it into despicable evil monsters. If you are a monster if you use it in what way are you not a monster if you threaten to use it? I recall seeing many priests marching with CND to “ban the bomb”, to argue a moral case for unilateral nuclear disarmament, did any of them ponder a moment about the morality of threatening people with an eternity of torture? Ah, but there's a choice, isn't there? There is always the option not to attack and retribution to be an effective deterrent must be as sure as hell, if you will pardon the expression. Hell is anything but sure, as is clearly demonstrated by looking at the behaviour of so many of those who claim to believe in it while demonstrating that they do not.
Most civilized Christian denominations now know that hell-fire is seriously bad for their image. It seems to be so, well, primitive, a hang over from an earlier darker age. Of course that is exactly what it is, a hang over from an earlier darker age, but not the earliest days of religion. The early Hebrew myths are devoid of any concept of a soul or an afterlife. When the old prophets died that was it, they were dead. Nobody prayed for their souls or prayed to them in heaven. They were dead. The Hebrews could understand the concept, they were quite familiar with what happened when you cut the throat of a heifer or throttled a turtle dove. It died. And stayed dead. It's not that hard to grasp.
“Where's it gone daddy?”
“Didn't you just see the priest kill it? It's not gone anywhere son, it's still there, dead. Oy Vey, almighty G-d, have I raised a klutz?”
Good people didn't get eternal life they got longer life, apparently, and more wealth and their wives, slaves and cattle were more fertile.
The Hebrews came late to the idea of hell, and the concept of immortal souls that make hell possible. This was probably something they picked up in Babylon along with the idea that you could scare people with the idea of imaginary beasts with strange numbers of heads and horns of different kinds that by rights belong to different animals. Moses never lost sleep imagining being ravaged for all eternity by monsters, neither did he make the slightest suggestion that such a fate awaited those who broke his laws. Was hell originally designed as something the Hebrew people (by that time known as Jews) wanted their Babylonian captors to believe in rather than their own people? It certainly makes far more sense to make your enemies believe in hell-fire than your own people. Who wants to lead a bunch of frightened wusses? Ah. Manipulative sick bastards, obviously. Like lambs to the slaughter, they even have the sick humour to call themselves Pastor, which is oldspeak for shepherd. The Pastor will look after you until he is ready and he will make sure nobody else fleeces you.
Hell is a thoroughly discredited idea, clearly a human invention and not something that can be described in a first-hand account. According to Christian dogma nobody has been to Hell and come back to tell the tale except Jesus, and his was only a flying visit. And yet descriptions of Hell are everywhere and preachers come up with new ideas about who will be there, why, when, for how long and what they will suffer. It seems that Hell is not set out like a symphony, something that is tightly scored, it's much more like free-form jazz: feel free to improvize a tune on the last trump. Of course one of the great unexplained or obfuscated points is who is in Hell now, if anybody. There are clear inconsistencies between the tale of waiting in the grave until the day of judgement and the idea that graduates from Bob Jones university can tell you what is happening to dead homosexuals right now as if they have a live video feed installed in their lecterns.
The soul is a kooky idea. It took time for the concept to become familiar until the point that people began to believe that everybody was born believing that that they would go on experiencing for ever just like they didn't before they had a brain. Up to the time of King David there wasn't the slightest hint of the idea that there was an immaterial core to a person. The Bible may use the word soul before that time but that is an interpolation of a later translator referring to inner unvoiced thoughts and consciousness rather than to something essential which has the capability to survive bodily death. The idea of a soul surviving death permeates the New Testament but it would baffle and confound even the imaginative storyteller who gave us the Book of Job. Only the author of Daniel would have the faintest clue what the New Testament was saying.
