July 30, 2013 • 55 mins
Belief in Hell is problematic at best. How do we relate to our fellow human beings while sorting them into an imagined afterlife of torment? How do we relate to faiths and myths that heap such additional darkness on an already bleak world? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie discuss the origins of belief in Hell, the philosophical problems it entails and just what sociologists and economists think about its effects on the real world.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to a bow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name
is Julie Douglas. Julie, do you believe in Hell? I
didn't hear you ask me that. Well, you know, that's
(00:24):
the kind of what this episode is about, about the
belief in Hell, the problems of Hell, why where this
idea comes from, and why it's problematic at times are
are often problematic in our culture. So I thought we'd
we creak it off by just talking about our own
sort of viewpoints. Yeah, just there's a big loaded question.
What do you think do you think I believe in Hell?
(00:44):
I don't think you do. I don't you seem like
a nonbeliever when it comes to especially to a place
where demons torment souls for all eternity and that sort
of thing. I think it's fascinating. Yeah, I love it.
I love the imagery. But no, I mean, I'm gonna
go out there say it seems a little silly to
me at times, so well, silly in the best of
(01:05):
circumstances meant to, it's not meant to, But um, it's
just such a caricature of humans in a way, um
are our worst thoughts that it's rendered to me in
this way that seems kind of silly. And of course
I've seen so much double imagery and satan imagery, and
of late it seems like Satan has been kind of
(01:27):
a silly figure in some modern works. Well, he certainly
can be. Yeah, I mean the you know, comedy and
Hell go way back, um. And we've recently been doing
a lot of rather research about this and some of
the earliest models of Hell that we encounter, um, you know,
an ancient Mesopotamian mythology. You encounter comedic stories even then,
(01:48):
stories that we think we're more about about being a
little loose with material and then having a little fun
with the material, with individuals going and having adventures in
in the afterlife in some sort of underworld. So the
idea of Hell ranges from yea, from silly too grotesque
For my own part, when when I think about hell
(02:09):
as is uh, the idea that there is a place
where bad people are are tormented for all eternity or
even for a finite amount of time. I tend to
find that a difficult thing to believe in, and and
you know, in this world, it takes a certain amount
of mental power to believe in anything, and I feel
(02:31):
like that's something that I don't want to focus that
energy on. They're they're far more positive things outside of
our experience than one can put faith into without thinking
about where hell is, who's going into it, and how
long they're going to be there. That being said, I've
always found the idea just richly fascinating. And uh and
(02:51):
and certainly Hell is this this fantastic place in in
h in the history of human art, human writing, fiction, philosophy.
We keep coming back to it. We can't help but
visit it over and over again, despite all of the
grotesque ideas that fill it. And uh, and sometimes the
grotesque beliefs that prop it up. Well, Uh, I'm sure
(03:13):
you guys have all guests we were gonna be talking
about hell today. UM. In fact, we're gonna another episode
coming out about the science of Hell. And I do
think that it's one of those things that has gone
by the wayside in terms, at least that's from my perspective,
that people really feel invested in. UM. But as we'll
discuss later, it actually is a belief that a lot
of people hold regardless of this idea that it went um,
(03:37):
you know, or according to the economists in the article
and Everlasting Hell, that theologically it's gone by the wayside,
because even the Vaticans sort of on the fence about
it um. And in that article it says, you know,
the devils and pitchforks, the brimstone clouds and whaling souls
have been cleared away rather as a mad aunt might
be shut up in an attic. So you know, that
(03:58):
being said, it's still this idea that that's pervasive, and
in fact, no matter where you stand on the issue,
you have to admit that it's actually died into the
fabric of our existence, that it is um sort of
creating some of the rules that we we play by
as humans, right at least in the West in certain cultures.
(04:20):
And I mean just look at sort of at jail.
This is a good example of a concrete, uh idea
of the abstract hell that we think of and that
has been told to us thousands of years now in
various forms. Yeah, conceptions of hell or just go side
by side with with our ideas about what what should
(04:45):
happen to criminals and wrongdoers in the real world. To
what extent is it is it punishment? To what extent
are they being shuffled away? To what extenter there being
m are they going to be saved and turned back
into proper citizen? I mean there's some models of even
um in the in the history of Christie Anity that
saw there there would be a day when even the
devil would be saved and brought back into God. I
(05:06):
mean there. Um. So when you start looking at the
history of hell, you see all these different takes on it,
all these different ways that we make we make sense
of it. Um. One way that I was thinking about
it recently is it's been proposed that that language is
the operating system, uh, you know, free the human mind
that we we have this brain, we have to put
language in it to deal with a lot of these
(05:27):
higher concepts. Right. And then you might consider religion a
data management program that we install to provide us with
a certain worldview of reality. Okay, Um, it's an optional
install and you may install another worldview software. You may
install multiple ones and do kind of like the thing
on Mac where you have the Windows and you go
back and forth between the two. Um. More than that,
in a second. But but you know how you but
(05:50):
you know how, you install certain software and it comes
with an antivirus program that you did not want, and
suddenly it's there, and how do you get rid of it?
Sometimes I feel that that's what hell is and need
not be Christianity. But but we can take Christianity Christianity
as an example. We can also take uh Tibetan Buddhism
as an example, where once one finds something really um
(06:11):
enamoring about the concept, something really positive, like you know,
like that there's this guy named Jesus and he's gonna
he's gonna save my soul, or there's this there's this
thing called karma and there and I can eventually work
myself through all these different phases of life and find
liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. But both
Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity, if you if you look at
(06:31):
them closely enough, you you get into these problematic um
concerns about hell in the in the Christian tradition and
in Tibetan Buddhism, a lot of a lot of thought
goes into how to avoid reincarnation into the lower realms
and actually to Devot tibetan Buddhist can cause a great
goal of anxiety. Um, well, and what we're talking about
when we talk about anxiety is the psychology of this. Yes,
(06:55):
and uh I thought it was very interesting in the
book The History of Hell. But les K Turner that
she brought up psychoanalysis and hell. And she said that
the Journey of Dante, because this is sort of the
gold standard that we'll talk about, and Dante's Inferno. The
journey of Dante and Virgil through the Inferno was an
interior metaphor, and it was an allegory of the human
(07:16):
experience that you have to, you know, trudge through the
dark knight of the soul before spiritual re emergence. And
so she said that this has really turned out our
idea of psycho analysis. She says, a patient must explore
with his guide the deep sources of his unhappiness and
inability to follow the true path, and he must endure
the painful purgatory of examining and challenging his behavior before
(07:38):
achieving the relative paradise of mental health. So, even in
this way, Hell has pervaded our idea of of how
we experience things as human beings. How we talk about them,
even psycho analysis. You know, I was thinking about this
in terms of mad Men, because this past season has
been all about a journey and certainly sins and dealing
(08:04):
with sin and the weight of that sin. Yeah. And
there's an early scene where Don Draper is reading The
Inferno on the beach. Yeah. And there's another great scene
where Roger Sterling is in psychoanalysis with with and he's, uh,
he's sitting there trying to explain his frustration in life
and where he's arrived. And it's really interesting because usually
Roger Sterling is just sort of cutting up and making jokes,
(08:26):
but here he is sort of giving you a portal
into his soul and he says, uh, he's on this
path and it's a frustrating path. He says, what are
the events in life? It's like you see a door
the first time you come to you say, oh, what's
on the other side of the door. Then you open
a few doors, Then you say, I think I want
to go over that bridge this time. I'm tired of doors. Finally,
you go through one of these things and you come
out on the other side and you realize that that's
(08:48):
all there are doors and windows and bridges and gates,
and they all open the same way, and they all
closed behind you. Look, life is supposed to be a
path and you go along and these things happen to you,
and they're supposed to change you, change your action. But
turns out that's not true. Turns out the experiences are nothing.
