Conscious Torment
So religion makes people good, does it. Christianity makes people more kind and compassionate does it. Well, maybe sometimes it does, but all too often it (at least the extreme, narrow version of it that is so popular in the US) makes people – not just not better, but horrifying. Disgusting. So appalling it’s hard to take it in.
Patrick Henry is a Christian university where the students all (shades of Oxbridge and the Thirty Nine Articles) sign a ten-part statement of faith –
agreeing that, among other things, Hell is a place where “all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.”
Okay, I know we’re supposed to be all tolerant and respectful, we’re supposed to shut up about people’s pious ‘devout’ beliefs, we’re supposed to refrain from telling them that they’re lost in the fog. But – but there’s a limit. There’s a limit, and with the drooling sadism of the Rapture novels and with ‘statements of faith’ like the above, I reach my limit. That sentence is disgusting! It’s disgusting, disgusting, disgusting, and people who sign up to it and then go cheerily about their business, ironing their hair and not drinking alcohol and interning for Karl Rove – people like that are an abomination. I’m serious. If they sign up to that and seriously literally believe it’s true – what the fuck is the matter with them? Why aren’t they all curled up in little balls sobbing and screaming? Why doesn’t that thought blight their lives? Why doesn’t it give them nightmares? Why doesn’t it torture them so much that they look for a way out and realize it’s all a pack of lies? Why are they happy with the set-up? What is wrong with them? They seriously think that the vast majority of humans alive now and also formerly alive are now or will soon be ‘confined in conscious torment for eternity’? And they don’t mind? They in fact ‘love’ the ‘God’ that arranges this? The God that first creates us and then confines us in conscious torment for eternity?
They’re sick. I’m dead serious. They’re a population of sick bastards. And there they are trundling around thinking they’re good. It’s staggering. It’s also disgusting. It’s always disgusted me in Dante, but he had the excuse that he lived in the 13th century. There’s no excuse for it now. I can accept (up to a point) that the fact that religion is consoling is an excuse for believing it, even though there’s not much other reason. But believing that foul sentence is hardly the same kind of consolation as believing we will all be reunited and there will be no more parting then.
It’s the word ‘conscious’ that pushes me over the edge. There’s something so – oh, determined, refined, thorough about it. An anxious carefulness to nail everything down, to make absolutely sure that not only is there torment and not only is it for eternity, but the outside-of-Christers are awake for it. And along come tripping all these brighteyed fresh-faced home-schooled dimpled little darlings from Idaho and Nebraska, signing right up to that evil piece of shit. And thinking they’re virtuous for doing so – thinking they’re better than the secular crowd.
I don’t understand. I really don’t. It defeats me.
Truer words were never spoken. It’s the ultimate form of “nyah, nyah, I’m better than you” mentality. It’s smug, infantile, sadistic.
I was talking with a friend of mine who’s a lutheran pastor (oh god, yes, I have friends whose full-time job it is to tell fairy tales — I should be so lucky) about that article — he seemed to think that those kids at Patrick Henry College didn’t have much of a grasp of what is was that Christ died for (everyone, the way he reads the good book), and as he put it, “if there is a heaven, and if somehow these kids get there — considering their inability to embrace christ-like lives, and because unfortunately for some stupid reason my god loves everyone, they’re going to be in for a big surprise about who they’re going to meet once they get there — cuz’ it could very well be one big gay wedding.”
Anyway, it’s always nice to be reminded that not all “faith based” folks are so evil minded. Unfortunataly, I think the tolerable ones are vastly outnumbered by the bad. Frightening article. If all those boys at that school are as pro-Bush as they say they are, I wish they would put their lives where their mouths are and join the army. Funny how they’re all too busy being interns for GOP congressmen. I guess the army is just for suckers who can’t afford Patrick Henry’s $20,000 a year tuition.
If we’re lucky maybe these Patrick Henry kids will start drinking cocktails at staff parties, sleep with the senators they work for and turn into your every day old-school selfish laisez-faire Republican who puts on a show of epicopalianism, but would never be so gauche as to ever mention God. I never thought I’d ever miss that type of american-conservative, but these days I sure do!
