What is Hell?

I've been debating the nature of Hell with a friend. Here's some of our interchanges:

MY FRIEND'S VIEW OF HELL:
When reading the Bible, we are limited to earthly analogies. The subject used for the analogy is always within the scope of human experience...

The fire [in the biblical references to Hell] represents the pain experienced at that moment, not necessarily that of a burn victim, but the pain of mental anguish associated with separation from the divine Source of all happiness.

PATRICK:
One explicit earthly analogy for final punishment is the punishment experienced by Sodom and Gomorrah. It was not a mere "separation from the divine Source of happiness" (as you have defined hell). They were punished with "eternal fire." And the results of that punishment are quite plainly stated.

Jude 7 ... Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities... serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.

2 Peter 2:6 ... by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly...

Those quotes are from the very conservative, quite literal English Standard Version. Some writers think they can find some way around the plain meaning by a different rendering of the Greek, but I still believe that God gave us an earthly analogy to final punishment when he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. That gives us a better idea of what the fire is and what it will do than any psychological explanation.

In other words, I believe that Hell will eventually result in the total extinction of those who go there. I do not believe the Bible teaches eternal, conscious suffering.

MY FRIEND'S RESPONSE:
I understand that you take Jude and Peter as predictive in a literal sense. I do not because I view that method as a stumblingblock to truth. With all the evidence available elsewhere, I do not think we can know what things will literally be like after the final judgment. We cannot understand that any more than we can understand how God will raise the dead, or in what form they will be raised. We have analogies that help in some ways and as long as we do not press those analogies too far, we remain open to suggestion and perhaps spiritual enlightenment. Once we go over the line, we loose our ability to see the finer things.

By literalizing, we often trivialize the Bible. No wonder intelligent lost men have become bored with Christian rhetoric. To some extent they are just rebelling against the truth, but some are just tired of hearing someone who refuses to exercise his mind mumble the same observations that some farm-boy become preacher stated a hundred or more years ago.

PATRICK:

I don't interpret the Bible literally in all cases. I no longer believe in a literal 6 day creation. I no longer believe in a worldwide flood (instead, I think it was regional and that the language of Genesis 6-9 must be interpreted as the honest description of what a human would observe, rather than taking the universal sounding language as being literally universal). I no longer believe that the four Gospels agree on every detail of Christ's life (e.g., they give a different order for the temptations of Jesus during his 40 day fast, and they differ about when the veil of the Temple was torn in relation to his death, etc., etc.)

I could list a dozen more examples of where I depart from literalism. I understand that many passages in Scripture are poetic, literally poetic. Modern translations generally indicate the presence of Hebrew poetry by printing that section of Scripture with unjustified margins.

But, in my experience, if anybody tends to repeat old shibboleths about Hell, it's certain people who defend the traditional view of eternal conscious suffering. Just recently a good, godly man who is a simple believer kept bringing up the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man to me as an objection against the annihilation view of Hell. He had no idea that "Hades" was different than "Gehenna," or that the story is not a literal glimpse into the afterlife, or that the condition of ungodly people in the intermediate state is a different issue than their final destiny after Judgment.

Do people who defend the traditional view of Hell have a great impact on intelligent unbelievers? I haven't seen much to make me think so. But I've seen intelligent skeptics be willing to think twice about the idea of Hell when I've explained it as the end of all existence.

An Atheist's Article, and My Response:

Why Do People Believe in God?

Larry Beinhart, AlterNet

Many people continue to clutch to their belief in God, even though there's no evidence of a higher power. Why? (Click on the title to read the article).

Patrick's response (which was emailed to the author):
I read your "Why Do People Believe in God?" and found it interesting... and a bit frustrating. If AlterNet is going to print bold attacks on faith (of every form, not merely a rebuttal of some anti-intellectual fundamentalist faith), it would be nice to see a response by an intellectual who has a faith, or an excerpt from a book or article by someone like John Polkingham, the British physicist and Anglican Priest.