They're just some pennies you pick up off the floor
you stick in your pocket, and you're just going in
a straight line to you know where, Hell, of course,
(09:12):
And so that imagery again, it's and we'll get more
into this when we talk about Dante and we talk
about the nine circles of Hell. But the bridges and
the doors and the gates in the path and the
meandering is all part and parcel of what we think
of um when we think about a journey of our
soul or trying to transcend our physical selves. Yeah. Medievalist
(09:35):
Howard Roland Patch he actually broke down a number of
the elements appearing in nearly all known accounts of the underworld,
you know, the afterlive, hell, hades, what have you, both
in the Eastern and Western world. And he said that
they include a mountain, barrier, a river, a boar, and
a boatman, a bridge, gates and guardians and import in
an important tree. And except for the bridge, all were
(09:57):
present in ancient Mesopotamian mythol And of course Roger Sterling
alludes to these uh and the passage that you read well,
and you know, it's still summer and people are still
taking their their summer trips, their pilgrimages. Even even these
trips that we take to escape the monotony of life
and to find new experiences is in a way reach
writing some of this idea of transcending hell. Yeah, brings
(10:20):
me back to the very first line in Dante's Inferno.
In the middle of the journey of our life, I
came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight
way was lost. There you go. That's what I say
every time I get in the car to go on
a road trip. One more thing to to touch on
before we start breaking down some of the roots of
hell Um is important to note that a lot of
(10:44):
us have multiple ideas of what the soul is and
what the afterlife is um or isn't in our head
at the same time. You know, it's a it's a
bit simplistic to say, uh, my name is Robert Lamb
and I don't believe in ghosts because they're generally I
don't believe in ghosts, but there are times where I'm
more inclined to believe in it, or more inclined to
(11:05):
want to believe in it. And uh, you know, the
same goes with a lot of religious and mythic things. Um.
And I've talked before about this idea of like a
spiritual salad bar, where you take what you want and
you leave the rest. And apparently it's even more popular
with the with millennials these days, where they feel completely
you know, okay with with saying, all right, I like
this stuff in Buddhism, I'm gonna take that. Um, I
(11:26):
like this bit from Christianity, I'm gonna take that, and
then you sort of build your one faith or worldview
out of that. Uh. But but really we do a
lot of that anyway. It's kind of the the the
view of the world that I have right now is
not necessarily the one I have, um, you know, yesterday tomorrow.
So a lot of people have varying and conflicting ideas
about what the soul is and and who we are
(11:48):
and and really really we talked about human consciousness and
our views of that in the past, and and a
lot of that is part and partial to this to
do hell and and beliefs in the after live, because
a lot of it comes down to our queens and
our inability to to come to terms with the difference
between between flesh and mind and trying to figure out
what the mind is. And we get into this idea
of the mind slash soul is this thing that exists
(12:11):
outside of ourselves and therefore continues after we're gone. So yeah,
it's so fascinating when you start to think about it
that way, that hell is not only the way that
we color our perception of the world and we organize
our world again, think of jail's I think of our
judicial system, but also it is part and parcel of consciousness. So,
in other words, since the beginning of time that man
(12:33):
became conscious that you know, he or she was alive
and looked up at the stars and wondered about death
and wondered about what would happen afterwards, there has always
been some sort of afterlife story put in place, or
some sort of exploration of that topic, which you can't
have consciousness without having this idea of what would happen afterwards.
(12:54):
Even if even if that that thing that happened afterwards
was nothing, that's still a story in a sense, Yeah, exactly.
And it comes down to early people and even modern
people trying to figure out how the world works. And
there are things that you can test and that you
can you can throw a scientific investigation at um, and
then there are things that you cannot. And when you
(13:14):
cannot answer those questions with science, that's where all of
this myth building comes into play. Um. Now we're gonna
go into kind of a brief history of Hell, and
I'm not gonna go through everything. If you want to
really fabulous uh examination of the history of Hell and
our belief in it, do check out The History of
Hell by Alice K. Turner is a fabulous book, very readable,
wonderful illustrations throughout. Um. But we're not going to give
(13:37):
that concise of a journey because we'll be here all day. Uh.
One thing to keep in mind though with all of
this is that is that you you have to look
at religion not as a thing that comes off the press,
is you know, completely made it is um. It's more
like a pit through which humans have thrown ideas down
or like an ice cream cone where we're piling ideas up. Um.
(14:00):
But for instance, UM, you know, I've read a little
bit about the Hinduism here and there, and I often
um read that it described as something that you can't
really sum up, like you can't give like a really
good one paragraph summary of what Hinduism is, because Hinduism
is such an old religion built on you know, earlier
Vedic models. It just it's just a pit that goes
(14:20):
down through the centuries, through through millennia, and there have
just been all these ideas about gods and goddesses and
the human soul thrown down there, ranging from the literal
to the philosophic and uh. And there are there are
shallower pits as well, such as the pits of of
of of Judeo Christian and Islamic tradition and uh. And
(14:41):
those two are are built upon all these ideas that
have built up over over the years. And like the
Christianity of today is not the Christianity of a few
centuries ago, etcetera. So keep all of that in mind. Yeah,
I kind of think of it as those being sentiments, right,
the layers of stories that have just been built upon
each other. And if you were to take a soil
sample and bringing out you could be you would be
(15:03):
able to identify like, oh, look there's the Egyptian Book
of Dead, Um, you know, there's Judaiciah, there's you know,
and and be able to say like that informed this,
and this informed that and so on and so forth.
And to go back to the the analogy of religion
as a as a program on the operating system, it
probably makes for a pretty unruly program that I'm sure
(15:23):
some of our programmer listeners out there can can attest
to that. It's it's the system that's just built up
over time and probably you know, you probably need to
go in there and just recreate everything. But you have
all this stuff that's in there. Uh fie a legacy. Okay,
so we should all pull up a chair right now,
get settled and uh laid on us, give us, give
us the roots of hell. Okay. Well, uh fabulous notion
(15:44):
that was presented in some of the texts we're looking at,
uh is the idea that what happens when you go
back to like really ancient man, hunter gatherer man, what
what what are they? What kind of gods are they? Glimpsing. Well,
certainly gods that had to do with hunting, right, because
this was not an agrarian society yet. So they're on
the move, and uh, it seems to me like they
(16:06):
would be things would be a lot less um stable
for them. Yeah, be like the winds of change all
the time, chaotic even, Yes. So the argument is that
the the early humans they looked to horned gods, gods
of the hunt, gods that were like, you know, like
the dear God that is over the deer that we hunt. Um,
it's a god of chaos, and it's a god that
(16:28):
you're just kind of really you're really hoping that the
dear God will shine on you so that you can
actually find enough deer, kill enough deer, and bring back
enough meat where your people can survive for another day.
So those are the gods of the hunt. But then
in time we learn to grow things. This agrarian society
begins to grow up, and suddenly we begin to adopt
new gods. So we'd bring in celestial gods, gods that
(16:51):
are in line with the seasons and cycles, because now
we're farming and we're much more tied to the land
and things are a lot more predictable. Right, So you
kind have all of these demi gods hanging out from
from years past, right, Yeah, you don't want to throw
out the old gods thousands years past. It sounds like
a bad idea. And they're chaotic and they have horns,
so we keep them, but they're more resided to the earth,
(17:13):
and so we end up with these these hornet Earth
gods and these celestial sky gods. Um. So that's one
kind of cool idea of just sort of looking at
the roots of some of our beliefs about uh, not
only ruling uh, you know, superhuman deities, but also the
places they inhabit. This idea of sky and deep Earth
(17:35):
and then the middle ground where we humans do our things.
And speaking of deep Earth, where are we burying people
but in the earth. So again there's this idea of
afterlife being tied to what is under us. Now I
already mentioned some of the the the elements that you
find and even the most ancient ideas of the afterlife
and uh, and this all takes back to to just
(17:55):
ancient Mesopotamian mythology. This is the age of Gilgamesh four
thousand years ago. And even here you had, you had
a celestial queen named in Nana or Ishtar, who rules
over the heavens and the earth, while we're sister queen
Erska Gal or allowed to rules over the dead in
the Land of No Return. And we live in that
space between, this borderland between heaven and a sort of hell.