“young, ambitious politicians who talk openly about their relationship with Jesus and still get ahead.”
Am I crazy or is there something in that sentence that implies that declaring religious belief is a hindrance in American politics? We all know the score on that question; it’s been discussed here often enough.
“What is wrong with them?”
That’s the way I usually express it, in helpless uncomprehending shock, when confronted by those whose minds have been twisted to the point that they’re no longer on the same planet as I am. That’s when I remember Jonathan Miller dismissing religion as mental illness. I share OB’s disgust, but it’s far worse than that. Hands up anyone who thinks that if they get the kind of power they’re after it would never cross their minds to help god in tormenting the unbelievers, maybe with a little preview to convince them to mend their ways. Why not, if it’s “his” will? Aren’t they trying to help him now, in every way they can (though they surely believe he could do it all on his own if he felt like it)?
I’m afraid Patrick Henry makes me think of the greenhouse with the pods in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” It also makes me think of something else belonging to 20th century history that is too inflammatory to mention.
I was curious about what was in the other nine parts of the statement of faith, so here’s a link to save time for others who might also be interested:
http://www.phc.edu/about/default.asp
Further on down the same page there are wonderful glimpses of the American future, such as:
“Any legitimate system of government must be built on the dual realizations that all people (i) bear God’s image and are therefore entitled to enjoy a number of fundamental, inalienable rights, but (ii) are tainted by sin and therefore cannot be trusted to be free of all government restraint.”
Comment superfluous.
It seems this sort of hardline evangelical Christianity is in the ascendency because it perfectly fits in with our modern lives. This way, as long as you accept Jesus, you can carry on making loadsa money and shitting on the little guy, safe in the knowledge that they’ll go to heaven and everyone else will burn in hell however good they’ve been. Pure unadulterated selfishness. But a great sales pitch.
Jeremy – you’re absolutely right about there being somewhat more enlightened versions of the afterlife around. I once asked my father (a Roman Catholic theologian – don’t ask) about Hell, and he believes it’s empty. It exists, but there’s no one there.
I’m also reminded of a passage from Steven Weinberg’s collection “Facing Up” (p. 243-244) in which he recounts a discussion with John Polkinghorne:
“For instance, I said, a flaming sword might come down and strike me dead on the stage, which would provide pretty good evidence for divine intervention in the working of the universe. John Polkinghorne kindly interposed that he hoped that would not happen. If it did, he added, it would pose a theological problem for him as well as for me, since he did not believe in a God who would do that. To lighten the exchange, I pointed out that it would not only pose a theological problem, but also a janitorial problem.”
In any event, that does not remove the abominable views OB refers to. I’m wondering sometimes where all these visions of eternal torture and being put into big cauldrons by little pitchfork-wielding hairy devils, etc. comes from. Islam may have an analogue to it, but surely no other religion? Judaism is very vague as to the existence of an afterlife. And the visions of Hell in, say, Nordic and Greek/Latin polytheistic religions are rather mild (and I don’t think they involved eternal torture of nonbelievers). I remember having read somewhere that it was Zoroastrianism which introduced the concept of a Final Judgement at the end of time, which is probably where all this crap comes from.
But to me, there seems to be a sadistic strain suffusing a lot of Christian art and imagination throughout the centuries. I’m perfectly allright with sadism myself – but let’s call it by its name.
I’m hardly up on Christian theological history, but I imagine that when it was the religion of the poor and oppressed, the promise of salvation in another life, and punishment for everyone else, probably helped it spread.
PM – far as I remember, it was Calvinism, a strain which afflicts the Netherlands, some rainy parts of Scotland and the US, which introduced the idea of predestination: nothing you do matters, God already made up its mind on whether you’re going to be marinated or eating nectar and singing in the holy choir. From there, there’s only a small step that you can be as evil and heartless as you want to be, as long as you believe in evangelism’s amoral version of Christianity. Which is stated pretty explicitly in, say, Jack Chick cartoons and the like.
