Part 1c: The Bible: Hell... and Heaven

[paintscribe]

I grew up steeped in heaven and hell. Getting into Heaven was easy, you just had to choose God before you died. Hell, on the other hand, was a scary place, a place of eternal torture. However, I was so confident that I was going to heaven that it only came up in my concern for my friends. Since I had few friends and fewer non-christian friends, I

Comments

[reverancepavane]

There was a theme in Niven and Pournelle's Inferno (a fictional account of a science fiction author's journey through an updated Hell based on Dante's The Divine Comedy) that always struck me as rather moving. And that is the encounter with the psychologist, who was so desperate to get through to his catatonic patients that he put them in a hot box and slowly raised the temperature until they screamed to be released. The idea that Hell is God's hotbox, a ward for the theological insane if you will, that was rather philosophically intriguing.
Personally I think that Heaven and Hell are purely a matter of the company that you keep, in this life or any other. Something exemplified in fact by the original The Divine Comedy.

[wunderworks]

A hotbox is still manipulative and torturous. A psychologist who cannot convince their patients without resorting to torture is no psychologist.

[wunderworks]

The Problem of Hell for me leads directly to the Problem of Evil, which Epicurus so eloquently expressed:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?