(18:16):
Uh and and and and we quickly find Gilgamesh traveling
to the other side in the first of many descent
stories to fill human history. Um. And then there's another
story where Erska Gal even takes a hostage from the heavens,
ushering in cyclical seasons, which is another trope that occurs
throughout myth, the idea that that one of the sky
beings is taken and has to live a certain part
(18:37):
of the year, the winter uh in the underworld. Uh.
And then there's even another tale where Erska Gal threatens
to flood the earth with the dead quote so that
they might devour the living, which also makes it kind
of the oldest zombie account, or at least the threat
of zombies. But even in these these uh, these stories,
the afterlife remains a place of sort of generic in life,
a sort of limbo uh. In another world, there's no
(19:00):
true punishment or reward. It's just this idea that well,
the soul, the consciousness lives on and what does it do?
I guess it just kind of bums about in a gray,
shadowy world. And this is an idea that that sticks
with us for a very long time. Now, if we
look back at the Egyptian Book of the Dead uh
from around we we find some very fascinating, very rich
(19:23):
views of what the afterlife would be. Now, in the
ancient Egyptian religion, it failed to travel well, as Alice K.
Turner makes makes this point. Also, it didn't survive a
test of time. But it's just not something that really spread.
And it didn't have legs, you could say, no, and
if it did, we would probably all worship cats, right, Yes,
they loved they love their cats more than we do now. Yeah.
(19:46):
But but it was a rich religion and it put
extreme emphasis on the afterlife. It had just a lot
of a lot of amazing ideas about what the soul was.
For instance, the soul was just one aspect of the person.
He had a soul or bo the often depicted as
a human headed bird uh. And there's just one part
of the cocktail of being which and also involved a
(20:06):
car or life force, a coup or spiritual intelligence, a
sekim or power, and a cohibit shadow and a wren name.
So all these things come together to make up who
we are. Um. But then the idea is that if
you die, then your soul will continues on this journey.
And this is where I think it's really interesting because
in the Egyptian Book of Dead you begin to see
(20:28):
this judicial system evolve because your soul can actually be weighed,
and it can be weighed against the feather from the
head dress of Matt who is the goddess of truth.
And if your heart is burdened with sin, well you'll
find out that Amt, a tiny little creature that's sitting nearby,
will gobble up your heart. This will be your fate.
(20:49):
So here we have this idea of the afterlife coming
to fruition in the Book of Dead. Um. So again
you might not think of this coloring our world view now,
but but later on, later on, yeah, things are things
are being put into place about what happens when you sin. Yeah.
So the idea is that if you're good, you get
to pass on into this other world. This saki Haru,
(21:11):
the field of rushes, and if you're bad, it's just annihilation.
This monster eats your soul and that's it. Uh. And
but but then the interesting thing is the field of
Russia is is is not a heaven, and it's not,
but it's also not just that gray area of Limbo.
It's kind of like it's his own fabulous world. They're
fifteen regions, each ruled by a god. One of them
is that there's just one place where there's no air
(21:32):
and an egg. God rules over everything. Or it's like
the God is in an egg. It's very cryptic and
and wonderful, and you have to take with you stuff.
As you know, his evident by anyone who's ever watched
the documentary about pyramids. Um, this is a world where
you're gonna needs, you know, you might want to farm there.
You're gonna need some protection against giant beetles. You might
need some spells. Uh, you might you might need to
(21:54):
bring some loved one, some pets, some golds and foods,
some comfort, do you know. And I didn't realize this
until I read this book, Um, that there were gollums
that were buried with them in the Golems, of course,
are like this sort of not mindless person or creature,
but it does your bidding. Yeah, it's a like an
inanimate form that is given life through some manner of sorcery.
(22:15):
So in the afterlife, if you have like forty gollum,
you are set because they're doing everything for you. So anyway,
just an interesting little that idea too. In the Terracotta Warriors,
you know, Yeah, you need an army in the afterlife.
Build one, bring it with you. It makes me want
to I mean, I think my plan is to be
cremated when I die, but maybe I can still have
(22:36):
a gollum. I feel like I need a gollum to
help me out. Well, your a could be contained in
a gollum. I like that, But does that mean I
become the gollum? It becomes kind of complicated. Now. I
definitely want a psychopomp, which you also see a lot
in these tales. Um psychopomp being a spirit guide or
a creature that takes you through the afterlife. So maybe
(22:56):
the gollum could be my psychopomp. Are kind of hoping
that my psychopomp is a at but let's see. Okay,
So anyway, Egyptian Book of the Dead that contribution um. Now,
eventually you get some really cool ideas in the form
of Zoroastrianism. Uh. And this is uh like pretty much
everything else, it has its roots and ancient Vedic beliefs
of India and it's it is a duellist religion, meaning
(23:18):
that there is an absolute force of good in the
universe counterbalanced by an absolute force of evil. The good
is Otto Mazda, who lives in the sky, and the
evil is Ottoman, who lives in the hell beneath the earth.
And after death, the soul is judged by an angelic
spirit named Rashnu uh and the good pot pass on
into the House of Song. The evil descend into Hell,
(23:40):
which is ruled by Yama. The first man to die
and the rest they go into this limbo that resembles
this original Babylonian vision of the afterlife again shadowy world
where souls just kind of bum around and bounce into
each other. And uh and this this is also really
key with those Zoroastrianism is that a cosmic battle will
ultimately decide everything. Avior will descend into Hell. Yeah, said,
(24:02):
will descend into Hell, save everybody. Hell will be destroyed,
and new Kingdom of God will be born on earth.
What does that sound like. Oh, my goodness, that sounds
like Christianity. In fact, a savior name Socian is born
of a virgin impregnated with the seed of Zoroaster. Who
So that's pretty specific, right, You can see the influence
there pretty clearly. Yeah, And you know, and and that
doesn't take away from any beliefs. Like I said, I
(24:24):
think it's just about realizing that this is how we
get our beliefs. We build up these stories over time,
and you know, you should be happy that your system
of belief has deep roots. Um, there's some other ideas
that of course kicked around as well. The Greeks, Romans,
and Jews had some very similar ideas in many respects.
With the ancient Greeks, we see the the afterlife hades
(24:44):
is a mere repository for the dead, and there's some
punishment there, but it's generally you know, the Titans that
are chained, the you know, the the elder beings that
that the God's word with and they so you'd have
to really commit a crime against the gods to be
punished you in the afterlife. Otherwise it's just gray souls
shadows bumping into each other. Well, it's kind of like
(25:05):
a house of horrors, right, almost like that the team
like um house of horrors that are put on by
churches where you can see all this ins in those
typical stories. Um, it's more of like just hey, we're
gonna cruise through here and we're gonna just see a
little bit a little flavor of this. Well, yeah, everybody
wants to visit hell. So many of our stories are
(25:25):
like that. I mean, Dante's story is a big one.
But you know, Dante was not the first person to
write a story where someone toured the afterlife. Virgil did
it before. And that's my Virgil is his guide or
his psychopomp in the Inferno and uh, and you just
sell countless versions of this before. People are always going
down into the underworld to save somebody or just tour
(25:46):
it to learn something, to grow. It's just a it's
a common trope that we keep coming back to when
we're gonna continue to do it. Um. Speaking of Virgil,
of course, the Romans initially had views more in keeping
with Shintoism, where he had spirits and everything. Um. But
with the increasing doses of Greek myth, uh, you know,
it changed and really grew more into that model. And
(26:06):
then Virgil wrotevia Neid, which sees our hero and Nias
travel to the land of the dead in search of
advice from his dead father. And again, of course Virgil
goes on to the influence Dante, which will discuss later.
And then you have the Jews who believed in a
place so called Shiel, which is often translated as the
grave or the pit. And again just another gray, ghostly
world of shades. Uh. Turner says in her book that
(26:28):
there was a lot of cross pollenization going on in
the Roman Empire because you had the great influence, you
have Roman influence and mister influences coming in as well. Right,
she sees like all sorts of things starting to converge.
And uh, there's a good little passage here that says
the old religions were assaulted by mosaic of novelties entirely.
