If you are not a trained logician, philosopher, or theologian, opening your mouth about matters of heaven and hell can be pretty embarrassing, if you want to be taken seriously. I presume that Ross Douthat wants to be taken seriously. So, here are a couple of things to keep in mind. You don’t have to believe in God to believe in Hell (or evil, for that matter) and you can believe in God without believing in the afterlife. Consider the following statements:
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.
These are a very incoherent set of statements, and, unfortunately, reading the whole piece and putting these statements in their full context is not very helpful. In the first sentence, Douthat logically equates a belief in God with a belief in afterlife (or paradise). But one can believe that God created the world just as we see it, with all living things blossoming, aging, and eventually succumbing. You can believe that the temporal world is a paradise or you can believe it is part of an eternal cycle of suffering. You can believe almost anything. There is no requirement that you believe in afterlife, whether or not you are an atheist.
The second sentence is even worse. Here we are told that paradise is available to us but that we have an opportunity to turn paradise down. That’s a straightforward way of describing the decision on whether or not to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior. What Douthat is really saying, I believe, is that we can’t all go to heaven or there is no punishment for bad behavior. But that assumes that people who reject hell must retain a belief in heaven. This is, again, an insistence that believing in God is equal to believing in the afterlife, and (as the third sentence makes clear) an afterlife that settles scores.
Part of this thought-spaghetti is a consequence of Douthat tackling a simple question. Is Mohandas Gandhi in hell? Are the most virtuous non-Christians condemned to an eternal pit of flame? And, if not, why not?
It might seem like a stupid question, but a lot of people take these types of questions extremely seriously. For Douthat, people are clearly uncomfortable assigning Gandhi to hell. And, as a result, they are basically writing hell out of the Christian religion while retaining heaven. He thinks we are doing this because of “pluralism,” which just means that we encounter non-Christians in our everyday lives. He also thinks we are doing this because, ironically, our lives have become less brutish and short. We have less tolerance for big tragedies and less ability to explain them in the context of a loving God. If you aren’t following the logic here, don’t worry. The logic is a hopeless mess.
What he might say, which would make a lot more sense, is that we no longer live in a world in which half or more of our children will not live to be teenagers. As a result, it’s a lot easier for us to see God as an all-loving being, and a lot harder for us to picture him enjoying the eternal torment of the vast majority of people ever born. It’s only when a tsunami or epic earthquake or massive hurricane or some other natural disaster hits us, that we begin to question God’s good intentions and think about his wrath. But this observation wouldn’t fit in at all with Douthat’s point.
He wants some assurance that Tony Soprano is not in heaven. I don’t think fictional characters go to heaven, although Jeffrey Lebowski (not the real one) certainly deserves a place there. More seriously, everything we do has meaning. We don’t need to be bit-players in a cosmic morality-play for our actions to have meaning. If someone has convinced you that your actions have no meaning unless they impact the standing of your immortal soul, that person doesn’t have your best interests at heart. There is no humanist case for hell. There is a humanist case for relieving human suffering. Any argument that there is a humanist case for eternal human suffering, or the threat of eternal human suffering, is bankrupt and wrong.
But, you believe what you want to believe. Whatever gets you through the night, it’s alright.
I think it’s reasonable that if you are a Christian you have to have faith there is a heaven and hell. But the Christian God is not the only conception of a supreme deity.
Well, two things on that.
It’s a split personality, which is mostly divided into God and Jesus, although not entirely, as Jesus has some pretty spiteful quotes here and there.
What I’ve learned over the years is that no one is compelled to actually believe much of anything to consider themselves a Christian. Check out, for example, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong.
I know. I actually had written “not the fire-cave hell of the Renaissance” but ended up deleting it from the post. My personal conception of Christian hell is spiritual abandonment/isolation.
Anyhow, Christ did say Commandment 1, love the Lord with all you are, and Commandment 2, love your neighbor. Which are pretty broad sentiments.
ED: But I should add that some kind of spiritual judgment is also a major component, though I tend to think of it as “You will be held accountable by a power greater than you.”
It’s actually very hard to craft any hard prerequisites for being a Christian. The best I can do is that you see Jesus of Nazareth as having been a very, very unique and special individual, without whom, your world doesn’t make sense. You must consider him to have done something or offered some knowledge that no one else has done. But, what it is that he did or taught that is so important? That can vary massively.
For a lot of people, the most important thing is that he taught of the power of love and the possibility of redemption. But there is no necessary otherworldly component to those insights.
Well it’s good to a get perspective from a non-Christian.
The problem is that the most radical and fundamentalist Christians, still a minority in the overall Christian community, make the most noise and automatically draw the attention of the media. The fundamentalists are also the ones who have cleverly co-opted the political process to push their agenda. They are also the ones willing to put their money where their mouth is to push their truly radical views into the mainstream.