I agree with your observation that we are all driven to discover meaning in the world in relation to ourselves. One might even conclude that we've been designed with a will to find purpose! This – along with many other human traits -- could easily be seen as an argument for design rather than proof that all faith is by nature anti-intellectual.

I have a high regard for science, but I don't believe science has the tools to come up with a universal philosophical conclusion about the absence of meaning/purpose in nature. You quote Richard Feynman as saying, "The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as she is -- absurd"). That’s a bit of a stretch, I’d say.

There are countless examples in nature that we live in a purposeful world. Look around you, Mr. Beinhart. Intricately designed particulars in the world whisper, "I exist for this or that purpose." There are a myriad of non-absurd, purposeful realities in nature, yet you trust Feynman’s conclusion that all nature is absurd.

I wouldn’t argue that everything we observe is understandable to us. Or, even that every particular necessarily has a purpose (in the way that we think of purpose). But, it appears that our common human drive to find purpose and meaning has driven you into trusting a scientist's philosophy of absurdity.

Patrick Mulhaney
www.irishwiseguy.com

Pro-Lifers In Obamaland
Newsweek
But while the majority of pro-lifers may be preparing for an escalated battle, there is a small group that sees the change in Washington as an opportunity to reshape some of the movement's core principles. "In this context, no matter what your convictions are, we're not going to change the rule of the law," says Jim Wallis, who directs Sojourners, a progressive evangelical group. "Even if Roe is repealed, it just goes back to the states." Wallis, who is pro-life, and other progressive leaders are trying out a strategy that has so far failed to gain much traction on either side of the debate: "Let's look at results. How do you really reduce abortion? You support women's health care, you promote involved fatherhood. I think those programs are significant if you're saving unborn lives."
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Q&A With Reverend Jim Wallis
Time Magazine
For more than three decades, liberal evangelical leader Jim Wallis has been stubbornly preaching into the wind, telling fellow evangelicals that they need to do something about poverty and urging fellow liberals to partner with religious communities. Now, after years of being drowned out by the Religious Right, Wallis finds himself a most unusual position: he has the ear of the man in the Oval Office. Wallis was one of a small group of religious leaders who participated in the national prayer service that followed Barack Obama's Inauguration.
+Click to continue

Jason Linkins: Limbaugh Still Controls The GOP

Patrick: I heard Keith Olbermann refer
to "Comedian Rush Limbaugh" 2 or 3 times
in one segment of his program the other
night. Limbaugh is an entertainer, definitely
not an intellectual source for conservatives.
His cheerleading during the Bush-Cheney
fiasco forever discredits him in my mind.
Their unnecessary war in Iraq, illegal phone
taps, imprisoning people without giving them
trials, and adoption of torture were things
that Rush should have criticized -- from a
CONSERVATIVE viewpoint! I never heard
him do that. But I must confess, I didn't listen
to him much. His egotistical style of talking
and his stuttering drive me crazy and I quickly
change the channel. No offense to stutterers.
In Rush's case, it's probably not a true stuttering
problem; it's trying to fill air time with words
and not having as quick a mind as his mouth
pretends to have. The conservative movement
needs a better spokesman than Rush.

The Financial Crisis Is Driving Hordes of Americans to Suicide By Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com Pushed past their breaking points, people are robbing banks to pay the rent, setting homes on fire -- even taking their own lives. Read more »

O'Reilly Ignorant About Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan By ZP Heller, Brave New Films FOX continues to distort the realities of the war in Afghanistan

Patrick: Someone told me I look like Bill O'Reilly. I'm saving up for
plastic surgery, and until then wearing a bag over my head. I find him
to be one of the most obnoxious broadcasters every to appear on TV.
Please send donations to my plastic surgery fund.

The 10 Most Redeeming Films of 2008
What do irresistible robots, racist curmudgeons, and sensitive pachyderms have in common? They're all key characters in the year's best redemptive movies.