New gods like the Greco Egyptian therapists were fabricated, while
(26:51):
old ones arrived from strange lands. It goes on to
say that there's influence in Turkey and so on and
so forth, so you get a lot of the sharing
of ideas here. And again this rich fabric of what
the story of hell and the afterlife becomes for us. Yeah,
and then the Zoroastrian influence continues, uh, and it continues
(27:12):
to democratize hell. In in Turner's words, um, the good
souls have to go somewhere right, and then the bad
souls have to go somewhere else. And then you get
this rich, dark, disturbing, and endlessly fascinating vision of what
hell might consist of. And then we have to rationalize
all of that with our belief in and or a
devotion to a divine being. So you get into this
(27:34):
problem of hell and you have to work out the kinks.
And like the idea of a program that is built
upon a previous program, in a previous one, you have
all these problems that need to be worked out in
the program, Or like a novel that has each chapter
has been written by a different author, and you have
to go back and somehow work all these plot holes
out well. And it is really interesting because depending on
the culture your your Hell is going to be very different.
(27:55):
So if you have a culture that has a lot
of different levels of classes, then you're gonna have many
different classes in Hell. Or as you say, there's one
version of hell that is democratized, um. And it's it's
talking more about perhaps the Greek culture and people existing.
If you've sinned, then then you're all on the same
page or all you know, nobody is higher than the
(28:15):
other person. And I couldn't help but think about the
blog post that you recently wrote. This is a little
bit of a diversion, but it's about cubicles and office
space and which version of hell your your open office
or your cubicle hell um. And there's an element of
the democratization to that as well. All Right, we're gonna
(28:37):
take a quick break and we come back. We're gonna
get even more into this idea of the problem with
healthy Alright, we're back. So what could be the problem
with a place where sinners are flayed, staked, disemboweled and
(28:59):
eating a lot. What's wrong with that? Well, because in
most of these you have to it has to make
sense with the rest of this university you've built and uh,
and there are different ways you attempt to do that.
But certainly any kind of monotheistic religion you have a
god at the head of it, and what kind of
god do you want to invest your time in? Is
it a Is it a god who has something called
(29:20):
it a hell and allows it to exist and sends
people there. That sends dead infants there, That sends people
who hadn't heard about the message of the truth, people
that had varying uh, you know, faith and varying beliefs
that they go there as well. I mean, how do
you how do you deal with that? Or do you
decide your God is that type of God? And then
(29:42):
does that shake your belief in the whole system? So
there's two issues there, Like one is how do you
meet out justice in the afterlife? Right? And how do
you determine what is sin and what is not sin?
Because everybody has a different take on that. And as
you said, if you have innocence, let's say, babies who
are not baptized, then well they're going to help. Right,
You've got to create new rules to figure out how
(30:02):
that works. And you've got a choice. You can have
a God who was warm and cuddly and fuzzy that
you take a positive message from and you just kind
of say, you know what, Hell is not my concern.
Heaven is my concern. Yeah, And uh, this God would
like me to join him in heaven clearly, or you
could say I may not be worthy for heaven, and
(30:24):
many other people may not be as well. Yeah, now
they're There are various ways of dealing with this, and
one is just exactly what kind of a view of
hell there is? And it's not quite as simple as
they are those of us who do not believe there's hell.
And then there are those of us who believe there
is a literal place where where Devil's torture sinners. It's
not quite that kind of right. You do have literal
there is literal belief in hell where it is that
(30:46):
where there is a place probably under the earth, where
sinners are tormented. But then there's also a more psychological
view where instead of being physically tormented at the at
the behalf or at least the permission of a statistic God. Uh,
it's more about being separate from God. Being separate from
God is torture. Um. There's like a mild cycule tychological view.
There's Um, there's the idea that hell is self inflicted.
(31:08):
And you throw full free will into the equation and say, well,
it's not really God tormenting you. You had the free
will and you're choosing to live this way, and in
some of these models, you can get out in any
time you want. It's just do you do you have
the belief, you have the faith to do so. There's
a There are also plenty of versions of it where
hell is temporary, the idea that hell is like a
place where souls only have to burn for a certain
(31:30):
amount of time and then they either are saved or
they're annihilated at the end. There's some versions of of
hell belief where hell is annihilation. Being cast into the
fiery furnace is is death is annihilation. It is that
crocodile faced beast from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
And then you have, especially in Eastern models of the
(31:51):
Hell's such as the Nakaras in you know, Hinduism, Buddhism,
and various other Asian myth cycles, the idea that we
go through these different lives, there's reinca ornated into different
phases of being, and you can fall down the chain
of being, you can fall into these lesser realms of existence,
such as the Hellishnkaras. But it's but it's not a
permanent place. Um it's a place that you can you experience,
(32:14):
and it's kind of a refining of the soul, and
then you can you can work your way back up
to better stages of existence and ultimately ideally free yourself
from the wheel entirely. The problem is that nobody can
really agree on what hell is right, so uh, and
I think the issue of this is that you know,
(32:34):
from from classical texts, back to very very ancient text
it was thought that Hell dwelled under us right um,
and the main things a lot easier back than to
think that in a sense, because what you're talking about
is that it's low ground geographically. You can point at
that time and say clearly it's it's right underneath us um.
(32:55):
In fact, Pausanias, a Greek geographer, said that Hell was
as far beneath Hades, says Hades is beneath the earth.
But along comes Galileo and Galleto suggests, well, you know,
the Earth is not the center of the universe. The
Sun does not revolve around the Earth, and therefore, if
the Earth is not the center of the universe, then
where where does Hell now reside? So that was really
(33:20):
one of the big problems with the Church is that
they said, okay, if Heaven is hanging above us, and
Hell is below us, and you're telling us that there's
something beyond the earth that is the universe um, and
we're not central to it. Then it really does displace Hell,
and it makes it much less likely as a logical
(33:41):
construct or you just have to make You have to
imagine that exists in like another dimension, that Heaven and
Hell are both extradimensional places. You couldn't even fly there
in a spaceship. But this is the teasing a part
of Hell and the logistics of it in a sense,
because now that it is banished to even a further
round of imagination, that is to have been taken out
(34:03):
of the ground, the soil, it's been turned into Narnia,
has been turned into Narnia, then you begin to understand
that it is perhaps a construct of the human mind.
And that's all part of the problem too, because you
have you have individuals who who see it this way,
and then you have individuals who either do believe in
a Hell, or more likely they cling to a faith
(34:23):
that also has Hell somewhere in the fabric. And we've
all had that situation where we've if we're not you know,
uber religious, ourselves you will end up encountering someone who is.
And if you don't, actually you may not actually discuss
it with them, but there will come a point. And
I remember this and thinking about this alting like junior
high in high school, where you know, I had friends
that were mostly were Protestant um but there were all
(34:45):
these different Protestant faiths, some of which supposedly, uh thought
they were the only ones who would actually make it
to happen. I don't know how much of that was
just sort of inviting and bickering, but that was kind
of the charge, Like I would say, oh, well, those
guys at that shirts they think they're the only ones
going to happen. And then we also had there were
some there were Catholics in the area. They were Jehovah's witnesses,
had a number of friends who are who are Mormon,
and and so you end up in these situations where
(35:08):
you're like, now, if their faith is right, that means
I'm going to hell. And then my preacher just the
other day, so that these guys are going to hell,
and you start trying to map out these different relationships
and if you you know, if you let this kind
of thing get the better off you. It can lead
to some uncomfortable confrontations. It can, and I think because
(35:28):
some of this is predicated on what Turner calls abominable fancy.