And all of this gets cover due to the undeserved, yet automatic, respect and deference that so many Americans and American institutions willingly give to religion. Until we recognize the need to logically evaluate the irrationality of much of our religious community, and seek to put them in the place where they belong in our democracy, we will continue to suffer through their religious pogroms against those who they see as infidels. The fundamentalists have created a world where those who don’t kiss the ring of this oppressive, cruel and discriminatory faction are essentially ostracized from any public forum or service.
Almost any religion which seeks to categorize people into groups; those privileged to be included in “the family of god”,and the “others” (everyone else), is destined to be poisonous to the well being of humanity.
Douthat, like so many others, is simply seeking to help perpetuate these conditions. His argument, though simply a mish-mash of unrelated and discordant thoughts, is still obvious to anyone who follows the irrationality of the fundamentalist Christian camp and their world view.
As for Bishop Spong, I have no doubt that if the fundamentalists had their way, he would be near the head of line of those on whom the fundies would like to exercise their god’s “righteous hand of judgment”. And in the most tortuous and inhumane way possible. In their eyes, people like Spong are worse than an unbeliever; they are heretics.
Here is an interview I heard recently on the CBC with Bishop Spong. I found it very interesting. His take on religion is quite different than one imagines for someone who has spent a lifetime in the church.
I’ve always been more comfortable that by definition a supreme being would be just that, thus nullifying the existence or if you will, the need, for the concept of Hell.
But then again I’ve never felt the urge to cattle prod my neighbors with promises of hellfire and damnation.
I don’t quite get your meaning. Or, maybe I do, but I can’t be sure.
You could mean that a Supreme Being doesn’t have to bother with a meddlesome devil (because, if he did, he wouldn’t be Supreme).
Or, you could mean that all scores are settled, but we just don’t have the eyes to see justice being done.
Or, you could mean something entirely different.
One problem is that Douthat wants Hell to be his definition of Hell. I doubt very much, based on his other writings, that he would think that Cheney, Bush, or the myriad of other leaders who launched unnecessary war and established a torture regime would be destined for Hell. But I don’t see how one could read the Ten Commandments or any of the Gospels and conclude otherwise.
One reason for that, of course, is that in the Old Testament many of the heros regularly break the rules, so there is a definite sense that the written rules are merely guidelines, and the most important thing is to be on the right side — no matter what nasty stuff the right side is doing at the moment. Once you make that philosophical leap — which just about every religious conservative has — then the logical conclusion is Hell is for everyone who isn’t part of your group, and that those on your side who regularly broke all 10 commandments, all seven deadly sins, and the golden rule are going to Heaven as long as they were loyal to your side.
I’m late but I’ve spent too much time researching religion lately not to comment.
There seems to be three main issues for Douthat, and they’re pretty standard. The first is moral behavior, which purportedly comes from God, who punishes those who disobey him with hell and rewards those who obey with heaven.
The second issue is allegiance, which is an issue that makes more sense if one understands that polytheism was still being practiced by many Jews around the time that the bible was written. I’ve tried to explain statements by Jesus such as “..only through me.” as directives to a particular belief, as in only through ‘this’ way, but I now think that it’s a statement about competing gods. It’s also taken from the conception of a god who favors the Jews, in the sense of a tribal god. Many religious texts from that era also go to lengths to point out the universal nature of the Abrahamic god, which is a sort of ‘one-up manship’ that indicates a level of concern over worship of other deities.
The third issue is free will. Moral behavior isn’t moral if it’s only compelled, and there’s a hint of the conservative idea of accountability, in the sense that actions have consequences. Individuals need to develop an internal moral compass in this behavioristic carrot (heaven) and stick (hell) scheme, so lacking a proper system of rewards and punishments would rob them of the ability to develop it, or so Douthat believes.
One way I can address all these issues is by using the Catholic idea of contrition, which encompasses all three issues. Perfect contrition is a state in which one choses a moral path because of a love for god whereas imperfect contrition is when one chooses morality for less noble reasons, such as the fear of hell.
The Biblical deity is a legalistic entity not unlike a monarch of that era. Because of this, little thought is given to moral governance that doesn’t rule through autocratic, coercive psychological principles. And tied up with this is the concept of original sin. But not all of Christianity agrees with this, and perfect contrition speaks to this. Orthodox Christianity employs a medical model, and the concept of reincarnation that exists in many eastern religions could be compared to a learning process culminating in an enlightened state. Rather than a dichotomy of good and evil, which dominates Christian thought, there’s a long slow process of development. People aren’t viewed as evil but undeveloped, just as in any learning or development process.
The idea that someone could chose good without a coercive outside force is hard for some people to wrap their heads around, particularly rightwingers. From my perspective, it’s the emphasis on evil that helps bring evil into the world, since evil is often a projection of our own fears and inadequacies upon the world. Religion is often less an attempt to eliminate evil than an attempt to sacralize it, by legitimizing our hatred of our enemies. By using the label of evil, we rationalize and condone acts that are evil in themselves. And by evil I don’t mean diabolical in the wild imaginative sense, but rather, ignorant and suspicious, and willing to believe the worst of others.