So, what's a "redeeming" film? The definition varies, but for our list below, we mean movies that include stories of redemption—sometimes blatantly, sometimes less so. Several of them literally have a character that represents a redeemer; all of them have characters who experience redemption to some degree—some quite clearly, some more subtly. Some are "feel-good" movies that leave a smile on your face; some are a bit more uncomfortable to watch. But the redemptive element is there in all of these films. Click to continue.

My favorite actress: Lauren Ambrose.


Her portrayal of a young Orthodox Jewish widow
in Loving Leah was absolutely wonderful.
Any critic who doesn't like her or that movie
should be water-boarded until he willingly recants.
And, by the way, she is obviously IRISH. Don't fall
for the rumor in her bio that says her dad is Italian.
It can't possibly be true. Look at that face and hair.

David Rees BREAKING NEWS:

Bush Pardons Osama bin Laden

Rep. John Murtha:
Gone-tanamo Bay: the Right Decision

AP

Rep. John Murtha: President Obama took the first key step in restoring America's image and credibility in the world by issuing an Executive Order to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay and to prohibit the use of torture by U.S. personnel. I applaud his judgment and I wholeheartedly support this decision. The Bush administration never understood what the Guantanamo detention facility symbolized to the rest of the world. They saw it as simply a prison, and just weeks ago, Dick Cheney commented that he thought "Guantanamo has been very well run." The problem with Guantanamo was never about its bricks and mortar. The problem with Guantanamo is that its very existence stains and defies the moral fiber of our great nation. Click here to read more.

Bill Maher’s Religulous: Polemic Based on Cynical Preconceptions

by Gareth Higgins 10-13-2008

Bill Maher is that rare thing: a media figure unafraid to say what he really thinks. When he intervened in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, suggesting that it’s better to deal intelligently with terrorism than to indulge in absurdist…

Continue reading this entry »

Obama putting his stamp on foreign policy (AP)

AP - President Barack Obama put his stamp on U.S. national security and foreign policy on Thursday, moving quickly to repudiate programs of his predecessor. The man he tapped to oversee the intelligence community promised Congress he would not allow torture or wiretapping without a warrant.

Colin Powell Praises Obama, Burns Bush By Steve Benen, Washington Monthly Powell has some fairly devastating criticism of W. Read more »

Bill Moyers Volleys Back at Foxman's 'Reprehensible' Smear Tactics on Gaza By Lefty Coaster, Daily Kos Moyers' eloquent essay willfully misunderstood by the head of the Anti-Defamation League to score a cheap point. Moyers fires back. Read more »

Goodbye to Bush & Cheney

I voted for Bush & Cheney 8 years ago. I'm not sorry to see them go. I've shouted at the TV many times when they twisted the truth before the cameras. I hope I can calm down for a while.

Dear God, please help our new president. Protect him from idiot advisers and twisted reasoning. Dear God, please show grace to this country, and this needy world.

God and Suffering: Incompatible?

Excerpt from the end of Bruce Ballard’s
The Problem of Evil: A Review Essay
http://www.mcmaster.ca/mjtm/volume9.htm

Woody Allen joked that he could not believe in the existence of a beneficent Creator who would let him get his tongue caught in the typewriter. Were we to utilize such evils to argue against God’s goodness, however, the general consensus of what should count as misery would ordinarily disqualify them. A certain experiential threshold is necessary to really motivate the problem of evil and especially the argument from evil.

What is that appropriately motivating threshold? Here the social context can be significant. If, for example, members of a Christian congregation, friends and family, rally round the cancer victim, his or her experience of suffering, all things being equal, will not play in the same register as that of the one who suffers alone. It will be harder for the person who experiences human love to give way to doubts and begin to believe the inner, personal argument that given such suffering, a good God cannot exist.

The same might be said where there is a direct inner experience of divine love. Our personal standard of what is rational for us to believe or continue believing seems to contain an affective component, at least in relation to certain kinds of beliefs.