Um did you come across this in the book? I
thought it was really interesting. It's ultimately this Catharsis that's
built on the foundation of shaken Freud. So Turner says
that it's a it's one of the less savoring notions
of the early Church. And it's this idea that part
of the joy of being saved laying contemplating the souls
(35:51):
of the damned. Yeah, it's there's also in this idea
is this kind of notion that in this world old
in the real world, evils often go unpunished and goods
often go unrewarded. But eventually, if we're faithful in the afterlife,
God's going to sort it all out. And these people
(36:12):
that that were that were vicious or vile or lived
outside of my group, uh, they will get their come
upance and I will get my rewards. Uh So, And
and that can be I guess you know, like you said,
it can be a comforting idea, especially if someone is
in a is downtrodden, if your life really is not
working out and is filled with a lot of a
lot of torment. There's gotta be something rewarding about the
(36:34):
notion will in the next life, I'm going to be rewarded,
and these people who are living high in the hog
off of my misery, they're going to be the ones
to suffer. So that can be both rewarding and a
disturbing concept. Likewise, there's the the ever present concept of
hell as the Boogeyman story, Hell is the thing that
someone is, that the threat that someone gives you in
(36:56):
order to make you fall into line. But at also
it's cathartic in the sense that it what they're saying
with abominable fancies that you can occupy the station of
the Boogeyman meeting out justice. Right, So if you're sitting
there saying I'm saved and you're damned, then in a sense,
you're inhabiting the sort of false humility. And it reminded
me of the episode we did on Pride when we
(37:20):
did the Seventh Sins, because there was a study in
which it was talked about how humility, which is thought
to be the opposite of pride, is actually pretty similar
in terms of what's going on in the noggin, and uh,
there's cognitive neuroscientist Julian Paul Keenan. He looked at transcranial
magnetic stimulation to disrupt deliberate self deprecation, this humility. He
(37:44):
found that the patterns of brain activation during self deprecation
are fundamentally the same as self deceptive pride, so the
same part of the brain is activated. And I thought
that was really interesting because maybe some of this is
tied to that, that this idea that you're hardwired or
humans are hardwired in a way to try to uh
(38:04):
put themselves on a pedestal and meet out justice and
assume this false humility in order to see themselves feel
vindicated in any sort of do gooding that they've performed.
So it's kind of it's like vigilante justice on a
on a weird kind of like thought way, you know,
(38:25):
in a mental vigilante action. Yea, right, right, So it
would be very interesting if they could take that study
and then uh, you know, slice it up with people
who are contemplating hell for others since see if that corresponded.
But I just wanted to mention that because I think, again,
this is a problem of hell. Is it meant to
(38:45):
um to divert us in a way that's cooperative for
the community, that's a positive? In other words, can hell
exist as this example that we point to say you're
gonna go to hell if you don't, you know, do
what you're supposed to do? Or is it a way
of us occupying maybe the darkest reaches of our minds
(39:07):
and um and playing out this drama in a safe way? Right?
You don't not actually want anybody to be hurt or
tormented or eaten in hell, but it's a it's an
easy way to say, oh, that person, they drive me nuts,
They're going to Hell. Yeah, And that's where a lot
of the problem comes in, like how do you separate
the oh, you know, there they suck, They're going to
go to hell, Like how do you have It's one
(39:29):
thing to think that, but then how do you rationalize
that with some sort of notion that, oh, yeah, they'll
actually go to a place where you know, demons will
you know, torment their flesh forever. You know, that's like
you know who deserves that well? And it's funny because
we talk about it more in this this abstract realm.
But back in the day, particularly in Galilet, it was
just just a real threat. Right, if someone thought that
(39:51):
you were committing a sin, they wouldn't meet out that
justice for you. They wouldn't wait for for they wouldn't
sit around and say, oh, when he gets to Hell,
he's going to suffer. Well. In the medieval church, of course,
they had a tremendous amount of power over the faithful
because they ultimately had the power to decide who goes
to Hell and who goes to heaven. Uh, you know,
you could, you could put you know, a nation on
(40:12):
an interdict. You could, you could excommunicate somebody, and that
was if you believed in into it enough, and a
lot of people did. That was that was a tremendous
threat to level against an individual and it it It can,
It could and did decide like you know, whole international incidents.
Which again, if you don't think that Hell has some
(40:33):
sort of shaping of our current culture, you're wrong because
you have to look back again at these examples which
have informed how we live today. Yeah, if we didn't
have have some sort of theology involving Hell at varying
stages in the history of Western civilization, we'd be speaking
different languages. Now, it's true. I shouldn't say you're wrong,
but I would say, please reconsider. Yeah, I mean, just
(40:55):
let's look back at the events of ten sixty six
and imagine a world in which the Catholic Church didn't
level this kind of supposed power over the fate of
the soul. And and you know, we did an episode
on witchcraft, so or rather which is and I won't
go into that, but you can certainly see the trail
that that led to. I did want to mention that
(41:15):
Turner says that Dante and exploring Hell so richly in
The Divine Comedy that he unintentionally killed Hell. Again. This
is that the notion that if you make something into
a story, or you abstracted enough that the logic of
it begins to be teased apart. She said, it's because
(41:37):
he invited readers to join him in Virgil in a story.
And she said that Dante made it easier for intellectuals
of Renaissance and the Enlightenment to reject its reality. Yeah.
And and it's also worth noting that with the Inferno,
he was not written in Latin. It was written in
Italian because he wanted it to be accessible by a
general audience without having to undergo particularly possibly brutal translation
(42:00):
by others. And it was. It was wildly popular. So
you might be sitting here thinking, Okay, hell is this construct? Um?
Some people believe in hell? But just how many people
believe in hell? What are we talking about here? Well,
we were looking at a particular article here of titled
who Believes in Religious Evil and Investigation of sociological patterns
(42:22):
of belief in Satan, Hell and Demons by Joseph Baker
at Baylor University. He basically deals with with just the
United States in this but in breaking down some of
the uh, the demographics here, it is a bit telling
um and you can you can find this article online.
I'm not gonna just read through the numbers and stats
where you but I thought I would read just a
(42:44):
little bit from the discussion section of the article. So
Baker says um in in in summarizing his stats about
these different groups and who believes what he said, African
Americans tend to have stronger belief in religious evil than
do whites. Women have stronger degree of belief than men.
Uh not a net of religious controls. Younger Americans hold
stronger belief and conceptions of religious evil than older Americans. Finally,
(43:07):
social class plays an important role in how certain an
individual is about the existence of religious evil, with those
of higher social class having weaker confidence about the existence
of religious evil. However, these effects are conditioned by church attendance.
For those exhibiting a high level participation in organized religion,
the influence of social class is neutralized. For those not
actively participating in organized religion, the influence of social class
(43:30):
is more pronounced. These results indicate that traditionally power and
resource deprived groups, African Americans and those of lower social
classes exhibit strong beliefs in religious evil. Difficult life circumstances
and suffering often lead individuals to search for meaning. Moreover,
suffering forces people to conceive of God as removed from
this you know, hell equation, or they attribute the source
(43:53):
of suffering to some other form of evil. So I
thought that was interesting because it it does not only
with just sort of the demographics. It lets you know,
like where you fall in the socioeconomic ladder, how that
influences your belief. And I thought it interesting. The more
downtrodden you are, it's the less likely you are to
be worried by the problem of hell because you kind
of remove God from the source of suffering. God is
(44:15):
the source of relief, not suffering well, and the perspective
of God is a good cop in Satan as that
cop right, Yeah, and then you end up falling back
into this more duellist view of the great evil and
the great good, because in Christian tradition, Satan is just
a fallen angel. He's a disgruntled former employee who wields
a great amount of power. But he's not the equal
of God. It's not it's not the you know, the
(44:37):
ancient uh, you know, Mesopotamian idea. It's not the Zoroastrian
or the or the Gnostic notion of these two forces.
And in fact, the Catholic Church show in persecuting heresies
UH tried really hard to keep dualism from creeping its
way back into the into this into the understanding of
the universe. Well, let me put a hard stat against
(44:58):
all of this u least here in the United States.
According to Alice K. Turner, six of Americans believe in Hell,
up from fifty in nineteen fifty three. Now here's the
real kicker and then here's where American optimism really shines.
Only four percent think that they'll end up in hell.
There you go, I mean it. I was reading some
(45:20):
some thoughts on this too, where in his particularly in
the United States, No, no one really thinks they're going
to go to hell. And then we tend to even
we may, you know, subscribe to a religion that has
some pretty uh well confusing, but some certain rules in
placing who gets to go and who's who's good who's bad.