Merlijn–
Predestinationist thinking goes back to Augustine in the 400’s. He was instrumental in having the Pelagians, who taught that one’s free will played a part in one’s salvation, declared heretics.
According to Antony Flew, The Augustinian doctrine of predestination and election flows logically from the propositions that god is omnipotent and omnicient.
He finds primitive forms of the argument
Augustine developed in certain of the
Pauline epistles.
Flew’s remarks appear in issue 40,
March/April 2003 of (sorry, Ophelia!)
_Philosophy Now_, page 27.
—
Cheers,
Elliott
“there seems to be a sadistic strain suffusing a lot of Christian art and imagination throughout the centuries.”
Just so. See Augustine, Luther – and certain parts of the New Testament, written by angry twisted bitter men. That one notorious sentence – that that sick bastard Mel Gibson put in his sick movie – ‘his death be on our heads’ – which is pure fiction, has gotten a lot of people murdered in the centuries since. (Elaine Pagels wrote a book about this.)
But it takes real…greed for sadism, a kind of sadism expanded into extra dimensions, to take pleasure in the idea of eternal conscious torment. And to put it in writing and to have people sign up to it. (One of the first N&Cs I wrote was about hearing Tim LaHaye talking on the radio (on ‘Fresh Air,’ an interview show on US public radio) about eternal damnation – talking happily, cheerily, perkily.)
These are bad, bad people. I don’t want them to suffer conscious torment for eternity, but I want it on the record that they are not what they think they are, they are not good. They’re loathsome.
(Quite all right about Philos Now, Elliott!)
A significant number of priests and ministers today have largely dispensed with the idea of hell, especially if they are fairly well-read and cosmopolitan in outlook. My friend’s dad, who is a Lutheran minister, has said things very similar to the comment by the other Lutheran quoted above.
But, and this is a big “but,” these relatively tolerant attitudes are often still compatible with believing yourself to be better than those who do not share their faith. They may not want dissenters to roast on Satan’s grill for all eternity, but they do often think that those who lack their beliefs are defective in some fundamental way. Now, I’ll admit that I think THEY’RE a bit defective in at least one way – namely, believing in an entity for which there is no evidence. But my rejection of their belief doesn’t entail an overall negative judgment about their worth as human beings, while theirs does seem to entail this.
On a side note, what’s the deal with Philosophy Now? About 6 months ago, I read an awful piece there about the alleged logical errors of Richard Dawkins, written by a creationist who could not write or reason his way out of a burlap sack. Is that typical of their content? Not everyone can be as consistently good as The Philosopher’s Mag, I guess.
Phil
Do the statements about hell apply to people who have never heard about Christ or just to those who have heard about him and rejected him?
If the latter, does it mean that by exposing people to Christ through preaching but not being effective, we are condemning them to hell?
Perhaps, we shouldn’t have religious telethons or missionaries as we are hurting more than we are helping.
Finally got around to reading the Simon Blackburn essay on Polkinghorne, “An Unbeautiful Mind,” and all I can say is
thankyou, thankyou, thankyou.
“but they do often think that those who lack their beliefs are defective in some fundamental way.”
Yes. Partly a result, I conjecture, of that endemic assumption that morality is part of religion’s territory even if it’s not (necessarily) its monopoly – an assumption I was surprised to see made even by – of all people – Kendrick Frazier, editor of the Skeptical Inquirer. If even he makes that assumption, what hope is there of getting rid of it elsewhere…But that idea (that believers are better in some basic way) kind of stands alone. It’s the belief itself that makes people ‘better’ in some (mysterious) way. More – trusting? Grateful? Loyal? ‘Spiritual’? All those, probably.
But compared with the cheery acceptance that most people will be in conscious torment for eternity, that idea looks almost benign. (Almost! And compared! I’m not giving in.)
“Not everyone can be as consistently good as The Philosopher’s Mag, I guess.”
Well maybe not everyone, but B&W can!
cackle
Jim – people used to argue in all seriousness about those questions. I wonder if fundamentalists still do. My suspicion is that they don’t – that they actually like the idea of trying to convert people who will then be eternally tortured for not being converted. That kind of salacious vindictiveness is part of the point of the Rapture books, after all.