That's the preliminaries out of the way. Hell does not exist, could not exist, makes no sense, is all lies and has no function but to scare people. But even so, who would I send? The Christians have their lists, headed by unbelievers, fornicators and homosexuals. So what about mine? I started writing this page with every intention of making a list of thoroughly deserving cases such as televangelists who live high on the widow's mite, paedophile priests and nuns who made so many millions of girls and women frigid and unable to enjoy sex but I just can't do it. Even as an exercise in fiction it is all too sickening to imagine. I'm far too good a person to condemn anybody to torture, even finite torture. The worst I can manage is imagining lining up people against an imaginary wall and shooting them with doubly imaginary soft and squishy bullets. By doubly imaginary I mean even when I imagine the wall is real the bullets are still imaginary. I just don't have enough hatred in me to be religious. Hell is a thoroughly wicked idea that demeans everybody who believes in it and contemplates it and is a terrible indictment of the imaginations of those who came up with it and promulgated it.
Torture cannot improve people, neither can bullying. If there really was a god with the power to create the whole universe you'd think it would be just as easy to make people nice as it would be to create a galaxy or a new species of dragonfly. The reason that such an idea won't work for the religious is that they have a whole mountain of dogma to support that would be rendered meaningless if God really did have the power to make people good without some blood, death, flames, torture or sacrifice along the way. Empty your mind of such nonsense and think yourself back into the mind of a child and ask the question: if God is good and can do everything and he wants everybody to be and do good why doesn't he make nasty people good again? Why does there have to be death and suffering and torture in God's perfect plan? If that's the perfect plan what are the other ones like? If God wants to forgive us what is stopping him?
By the concept of karma, people reaping what they sow, isn't it clear that there is only one candidate for an eternity in hell? Only an eternal being could deserve eternal punishment. No mortal being could ever do anything wicked enough to justify even eternal detention after school never mind eternal torture because of the disparity between anything finite and the infinite. Only a god could ever deserve to be sent to Hell. The human mind cannot directly imagine infinity, we have to use tricks. I remember my uncle had a grandfather clock at one time, I was fascinated that I could see the minute hand move because the face was so big. So I sat and stared at the hour hand, knowing that it must be moving too, but I got bored before I could say for certain whether I noticed it move. To imagine eternity picture a millennium hand on a giant clock. Eternity is much bigger than that, but it's a start.
What sin would be bad enough to justify an eternity in Hell? Murderers often get released from human prisons after ten years or so and it is only the most heinous of murders which see their culprits languishing in prison until the day they die. Not even serial killing can guarantee a lifetime behind bars these days, and I think rightly so. No good is served by keeping somebody in prison until they die unless they are judged to be a permanent threat and beyond redemption. Why should cosmic justice work in a different way to the justice system of a civilized nation state? There is only one crime that I can think of which would be serious enough to warrant an eternity in Hell, the ultimate crime against humanity – creating a place of eternal torment.
Who have the Christians sent to Hell? Satan. Or is it Lucifer? Or is it the snake from Eden who told Eve the truth? Or perhaps all of them. It seems by some descriptions the beast has enough heads and horns spare to be all those and more. And why was Lucifer sent out from heaven to Hell? For having a bit of ambition. For having a goal to his eternal life. That isn't done apparently. You don't get to play the cards you're dealt you should just know your place, do your duty and spend all of eternity ceaselessly praising God. So the devil is fully employed permanently, without ceasing, torturing the souls of those who will be damned after the day of judgement and/or from whenever God put him in charge. So who does the tempting of prophets and crash course individual tuition on stringed instruments? Is that another mystery like the trinity? The devil can be in Hell, in the pit, in the lake of fire, on the mountain, in the cup on the altar of the black mass, in the liquor bottle on the shelf, in the whore's boudoir, under Bin Laden's turban and whispering in Marilyn Manson's ear all at the same time. He can be the many headed many horned beast of Revelation and the fallen angel and the spitting image of the Roman god Pan and the scaled up version of Pan from all those rock albums all at the same time. The explanation for how all this is possible is quite simple: in fiction and myth the only limit is the perceived scope of the imagination of those the myth-maker is telling the tale to.
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