But then ultimately we kind of fall back on the
(45:40):
idea that most people go to heaven and only really
bad people go to hell. And certainly all the celebrities
go to heaven, oh of course, yeah, yeah, uh yeah,
even the Kardashians. Yeah, well, you know, they're really just
sort of wandering maybe. But it's interesting because of that
sixty six two percent of Americans who believe in how
(46:02):
nineties six percent think that they're not going to go there.
So do they really in their heart of hearts And
we can't obviously, um answer this, but do they really
in their heart of hearts believe in a health they
don't think they're going there, or do they just sort
of say, well, I believe in heaven, and they said
there's a hell, So I guess I believe in that too,
because it was recently listened to an interview Terry Gross
interviewed Stephen King last month, I think, and she was
(46:25):
asking him about some of this, like belief in heaven
and hell and supernatural and uh. And he he said
that did he found it a bit silly to believe
in heaven and not in hell. You know, it's like,
why would you just believe in the one when they're
kind of a pair, And you know, I, I guess
that's a valid argue. You could, you know, point back
to some of these ancient models, uh, the Mesopotamian uh,
(46:46):
one of the Mesopotanian models, with some of the the
other models and say, well, there's alway there's always this duality.
But then it's not always the case. There are plenty
of examples of of afterlife views in which there's really
there's only one place the soul was going, and it
may be neutral, or it may be varying the degrees
of positive. So again, the problem of hell is the
problem of death and the limits of knowledge. Yes, I
(47:07):
mean not to to be so reductionless about it, but
it all points back to this idea where we can't, uh,
we can't really wrap our minds around what's going to
happen to us. Um. So this is what's really interesting
about it is that nonetheless supernatural punishment informs how we
go about our daily lives. Apparently. Yeah, and this is uh,
(47:30):
We're gonna get into a couple of studies here, um
sociology studies that that look at and look at correlations
between different facts, between beliefs in the in supernatural evil,
between beliefs in heaven and hell, and how people behave,
how economies behave. And you know, it's not all cut
and dry. It's more about correlation. The authors are not
saying this is the relationship. They're saying, this is interesting,
(47:52):
we need to study this more. But it it's in
a way, these these studies that were about to discuss,
they represent a kind of problem hell for you know,
for for me, even because when I was first researching this,
I was kind of had it in my mind. I
you know, I was reading uh in in Banks, a
book that deals with the matter that I was discussing
(48:12):
in the summer reading episode, and you know, I kept
thinking of, hell, is this barbaric idea that that the
more advanced of society becomes, the more we need to
get rid of it. It's a dinosaur or you know,
a brutal fantasy, and we're better off without it. What
good could it possibly do us? And then here are
these two studies. They kind of make a case for
(48:32):
Hell being a positive motivator. Again, positive motivator. We say this,
and that the studies quick to point out again this,
these are correlations. So there's a lot more going on.
There's very complex things going on in societies to determine
the crime rate. But that being said, let's roll out
some of the data here. Okay, alright, So Azim F.
(48:55):
Sharif Uh he co authored the two thousand and twelve
paper Diversion Effect of Belief in Heaven and Hell on
National crime rates and UH his findings are encouraging or
discouraging compendently on how you look at the matter. H.
He compared the national crime rates UH with rates of
belief in Heaven and Hell in sixty seven countries, and
he came up with with these findings. First of all,
(49:17):
Heaven's belief rate is almost always higher than Hell's belief. Right,
all right, that's totally by that, uh, and that kind
of collaborates my theory that that helps kind of an
unwanted add on, you know, as I mentioned earlier. But
then the papers major statistical finding was that nations with
higher belief rates in Hell predicted lower crime rates, while
(49:38):
higher belief rates in Heaven predicted higher crime rates. So
the idea is that health fearing set of citizens are
more mindful of screwing up in this life, while the
heaven crowd think that they've got it knocked, you know,
in the next life, so they might as well do
what they want in this one. Okay. So this is
from a comprehensive analysis of twenty six years of data
involving over one forty three thousand people in sixty seven countries.
(50:03):
Now in two thousand and three, a Harvard University researcher
Robert J. Borrow and Rachel M. Then clearly found that
the gross domestic product was higher in developed countries when
people believed in Hell more than they did in heaven.
So here's another aspect of it. That being said, if
the gross domestic product is higher and uh, there's a
(50:26):
bigger belief in Hell in those communities and there's less crime.
Could you say that the economics of this are playing
a part. In other words, these communities are being served better,
they have better opportunities for people. And therefore, and I'm
just throwing devil's up here, just throwing in some other
(50:46):
nuances of what it means to have a high crime
rate or a low crime rate. And we know that
low opportunities, UM often predict higher crime. Right, so I
get the um. You know there's higher crime when people
in this correlation, uh say that they believe more in
(51:07):
heaven than they do in hell. But again, there's a
lot going on. In fact, Uh, there are some studies
coming out about how even weather affects crime, and so
you can't just say, oh, it's a belief system that's
keeping everything under wraps here. I found it interesting in
the uh the paper on Hell as a is an
(51:27):
its effect on crime, they pointed out that human trafficking
bucked the trend pretty much across the board. So so
human trafficking, as as as vile as it can be
in in in some situations like that, was just people
didn't even think of that as being something you could
go to Hell for, even in a country where otherwise
you would be like, you know, murders and thieves would
definitely be going. Really human traffic. Where does it say
(51:51):
in the Bible not to traffic humans and not to
forget to feed them in a in a you know,
a cargo container. M it doesn't. So it's kind of
a gray area there, I guess for some people. And
yet it seems so logical. Was something that that is,
you know, not something you should do. Yeah, I know,
not to do it. That's why I don't smuggle people
across the international borders. And not to get off on
(52:13):
another topic, but this is a huge problem in the
United States, especially for um, for sex trafficking, and these
are a lot of crimes that are perpetrated against women
and there sort of under the radar. But anyway, that's
neither here nor there right now. But it's kind of
mortifying to know that that's the perspective. Well, I guess
in some cases the individual is saying, I am allowing
(52:34):
you to take this journey, and if this journey ends
in a horrible place for you, well, my hands are clean,
which kind of reminds me of some of these arguments
about hell and God. God is sort of saying, look,
you have the free will. I am allowing you to
take this journey that's gonna into's gonna wind up in hell.
But but my hands are clean. Good cup, I'm a
(52:55):
good cup. Um we know what Jean Paul Sartre would say?
What would he say? Hell is other People? Oh? Well yes,
so And as a side note, there's actually an app
that's called hell is other People? Yeah. What does it do?
It tells you where your friends are so you can
avoid them. Oh my god, that is brilliant because, um,
(53:16):
my wife and I uh my wife particularly has this
thing about running into people. She knows that the grocery store,
which I totally understand because a lot of times you
go to the grocery store, you're not there to socialize,
you're not dressed up for it. You're there to to
carry out a task. And if you run into somebody, it's, uh,
it's awkward. You know, like you can say, hey, all right,
I said hi to you. Now you depart, and then
(53:37):
you run into them again and you have to either
be keeping store them and it's weird. It's awkward. So
if youah, if you had an app that let you
know that you know this co worker. This friend was
at Kroger. Then you might just go to publics instead,
but then you would feel like you had no free will,
like your life is being dictated by the coordinates of
your friends that you're trying to avoid because your hair
(53:57):
is mussy, Yeah, not messy, mussy. Well, it's it's a problem.
It's what it is. It is. All right, Well, there
you have it, the problem of Hell explored a little
bit there for you, the origins of Hell, the idea
of hell as a as a cultural, religious, theological, philosophical construct, um.
And certainly if you want to want to read more
about it again, highly recommend the History of Hell by
(54:19):
Alice K. Turner. Wonderful book. And uh, we're gonna do
another episode after this, published after this, where we're gonna
get into some of the science of hell, where we're
gonna deal a little more with this, but there's gonna
be less of a of a focus on on what
we believe and more about some of the science that
we've applied, um often as kind of a thought experiment
to what we think we know about Hell. That's right,
(54:41):
What is the trajectory of the fall or something like that? Cool?