Consider Mabel: “One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly . . . I also learned later that this woman was eighty-nine years old and that she had been bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone, for twenty-five years.”* It is probably impossible for those outside such affliction to genuinely appreciate it. And what can the would-be comforter say? Her life seems to be paradigmatic evidence for the argument from evil. Yet to a visitor who asks her what she thinks about while lying in her bed, she replies, “I think about my Jesus. I think about how good He’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know . . . I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied . . . Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.”*

And with her experience of Christ, Mabel not only pre-empts a personal argument from evil, but also makes her suffering unavailable to the outsider for an argument from evil.


*Mabel’s story is in William Lane Craig’s Hard Questions, Real Answers (pgs 110-112). Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2003.

Audio

A History of Stand-Up Comedy

TIME's Richard Zoglin narrates the rise of a unique American art form

Are We Eating with the Right People?
by Jon Zens

Christ was severely criticized, but rightly perceived, as a `friend of sinners.” I wonder how many Christians today would like it if people thought of them the same way. http://www.restorationgj.com/id216.htm

Patrick: Jon Zens has made a big impact on my thinking over the years. This article is short and challenging. Table hospitality is an evangelism strategy that ought to be high on the list of outreach strategies for believers.

• Kerry Fears Afghanistan War Turning into Another Vietnam

Video: Voicing concern during Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State confirmation hearing. More »

January 16, 2009 Is Ehud's Poodle Acting Up? By Patrick J. Buchanan

As Israel entered the third week of its Gaza blitz, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert regaled a crowd in Ashkelon with an astonishing tale.

He had, said Olmert, whistled up George Bush, interrupted him in the middle of a speech and told him to instruct Condi Rice not to vote for a U.N. resolution Condi herself had written. Bush did as told, said Olmert. ...

"I said, 'Get me President Bush on the phone.' They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care. 'I need to talk to him now.' He got off the podium and spoke to me.

"I told him the United States could not vote in favor. It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor.

Click here to continue reading Pat Buchanan's column

Glenn Greenwald

• Today's FISA ruling: a case study in 8 years of lying and ignorance

Patrick: Powerful people can get away with all kinds of things in these United States.
George Bush and Dick Cheney will "walk" I'll bet. But maybe, just maybe, some legal charges will be brought by an international body. I believe they deserve such.

Arianna Huffington:
Bush's Farewell Address: Still Delusional After All These Years

AP/Ron Edmonds

Arianna Huffington: Thursday night's valedictory speech was quintessential Bush: delusional from beginning to end. He made Afghanistan sound like a swell place to vacation when, in truth, only those with a death wish venture out these days without an armed convoy. He lauded Iraq as "a friend of the United States" -- without ever mentioning the fact that if Iraq has a BFF it is Iran, not America. He claimed that America's "air, water, and lands are measurably cleaner." Who is doing the measuring, the same eco-unfriendly companies to which he handed his environmental policies? It's dangerous spin. It's easy to feel a pang of pity for a guy heading out the door. But the more sympathy he evokes, the more susceptible we are to the lies he is telling. Before we know it, his revisionism becomes accepted as the truth. Click here to read more.

William Pfaff on Who Calls the Shots
"Who’s in Charge—Obama, the Pentagon or Israel?" -- The military is far too accustomed to getting its way, so it was refreshing to see Barack Obama reject the Pentagon’s sluggish withdrawal plan. But will he stand up to Israel, whose Prime Minister Olmert recently bragged about pulling the American president’s puppet strings?

How Israeli Intelligence Fabricated a Frequently-Repeated Myth to Justify Tel Aviv's Aggression
Ira Chernus

William Pfaff on the Israel-Palestine Conflict
"The Drama of Reciprocal Self-Destruction" -- The people of Gaza and Israel suffer at the hands of leaders whose bewildering and savage decisions have no rationally achievable purpose.

Cheney "Aggravated" By New York Times Pulitzer

Patrick: Now you know how I feel, Mr. VP. I've been
aggravated by you since the lead up to the Iraq War.