It’s really difficult to overstate how horrible these people are – the hellfire ones.
Welcome, w! Good stuff, isn’t it.
What would “unconscious torment” be like?
“…that endemic assumption that morality is part of religion’s territory . . .”
One of my touchstones — I memorized it, and from time to time I mutter it to
myself — is the first paragraph of
_The Ethical Primate_, by Mary Midgley:
“Human morality is not a brute anomaly in the world. Our moral freedom is not
something biologically bizarre. No denial of the reality of ethics, nothing offensive to its dignity, follows from accepting our evolutionary origin. To the contrary, human moral capacities are just what could be expected to evolve when a highly social creature becomes intelligent enough to become aware of profound conflicts among its motives.”
So, from the evolutionary point of view, our gaining knowledge of good and evil must be regarded as progress, rather than as a falling away from some putative perfection.
“The Augustinian doctrine of predestination and election flows logically from the propositions that god is omnipotent and omnicient.”
But they also complicate to the point of absurdity free will answers to the problem of evil.
“…from an evolutionary worldview…good and evil…process”
“Evolutionary” in what sense? If biologically, this would violate is/ought distinction. Evolution happens, it is. Moral goodness is not a matter of what happens, but what ought to be. It makes sense, of course, that humans evolved brains capable of speaking and thinking in deontic modals, but there is a difference between, on the one hand, figuring out what biological adaptation that might serve and, on the other hand, thinking in terms of those deontic modals. BTW, this capacity is surely where moral thinking arises, and religion is maybe a rather crass use of the same capacity to think in terms of what ought to be which confuses it with what is. I have no problem with saying that there ought to be hellfire for evil doers, there ought to be a benevolent loving center of reality, there ought to be immortal bliss for those whom I judge deserve it, etc. There isn’t any of those things, though.
‘From there, there’s only a small step that you can be as evil and heartless as you want to be, as long as you believe in evangelism’s amoral version of Christianity.’
Thats not quite fair. Evangelism’s Christianity is not more immoral than any other religion. As I see it they have a stronger theological case than any works based theology. Any theology where you ‘earn’ your Heaven ticket is bereft with logical problems while one relying on a ‘gift’ is consistent.
Having said that an evangenlical or doesn’t care about his actions is an immoral evangelical.Likewise for an atheist. But then again what makes one moral vs. immoral opinions vary depending on where you live and who your with.
Whether you believe in the supernatural has little to do with how you live your life, I think your parents likely had more to do with it.
I pondered about this when the idea of eternal damnation was introduced to me in Sunday School when I was 5 years old. I remember thinking something like, “Forever sure is a long time. It doesn’t make sense to punish me for a gazillion years for something I did in a lifetime of, say, 60 years.” (At the time, 60 years was REALLY old.) Yes, I WAS fairly precocious, but when a 5-year-old, even a smart one, can see through the fallacy … well, it does make one wonder about the sanity of adults who can’t.
“Evangelism’s Christianity is not more immoral than any other religion. As I see it they have a stronger theological case than any works based theology. Any theology where you ‘earn’ your Heaven ticket is bereft with logical problems while one relying on a ‘gift’ is consistent.”
Unfortunately, a substantial subset of evangelicals actually hold a truly amoral philosophical position. When trying to escape from the obvious moral conundrum of having a God who is such an arsehole they redefine what is ‘good’ or ‘moral’ as simply what God does or wants us to do. Thus decoupling their morality from the rest of us. That, for some of the time, Christian morality accords with practical morality is just fortunate. You never know when God is going to instruct you to slaughter a few thousand innocents. This probably explains why so many evangelicals have asked me how I can have morals without believing in God, and why I don’t just go out and kill people – scary stuff, enough to make you hope they don’t lose their faith!