All right, Well, In the meantime, everyone out there can
get in touch with us. You can let us know
what do you think about Hell? Do you think it's
a barbaric dinosaur that does the bone that some of
this cling to, is it? Is it important? Do you
do you feel like do you believe in Hell? If
you do, does it make you a better person or
(55:02):
do you feel kind of guilty about it? I mean,
anything that we've discussed in here is a fair game.
You can find us in the normal means. You can
go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
the main website. I have a number of blogs that
have done leading up to this about Hell and you
can find those there. You can find out our episodes,
and then you can find us on social media. We're
on that Twitter and Blow the Mind. We're on tumblers,
Facebook is Stuff to Blow your Mind? And where else
(55:25):
can they find us? Well, you can find us by
saying us an email and can do that at blow
the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Does it How Stuff Works
dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to a bow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name
is Julie Douglas. Julie, do you believe in Hell? I
didn't hear you ask me that. Well, you know, that's
(00:24):
the kind of what this episode is about, about the
belief in Hell, the problems of Hell, why where this
idea comes from, and why it's problematic at times are
are often problematic in our culture. So I thought we'd
we creak it off by just talking about our own
sort of viewpoints. Yeah, just there's a big loaded question.
What do you think do you think I believe in Hell?
(00:44):
I don't think you do. I don't you seem like
a nonbeliever when it comes to especially to a place
where demons torment souls for all eternity and that sort
of thing. I think it's fascinating. Yeah, I love it.
I love the imagery. But no, I mean, I'm gonna
go out there say it seems a little silly to
me at times, so well, silly in the best of
(01:05):
circumstances meant to, it's not meant to, But um, it's
just such a caricature of humans in a way, um
are our worst thoughts that it's rendered to me in
this way that seems kind of silly. And of course
I've seen so much double imagery and satan imagery, and
of late it seems like Satan has been kind of
(01:27):
a silly figure in some modern works. Well, he certainly
can be. Yeah, I mean the you know, comedy and
Hell go way back, um. And we've recently been doing
a lot of rather research about this and some of
the earliest models of Hell that we encounter, um, you know,
an ancient Mesopotamian mythology. You encounter comedic stories even then,
(01:48):
stories that we think we're more about about being a
little loose with material and then having a little fun
with the material, with individuals going and having adventures in
in the afterlife in some sort of underworld. So the
idea of Hell ranges from yea, from silly too grotesque
For my own part, when when I think about hell
(02:09):
as is uh, the idea that there is a place
where bad people are are tormented for all eternity or
even for a finite amount of time. I tend to
find that a difficult thing to believe in, and and
you know, in this world, it takes a certain amount
of mental power to believe in anything, and I feel
(02:31):
like that's something that I don't want to focus that
energy on. They're they're far more positive things outside of
our experience than one can put faith into without thinking
about where hell is, who's going into it, and how
long they're going to be there. That being said, I've
always found the idea just richly fascinating. And uh and
(02:51):
and certainly Hell is this this fantastic place in in
h in the history of human art, human writing, fiction, philosophy.
We keep coming back to it. We can't help but
visit it over and over again, despite all of the
grotesque ideas that fill it. And uh, and sometimes the
grotesque beliefs that prop it up. Well, Uh, I'm sure
(03:13):
you guys have all guests we were gonna be talking
about hell today. UM. In fact, we're gonna another episode
coming out about the science of Hell. And I do
think that it's one of those things that has gone
by the wayside in terms, at least that's from my perspective,
that people really feel invested in. UM. But as we'll
discuss later, it actually is a belief that a lot
of people hold regardless of this idea that it went um,
(03:37):
you know, or according to the economists in the article
and Everlasting Hell, that theologically it's gone by the wayside,
because even the Vaticans sort of on the fence about
it um. And in that article it says, you know,
the devils and pitchforks, the brimstone clouds and whaling souls
have been cleared away rather as a mad aunt might
be shut up in an attic. So you know, that
(03:58):
being said, it's still this idea that that's pervasive, and
in fact, no matter where you stand on the issue,
you have to admit that it's actually died into the
fabric of our existence, that it is um sort of
creating some of the rules that we we play by
as humans, right at least in the West in certain cultures.
(04:20):
And I mean just look at sort of at jail.
This is a good example of a concrete, uh idea
of the abstract hell that we think of and that
has been told to us thousands of years now in
various forms. Yeah, conceptions of hell or just go side
by side with with our ideas about what what should
(04:45):
happen to criminals and wrongdoers in the real world. To
what extent is it is it punishment? To what extent
are they being shuffled away? To what extenter there being
m are they going to be saved and turned back
into proper citizen? I mean there's some models of even
um in the in the history of Christie Anity that
saw there there would be a day when even the
devil would be saved and brought back into God. I
(05:06):
mean there. Um. So when you start looking at the
history of hell, you see all these different takes on it,
all these different ways that we make we make sense
of it. Um. One way that I was thinking about
it recently is it's been proposed that that language is
the operating system, uh, you know, free the human mind
that we we have this brain, we have to put
language in it to deal with a lot of these
(05:27):
higher concepts. Right. And then you might consider religion a
data management program that we install to provide us with
a certain worldview of reality. Okay, Um, it's an optional
install and you may install another worldview software. You may
install multiple ones and do kind of like the thing
on Mac where you have the Windows and you go
back and forth between the two. Um. More than that,
in a second. But but you know how you but
(05:50):
you know how, you install certain software and it comes
with an antivirus program that you did not want, and
suddenly it's there, and how do you get rid of it?
Sometimes I feel that that's what hell is and need
not be Christianity. But but we can take Christianity Christianity
as an example. We can also take uh Tibetan Buddhism
as an example, where once one finds something really um
(06:11):
enamoring about the concept, something really positive, like you know,
like that there's this guy named Jesus and he's gonna
he's gonna save my soul, or there's this there's this
thing called karma and there and I can eventually work
myself through all these different phases of life and find
liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. But both
Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity, if you if you look at
(06:31):
them closely enough, you you get into these problematic um
concerns about hell in the in the Christian tradition and
in Tibetan Buddhism, a lot of a lot of thought
goes into how to avoid reincarnation into the lower realms
and actually to Devot tibetan Buddhist can cause a great
goal of anxiety. Um, well, and what we're talking about
when we talk about anxiety is the psychology of this. Yes,
(06:55):
and uh I thought it was very interesting in the
book The History of Hell. But les K Turner that
she brought up psychoanalysis and hell. And she said that
the Journey of Dante, because this is sort of the
gold standard that we'll talk about, and Dante's Inferno. The
journey of Dante and Virgil through the Inferno was an
interior metaphor, and it was an allegory of the human
(07:16):
experience that you have to, you know, trudge through the
dark knight of the soul before spiritual re emergence. And
so she said that this has really turned out our
idea of psycho analysis. She says, a patient must explore
with his guide the deep sources of his unhappiness and
inability to follow the true path, and he must endure
the painful purgatory of examining and challenging his behavior before
(07:38):
achieving the relative paradise of mental health. So, even in
this way, Hell has pervaded our idea of of how
we experience things as human beings. How we talk about them,
even psycho analysis. You know, I was thinking about this
in terms of mad Men, because this past season has
been all about a journey and certainly sins and dealing
(08:04):
with sin and the weight of that sin. Yeah. And
there's an early scene where Don Draper is reading The
Inferno on the beach. Yeah. And there's another great scene
where Roger Sterling is in psychoanalysis with with and he's, uh,
he's sitting there trying to explain his frustration in life
and where he's arrived. And it's really interesting because usually
Roger Sterling is just sort of cutting up and making jokes,
(08:26):
but here he is sort of giving you a portal
into his soul and he says, uh, he's on this
path and it's a frustrating path. He says, what are
the events in life? It's like you see a door
the first time you come to you say, oh, what's
on the other side of the door. Then you open
a few doors, Then you say, I think I want
to go over that bridge this time. I'm tired of doors. Finally,
you go through one of these things and you come
out on the other side and you realize that that's
(08:48):
all there are doors and windows and bridges and gates,
and they all open the same way, and they all
closed behind you. Look, life is supposed to be a
path and you go along and these things happen to you,
and they're supposed to change you, change your action. But
turns out that's not true. Turns out the experiences are nothing.
