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.