Hell (part 2)

I notice that on Nov. 8, 2010 I published an essay on ‘hell’ and titled it ‘Hell (part 1)’.  For whatever unintended reason or oversight I failed to publish my intended ‘part two.’ This is ‘part two,’ four years later. To make any sense of today’s offering it would be well to go to my archives and review part one before continuing on. 

 

In even addressing such a subject I know that my statistical ‘ratings’ will fall because in our sophisticated scientific ‘enlightened’ time the subject is summarily dismissed as being an absurdity. Yet millions upon millions of people on earth—including me—believe in the logical concept and construct as an extension of our familiarity with mortal life, the promises of God and Jesus Christ, and the hope for a heaven—a positive and joyful afterlife condition for the righteous—and hell (at least as a temporary abode) as a consequence for those who are or succumb to evil. 

Could there not be some kernel of truth to the continued longevity of this concept? There is.  Most of us take cognizance of the war between good and bad, the virtuous and the evil, because we experience it personally—internally.  We also see it played-out socially in current events and geo-politically between nations, cultures, and world-views. Evil is too often in us, and always ‘out there.’ 

The problem in this diabolical attribution is the absurd portrayal of the ‘devil’ and his instruments of torture for those who find themselves in God’s disfavor and of the place where evil is concentrated and combated (hell).  As in most things, there is ‘more to the story,’ or in this case the divine revelation of the story, as I believe it has been given, and not just a fiction writer’s imagination.  But before I go on, even some fiction can be very helpful in understanding the evil or counter-point to all that we try to do which is good. 

C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, for example, is helpful to understanding Satan’s methods.  In classical literature Dante Alighieri’s allegory of hell, The Divine Comedy, both helps and hurts understanding.  If readers understand the symbols are not the reality (as portrayed in these works) then more light can shed on this dark subject.  The same can be said of John Bunyan’s classical work, The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Scripture, though, tells us that Satan, a.k.a. the devil, an unembodied spirit through his premortal rebellion, is a fallen angel. (We humans are embodied spirits.) Satan has a great arsenal of counter-spiritual ‘weapons’ or blandishments (we call them temptations) that influence man against that which is good or right or life-affirming.  People who fall to evil behavior and who do not repent (change) while in mortality will suffer the consequences of it, at least for a time--the time it takes in which "every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is the Christ," --in the afterlife.   

The suffering, though, is primarily deprivation or mental anguish at realizing ‘what could have been; and will consequently be eternally denied;’ it is not pitchforks, boiling oil or the like.  The suffering of those consigned to hell is that they have been ‘damned’ or stopped as a consequence of their own choices and dismissal of God's plan of salvation in their eternal progress.  Yet their mental sufferings eventually, and mercifully, come to an end. These individuals will then, at the final judgment, receive the degree of 'heaven,' but not the highest, that they have qualified for and in justice merit.

At least that is what my religion teaches, and it makes good sense to me.