Hell and its punishments

[drumbeat]

So you've got these two guys, ones good and ones bad, and they don't get on. One rules over the most of the entire universe and one rules in a place called Hell.

So if you steal and swear and act like a dick your whole life, and you go to hell for being 'bad', why does the Devil punish you?
Surely he should like you because you've acted up all your life.

 

[LIGHTBEING]

Stop being so logical, will ya ?

 

[spidergoat]

Maybe he does like you and hell is full of people having fun.

 

[wynn]

Do keep up:



/.../
This is hell: the negation of love; the return of hate for love; bitterness at seeing innocent joy; to be surrounded by love and to have hate in one's heart. This is the eternal condition of all the damned. They are all dearly loved. They are all invited to the joyous banquet. They are all living in God's Kingdom, in the New Earth and the New Heavens. No one expels them. Even if they wanted to go away they could not flee from God's New Creation, nor hide from God's tenderly loving omnipresence. Their only alternative would be, perhaps, to go away from their brothers and search for a bitter isolation from them, but they could never depart from God and His love. And what is more terrible is that in this eternal life, in this New Creation, God is everything to His creatures. As Saint Gregory of Nyssa says, "In the present life the things we have relations with are numerous, for instance: time, air, locality, food and drink, clothing, sunlight, lamplight, and other necessities of life, none of which, many though they be, are God; that blessed state which we hope for is in need of none of these things, but the Divine Being will become all, and in the stead of all to us, distributing Himself proportionately to every need of that existence. It is plain, too, from the Holy Scriptures that God becomes to those who deserve it, locality and home and clothing and food and drink and light and riches and kingdom, and everything that can be thought of and named that goes to make our life happy" (On the Soul and the Resurrection). 46

In the new eternal life, God will be everything to His creatures, not only to the good but also to the wicked, not only to those who love Him, but likewise to those who hate Him. But how will those who hate Him endure to have everything from the hands of Him Whom they detest? Oh, what an eternal torment is this, what an eternal fire, what a gnashing of teeth!

Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the everlasting inner fire of hatred," 47 saith the Lord, because I was thirsty for your love and you did not give it to Me, I was hungry for your blessedness and you did not offer it to Me, I was imprisoned in My human nature and you did not come to visit Me in My church; you are free to go where your wicked desire wishes, away from Me, in the torturing hatred of your hearts which is foreign to My loving heart which knows no hatred for anyone. Depart freely from love to the everlasting torture of hate, unknown and foreign to Me and to those who are with Me, but prepared by freedom for the devil, from the days I created My free, rational creatures. But wherever you go in the darkness of your hating hearts, My love will follow you like a river of fire, because no matter what your heart has chosen, you are and you will eternally continue to be, My children.

source

 

[Rav]

In the new eternal life, God will be everything to His creatures, not only to the good but also to the wicked, not only to those who love Him, but likewise to those who hate Him. But how will those who hate Him endure to have everything from the hands of Him Whom they detest? Oh, what an eternal torment is this, what an eternal fire, what a gnashing of teeth!

I've never understood this view of Hell. That is, the one where people are only there because they hate or detest God. I mean, you've got to know him first, right? But we're not just talking about a general overview of a personality. In order to make a meaningful determination about someone, you have to understand as much as you possibly can about them. Specifically, the circumstances need to be such that you have the opportunity to engage in a protracted exploration of their motives and desires, which usually involves asking questions and listening to the answers. Perhaps it should even involve engaging in certain activities together.

In the case of a hypothetical God who has created a world in which not everyone has come to know him, or in which many people are misinformed about or unable to properly comprehend his true nature and his ultimate reasons for getting the whole show started in the first place (and indeed the manner in which he allowed everything to play out), such things would need to be revealed in order to adequately equip everyone to make a determination about where they stand in regard to who he is. And if God is indeed an ultimately decent entity, that fact would become clear to anyone who is capable of recognizing that decency. In the end it's hard to imagine that anyone would end up hating him, which would mean that Hell would be populated by a ridiculously small number of people and the average person has absolutely nothing to worry about.

This is, however, rather inconsistent with many well-known religious doctrines.

 

[UncleChrist]

Is their anything more " Pure Evil " then the creator of Hell and the beings to send to such a place ?

 

[NMSquirrel]

So if you steal and swear and act like a dick your whole life, and you go to hell for being 'bad', why does the Devil punish you?
Surely he should like you because you've acted up all your life.

signal is gonna hate this answer ..

maybe the devil is not punishing..p@signal)

maybe he thinks he is rewarding those ppl..

Do onto others as you would have them do onto you..
if you treat others with contempt and mistreat, abuse,or just plain be mean to others, maybe he see's this as how you want to be treated...

<edit> oh and signal, do you believe all that? your comment of 'Do keep up:' infers it..

 

[drumbeat]

Do keep up:
In the new eternal life, God will be everything to His creatures, not only to the good but also to the wicked, not only to those who love Him, but likewise to those who hate Him. But how will those who hate Him endure to have everything from the hands of Him Whom they detest? Oh, what an eternal torment is this, what an eternal fire, what a gnashing of teeth!

Signal, you say keep up as if I should have read all that before. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, if I'm honest. Could you tell me what you mean in your own words?

signal is gonna hate this answer ..

maybe the devil is not punishing..p@signal)

maybe he thinks he is rewarding those ppl..