Unfortunately, I believe that this exclusivity, so central to monotheistic religion, is something actually coveted by many in this society. That sick impulse that says “My team is the winner, you are dirt! I am part of the elite!” is the same mindset that allows people to not only accept, but to fully embrace the digustingly xenophobic brutallity of eternal damnation for all but the Jesites. This is the same mindset that gives us the “America, Love It or Leave It” stupidity and, I believe, makes it possible to drive a brand new Lexus through urban squalor and, not only not feel bad about the conspicuousness of their wealth, but feel that one is truly superior to another human cause they got more stuff.
Yes. (I’ve just been re-reading Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan, which is all about this impulse to reinforce one’s own or one’s group’s own rightness goodness chosenness specialness etc etc by calling The Enemy – especially the intimate enemy as opposed to the foreign or distant or other enemy – i.e. other Jews as opposed to Romans – evil and of the party of Satan.) I think that’s one of the main things secularism and cosmopolitanism have going for them – that when they’re working properly (i.e. not Hitlerites or Stalinists, and neither Hitler nor Stalin was any kind of cosmopolitan, so they’re not counter-evidence) they are sharply aware of that impulse and do all they can to educate it out of existence.
‘Turn the other cheek, for in so doing you will heap coals of fire upong their heads’. (St Paul)
Lovely sentiment! So the being apparently tolerant hides a wicked glee underneath that much worse is being inflicted that by simply hitting back
snicker – Yeah!
(To be fair – although why I want to be fair to Paul I do not know – he may mean something like ‘for in doing so you will teach a real moral lesson that will make people kinder and more forgiving’ – because the soft answer that turneth away wrath really does do that. It’s a sort of Gandhian or Tolstoyan idea – the coals of fire are one’s own conscience and better feeling – or can be. But I don’t know if that’s what Paul meant.)
Heh – I actually have more respect for those Christians (and other religionists) who take their faith seriously enough to follow it to its logical conclusion. I have little respect for those who bend their faith just enough to fit inside whatever system of thought is dominant at the moment. “Oh, sure, this is supposed to be “eternal truth”, but since that would be inconvenient, we’ll just change it around a bit”, etc. etc.
As for the fundies believing everyone else will go to hell, and that they therefore must save as many others as possible, etc. – that’s pretty much their problem.
Also, a final observation:
“When trying to escape from the obvious moral conundrum of having a God who is such an arsehole they redefine what is ‘good’ or ‘moral’ as simply what God does or wants us to do.”
This illustrates one reason people like “divine morality” so much – it spares them having to explain why what they believe is good is really good. Us secularists have more work to do in that respect, and it’s not as if seculars have an easy time agreeing on a common moral codex.
“Unfortunately, a substantial subset of evangelicals actually hold a truly amoral philosophical position.”
As far as I can tell, the only explanation for people’s talk about their moronic “beliefs” — even if the talk is in the form of signing some sort of pledge of allegiance — even if the signing is done in blood — is that no one REALLY believes those things. They believe in SAYING they believe those things.
It’s possible to imagine believing something. It’s not possible to decide to believe something. You can imagine believing that your boss is an alien from 51 Pegasi, where people’s mood swings are a lot worse. You cannot DECIDE to ACTUALLY believe that. Think about what actually believing that would be like! You would be insane.
The problem is not so much that evangelicals feel that it’s OK to believe in antediluvian lunaticisms, but that they believe it’s OK to live without any perceivable connection between what you say and what you do. This is the lesson that our current “president” has taken so well to heart.
“As far as I can tell, the only explanation for people’s talk about their moronic “beliefs” — even if the talk is in the form of signing some sort of pledge of allegiance — even if the signing is done in blood — is that no one REALLY believes those things.”
Yeah. I often think that – that they don’t really believe it; if they did they would behave very differently – so differently their behaviour would be unrecognizable. Instead their behaviour is utterly recognizable and worldly and of this earthy.
“As for the fundies believing everyone else will go to hell, and that they therefore must save as many others as possible, etc. – that’s pretty much their problem.”
I do have some grudging respect for mission work done by evangelicals, because, if you do really believe that everyone else is going to hell, and if you have an ounce of compassion for your fellow man, you’d get evangelising like hell!
The -really- scary ones believe everyone else is going to hell and keep quiet about it.