Author: Ophelia Benson

Do we need empirical evidence to warrant thinking that telling children that people suffer torment in hell forever is harmful and bad? I don’t think so. There are things that we know without evidence. For instance we know that telling people they are stupid or ugly or boring or generally repulsive is bad. We also know that bad news is bad, so we know that it’s bad to tell people bad news if it’s not true – we know it’s bad to tell someone: ‘your cat/dog/best friend/mother/child is injured and in terrible pain’ if that’s not true.

We don’t need evidence for that. It’s part of how the world is. Imagine telling a child: ‘Your cat is caught in a trap, it’s crushing her leg in its jaws, she’s howling in pain, we can’t get her out’ when it’s not true. There’s no way to look at that and think it’s good or not too bad or neutral. Even if we knew for a fact that it would do no lasting psychic damage at all (and how would we know that?), it would still be bad. Even temporary mental anguish is bad.

We don’t demand research before we refrain from doing things like that. We don’t, and don’t need to, and shouldn’t. We extrapolate – from experience, imagination, sympathy, empathy. We know what that would feel like, and we flinch, and we don’t do it to people.

That’s how a lot of morality works, at the simplest level. That’s why one familiar parental sqawk is ‘How would you like it if she did that to you?’ It’s the most direct way to explain why something is wrong and not permitted. The child being squawked at doesn’t get to demand a look at the research before accepting the lesson.

So – adults who tell children there is a hell where some people are tortured forever are doing a bad thing, even if the children do simply ignore the claim, or shrug it off, or deny it. If the children believe it but think it is only other people who are tortured forever and are happy with that thought – that is a very bad thing, because those are some callous children, if not outright sadistic.

What I’ll bother with instead is a little musing about the subject of hell and the afterlife and heaven, and how bizarre it all is.

Hell, for instance. Imagine a child of 4 eats a cookie after her mother told her not to, and her parents sentence her to be constantly tortured for the rest of her life as punishment. That idea looks quite gentle and benign compared to the idea of hell that is in some sense orthodox (though in what sense is not altogether clear to me, but of that later). We live a few decades, and then after that, if we are ‘sinners,’ we are tortured forever. It’s sadistic enough, but along with that, it doesn’t even make sense. What’s the point? And besides what’s the point, what’s the reason? What’s the reason for the grotesque lack of proportion?

What’s god supposed to be accomplishing by this? Not teaching, not reformation, not improvement – because it’s eternal. So, what then? Nothing makes sense except sheer unadulterated revenge, but revenge that goes beyond the wildest fantasies of human sadism. And it’s an all-powerful being who is doing this, so it’s not as if it’s a fair fight.

So the truth is that people who believe in hell believe in a god that is truly bottomlessly disgusting and loathsome. A god that inflicts utterly futile pointless useless suffering on sentient thinking animals forever and ever and ever. I don’t see how they can stand it. I really don’t. I don’t see why they don’t just curdle with horror.

And then heaven, and the afterlife…They make a nonsense of for instance the fuss about Terry Schiavo. What sense did that ever make? She wasn’t having much of a life here – and when she died she would go to heaven and have a much better life – so why were the fundamentalists so outraged at the prospect of releasing her from her useless body?

And if the objection to abortion is that the embryo has an immortal soul from the moment of conception – then what’s the problem? It already has its soul, so it can just go to heaven and be happy there. The good place is not earth, it’s heaven, so why is it supposed to be such a disaster if a fetus goes to heaven instead of here?

Also, what does I Corinthians 5 mean? What does it mean to deliver someone to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved? If someone is delivered to Satan, the spirit isn’t saved, is it? Was there some interim arrangement in Paul’s day by which people went to Satan for an hour or two to have their flesh shredded so that after that their souls would be in tip-top shape? Was that later turned into Purgatory? Or what?

This stuff isn’t as well thought-out as it might be.

Heh heh. Andrew Brown answered my comments today. He said he admired my ‘rhetorical technique’ – by which of course he meant he didn’t, but anyway, I don’t think it was rhetorical technique, I think I was just pointing out his inaccuracy.

So I replied, and then he replied again.

What you are accusing me of is not getting the facts wrong. It is wrongly interpreting a passage that you read differently. I don’t think that’s such a monstrous offence in general and certainly not in this particular case where my interpretation was the plain and natural one. If bringing up children to be fundamentalists is comparable to child abuse, then the sanctions for it must be comparable too. If you shrink from such sanctions, then you should not imply that they are equivalent crimes.

Now there at last we get to grips with the thing. The trouble is that he said Dawkins said X when Dawkins didn’t say X, which is not wrongly interpreting a passage, it’s saying that Y said something when Y in fact didn’t say that. I pointed out that if he had changed just one word – if he had said Dawkins had implied or suggested – then it would have been a matter of interpretation; but he didn’t say that. I bet he wishes he had. I said that, too.

I don’t know, maybe this is an occupational hazard of journalism. It’s not exactly a secret that many journalists seem to think that an approximation is the same thing as a direct quote. But the fact that it’s common doesn’t make it good practice, or helpful, or accurate, or ethical.

And that’s especially true when one is disagreeing with someone; and all the more so when one is doing it in a polemical or irritable way. That is exactly the time to be extra careful about what one attributes to one’s opponent, 1. in order to be fair and guard against confirmation bias and 2. in order to give the opponent no extra advantage. I bet you can see that yourself. You didn’t do your argument any favours with that sloppy and tendentious approximation of what Dawkins said. I bet you’re well aware of that by now.

There’s also some depressing rationalization from underverse about why teaching children to believe in hell is not so bad, but I’m underversed out, so I’m not going to bother with it.