Patrick: The following article speaks of how some Right wingers are bowing out of the political process into their own fantasy world. I think it'll be interesting to see how the Right evolves over the next 4-8 years. I was a loyal member of the Religious Right, until the Iraq War and watching how certain elements in the Republican Party manipulated the RR by nominally aligning with a couple of issues while they made all kinds of bad decisions in foreign policy. Now I am a partyless person who has seen enough of the corruption of our political process that I'm rather cynical about both major parties. Anyway, the following article is interesting.

Brandon Friedman: Distraught Conservatives Retreating into the Realm of Fantasy

For conservative talking heads and bloggers, 24's Jack Bauer has become a surrogate -- a stand-in -- for the leaders they wish they had.

January 13, 2009 An Unreflective Man By Patrick J. Buchanan

Share Your Comments

With his public approval where Harry Truman's stood when he left office, George W. Bush gave his last press conference yesterday.

And like that predecessor he often identifies with, Bush showed a Trumanesque defiance of his critics -- and a Trumanesque failure to understand what ruined his presidency.

He denounced protectionism, as he has with dismissive contempt since he went to New Hampshire a decade ago. But nowhere in his defense of free trade was there any explanation for how Middle America lost 3 million manufacturing jobs in his first term and a million more in the last year.

Nowhere does there seem an awareness that the ideas he absorbed at his father's knee and the Harvard Business School had resulted in the de-industrialization of his country, an enormous and growing dependency on Japan, China and Asia for the essentials of our national life, and, now, for the borrowed money to pay for them.
Click here to continue reading Pat Buchanan's column

The 80th Birthday of Dr. King and the Inauguration of Obama as President

Clarence B. Jones: Now that Obama has become America's first African-American president elect, I hope that in his inaugural address, the day following our national holiday commemorating Dr. King's birthday, he will make specific reference to the confluence of historic events in our nation's capital. Having witnessed history first-hand with Dr. King and being fortunate to be one of his few advisors to live to witness the history-in-the-making that is the Obama presidency, I uniquely bridge a gap. I have both the honor and the responsibility to try and answer the overarching question: What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say about Senator Barack Obama's election as President of the United States? Click here to read more.

STROKE: Remember The 1st Three Letters.. S.T.R.

RECOGNIZING A STROKE

"3" steps, STR . Read and Learn!

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke

Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:

S * Ask the individual to SMILE.

T * Ask the person to TALK to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE(Coherently) (I.e. It is sunny out today)

R * Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.

NOTE: Another 'sign' of a stroke is this: Ask the person to 'stick' out their tongue. If the tongue is 'crooked', if it goes to one side or the other that is also an indication of a stroke. If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call 911 immediately !! and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

THE EMPLOYMENT OFFICE

Give These Men a Job

How do you feel about Bush's job prospects upon leaving the White House? And, what should his shadowy second-in-command, Dick Cheney, do next? Time to find these two men new jobs! Click here for the details.

Israel vs. Hamas in Gaza

Jan. 8, 2009: An Unnecessary War - Washington Post Op-Ed by Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter

Patrick: I admire Jimmy & Rosalyn Carter a lot. Whatever he says about the situation between Israel and Gaza is worth reading.

Glenn Greenwald
Alberto Gonzales gave a painfully self-pitying interview to The Wall St. Journal this week and announced that the real victims aren't the detainees who were tortured in our secret and not-so-secret prison camps, nor the millions of dead or displaced Iraqis, nor the Americans whose communications were illegally spied upon without warrants. No, the Real Victims of the last eight years are Bush officials like him who face criticism for what they did:

I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.

Here we find the predominant -- virtually unanimous -- Beltway mentality: when high American officials break our laws, it's nothing more than "formulating policies that people disagree with." Gonzales cried out: "What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" The answers are obvious to anyone paying even minimal attention. Steve Benen points out just some of them here.