Well this would make sense.
Either that, or God and the Devil are buddies as God asked him to treat some people mean for him and the Devil obliges.

 

[NMSquirrel]

Well this would make sense.
Either that, or God and the Devil are buddies as God asked him to treat some people mean for him and the Devil obliges.

there is an argument i would hope to be true..

that we have a chance to repent once we get to hell,that jesus is there rescuing ppl from hell.

 

[wynn]

Signal, you say keep up as if I should have read all that before. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, if I'm honest. Could you tell me what you mean in your own words?

I was being cynical by posting that.

It pisses me off that such doctrines (as the one I posted) exist.

They appall me to beyond words.

<edit> oh and signal, do you believe all that? your comment of 'Do keep up:' infers it..

I thought I had enough of a reputation for being against the notion of eternal damnation, so that I would not have to write any further qualifiers to my posts on it.

 

[Arioch]

If you're looking for interesting afterlife myths then you should really plumb the old religions, the new ones just aren't original enough to be interesting. Take the ancient Babylonians for example, they believed that when you died you went to the House of Dust where you would do nothing but sit and contemplate the life you lived for all eternity, so if you lived a fulfilled life you wouldn't suffer(at least not as much) but those who led unfulfilled or "evil" lives would be tormented by their memories for all of eternity.

Personally I think that if there is an eternal afterlife then the fact that it's eternal will drive us all completely insane, what with us being finite beings and all, but you've got to admit that the House of Dust at least has a nice sort of appeal to it.

 

[drumbeat]

You'd get used to the eternal bliss and then you'd be bored.
That House of Dust would send you crazy either way.


So now we've established this fact so simply in only 10 posts, why do so many of the world want to live forever in an afterlife?

 

[Rav]

You'd get used to the eternal bliss and then you'd be bored.

Eternal bliss would indeed seem to be incompatible with human psychology. The only way to reason it out therefore would be to accept that something fundamental about the nature of conscious experience must change in a hypothetical endlessly blissful afterlife. But once such 'tinkering' has taken place, would you even be you anymore?

 

[Big Chiller]

Eternal bliss would indeed seem to be incompatible with human psychology. The only way to reason it out therefore would be to accept that something fundamental about the nature of conscious experience must change in a hypothetical endlessly blissful afterlife. But once such 'tinkering' has taken place, would you even be you anymore?

What about the 'you' that you are now why would the 'you' that you are now be any more free of tinkering during creation than the different 'you' since you are hyposethizing for the sake of argument. IOW who better to hypothetically alter you than the one who hypothetically created you.

 

[Ellie]

So if you steal and swear and act like a dick your whole life, and you go to hell for being 'bad', why does the Devil punish you?
Surely he should like you because you've acted up all your life.

Punishment can merely be the difference between smelling something good and something bad.

 

[Arioch]

@Chiller --

IOW who better to hypothetically alter you than the one who hypothetically created you.

This isn't about merely altering humans, but completely removing anything human about them. Eternity is inherently incompatible with our human existence as evidenced by the fact that we can't even contemplate eternity properly(we must always resort to metaphors). Nothing can survive intact for eternity and be human, the two are mutually exclusive.

 

[Big Chiller]

@Chiller --



This isn't about merely altering humans, but completely removing anything human about them. Eternity is inherently incompatible with our human existence as evidenced by the fact that we can't even contemplate eternity properly(we must always resort to metaphors). Nothing can survive intact for eternity and be human, the two are mutually exclusive.

'Once when' you didn't exist at all you were hypothetically created. If one was created then why can't one be altered fundamentally into a new 'human' form. About contemplating eternity the kind of eternity hypothesized in the afterlife is still fundamentally similar to this life, as in one just continues to exist, the difference being there is no end such as death.

 

[Arioch]

@Chiller --

Because nothing human can even begin to contemplate eternity, let alone endure it. If there is an eternal afterlife that I must go to(sounds a hell of a lot like slavery to me) then I must be changed to endure it, such a change would destroy everything that is me from my memories to my finite thought processes. This isn't just a change, this is the destruction of everything that's fundamental to being human.

The bottom line is that humans just can't cope with eternity(even thinking too hard about it is enough to make our heads go a bit wobbly). Anything which can cope with eternity isn't human and doesn't function anywhere close to how humans function.

 

[Big Chiller]

@Arioch,

Is it just me or are you repeating yourself as well as not really replying to my reply and ignoring it. Please explain what kind of eternity you're talking about so I get the gist of what you're saying.

 

[Pineal]

@Chiller --
Because nothing human can even begin to contemplate eternity, let alone endure it. If there is an eternal afterlife that I must go to(sounds a hell of a lot like slavery to me) then I must be changed to endure it, such a change would destroy everything that is me from my memories to my finite thought processes. This isn't just a change, this is the destruction of everything that's fundamental to being human.

I tend to agree with this. If I was tortured for eternity - or just a mere trillion years - I would not have any qualities of the person I was before this. I would have nothing like a personality, let alone my own. I would be flesh in pain. I would have no hopes, dream, expectations - I would do nothing that I do.

As a separate issue...anyone who can accept a God that does this I would not let near my children. How could anyone accept such a God and call him loving? What if they did something loving to my children?