They're just some pennies you pick up off the floor
you stick in your pocket, and you're just going in
a straight line to you know where, Hell, of course,
(09:12):
And so that imagery again, it's and we'll get more
into this when we talk about Dante and we talk
about the nine circles of Hell. But the bridges and
the doors and the gates in the path and the
meandering is all part and parcel of what we think
of um when we think about a journey of our
soul or trying to transcend our physical selves. Yeah. Medievalist
(09:35):
Howard Roland Patch he actually broke down a number of
the elements appearing in nearly all known accounts of the underworld,
you know, the afterlive, hell, hades, what have you, both
in the Eastern and Western world. And he said that
they include a mountain, barrier, a river, a boar, and
a boatman, a bridge, gates and guardians and import in
an important tree. And except for the bridge, all were
(09:57):
present in ancient Mesopotamian mythol And of course Roger Sterling
alludes to these uh and the passage that you read well,
and you know, it's still summer and people are still
taking their their summer trips, their pilgrimages. Even even these
trips that we take to escape the monotony of life
and to find new experiences is in a way reach
writing some of this idea of transcending hell. Yeah, brings
(10:20):
me back to the very first line in Dante's Inferno.
In the middle of the journey of our life, I
came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight
way was lost. There you go. That's what I say
every time I get in the car to go on
a road trip. One more thing to to touch on
before we start breaking down some of the roots of
hell Um is important to note that a lot of
(10:44):
us have multiple ideas of what the soul is and
what the afterlife is um or isn't in our head
at the same time. You know, it's a it's a
bit simplistic to say, uh, my name is Robert Lamb
and I don't believe in ghosts because they're generally I
don't believe in ghosts, but there are times where I'm
more inclined to believe in it, or more inclined to
(11:05):
want to believe in it. And uh, you know, the
same goes with a lot of religious and mythic things. Um.
And I've talked before about this idea of like a
spiritual salad bar, where you take what you want and
you leave the rest. And apparently it's even more popular
with the with millennials these days, where they feel completely
you know, okay with with saying, all right, I like
this stuff in Buddhism, I'm gonna take that. Um, I
(11:26):
like this bit from Christianity, I'm gonna take that, and
then you sort of build your one faith or worldview
out of that. Uh. But but really we do a
lot of that anyway. It's kind of the the the
view of the world that I have right now is
not necessarily the one I have, um, you know, yesterday tomorrow.
So a lot of people have varying and conflicting ideas
about what the soul is and and who we are
(11:48):
and and really really we talked about human consciousness and
our views of that in the past, and and a
lot of that is part and partial to this to
do hell and and beliefs in the after live, because
a lot of it comes down to our queens and
our inability to to come to terms with the difference
between between flesh and mind and trying to figure out
what the mind is. And we get into this idea
of the mind slash soul is this thing that exists
(12:11):
outside of ourselves and therefore continues after we're gone. So yeah,
it's so fascinating when you start to think about it
that way, that hell is not only the way that
we color our perception of the world and we organize
our world again, think of jail's I think of our
judicial system, but also it is part and parcel of consciousness. So,
in other words, since the beginning of time that man
(12:33):
became conscious that you know, he or she was alive
and looked up at the stars and wondered about death
and wondered about what would happen afterwards, there has always
been some sort of afterlife story put in place, or
some sort of exploration of that topic, which you can't
have consciousness without having this idea of what would happen afterwards.
(12:54):
Even if even if that that thing that happened afterwards
was nothing, that's still a story in a sense, Yeah, exactly.
And it comes down to early people and even modern
people trying to figure out how the world works. And
there are things that you can test and that you
can you can throw a scientific investigation at um, and
then there are things that you cannot. And when you
(13:14):
cannot answer those questions with science, that's where all of
this myth building comes into play. Um. Now we're gonna
go into kind of a brief history of Hell, and
I'm not gonna go through everything. If you want to
really fabulous uh examination of the history of Hell and
our belief in it, do check out The History of
Hell by Alice K. Turner is a fabulous book, very readable,
wonderful illustrations throughout. Um. But we're not going to give
(13:37):
that concise of a journey because we'll be here all day. Uh.
One thing to keep in mind though with all of
this is that is that you you have to look
at religion not as a thing that comes off the press,
is you know, completely made it is um. It's more
like a pit through which humans have thrown ideas down
or like an ice cream cone where we're piling ideas up. Um.
(14:00):
But for instance, UM, you know, I've read a little
bit about the Hinduism here and there, and I often
um read that it described as something that you can't
really sum up, like you can't give like a really
good one paragraph summary of what Hinduism is, because Hinduism
is such an old religion built on you know, earlier
Vedic models. It just it's just a pit that goes
(14:20):
down through the centuries, through through millennia, and there have
just been all these ideas about gods and goddesses and
the human soul thrown down there, ranging from the literal
to the philosophic and uh. And there are there are
shallower pits as well, such as the pits of of
of of Judeo Christian and Islamic tradition and uh. And
(14:41):
those two are are built upon all these ideas that
have built up over over the years. And like the
Christianity of today is not the Christianity of a few
centuries ago, etcetera. So keep all of that in mind. Yeah,
I kind of think of it as those being sentiments, right,
the layers of stories that have just been built upon
each other. And if you were to take a soil
sample and bringing out you could be you would be
(15:03):
able to identify like, oh, look there's the Egyptian Book
of Dead, Um, you know, there's Judaiciah, there's you know,
and and be able to say like that informed this,
and this informed that and so on and so forth.
And to go back to the the analogy of religion
as a as a program on the operating system, it
probably makes for a pretty unruly program that I'm sure
(15:23):
some of our programmer listeners out there can can attest
to that. It's it's the system that's just built up
over time and probably you know, you probably need to
go in there and just recreate everything. But you have
all this stuff that's in there. Uh fie a legacy. Okay,
so we should all pull up a chair right now,
get settled and uh laid on us, give us, give
us the roots of hell. Okay. Well, uh fabulous notion
(15:44):
that was presented in some of the texts we're looking at,
uh is the idea that what happens when you go
back to like really ancient man, hunter gatherer man, what
what what are they? What kind of gods are they? Glimpsing. Well,
certainly gods that had to do with hunting, right, because
this was not an agrarian society yet. So they're on
the move, and uh, it seems to me like they
(16:06):
would be things would be a lot less um stable
for them. Yeah, be like the winds of change all
the time, chaotic even, Yes. So the argument is that
the the early humans they looked to horned gods, gods
of the hunt, gods that were like, you know, like
the dear God that is over the deer that we hunt. Um,
it's a god of chaos, and it's a god that
(16:28):
you're just kind of really you're really hoping that the
dear God will shine on you so that you can
actually find enough deer, kill enough deer, and bring back
enough meat where your people can survive for another day.
So those are the gods of the hunt. But then
in time we learn to grow things. This agrarian society
begins to grow up, and suddenly we begin to adopt
new gods. So we'd bring in celestial gods, gods that
(16:51):
are in line with the seasons and cycles, because now
we're farming and we're much more tied to the land
and things are a lot more predictable. Right, So you
kind have all of these demi gods hanging out from
from years past, right, Yeah, you don't want to throw
out the old gods thousands years past. It sounds like
a bad idea. And they're chaotic and they have horns,
so we keep them, but they're more resided to the earth,
(17:13):
and so we end up with these these hornet Earth
gods and these celestial sky gods. Um. So that's one
kind of cool idea of just sort of looking at
the roots of some of our beliefs about uh, not
only ruling uh, you know, superhuman deities, but also the
places they inhabit. This idea of sky and deep Earth
(17:35):
and then the middle ground where we humans do our things.
And speaking of deep Earth, where are we burying people
but in the earth. So again there's this idea of
afterlife being tied to what is under us. Now I
already mentioned some of the the the elements that you
find and even the most ancient ideas of the afterlife
and uh, and this all takes back to to just
(17:55):
ancient Mesopotamian mythology. This is the age of Gilgamesh four
thousand years ago. And even here you had, you had
a celestial queen named in Nana or Ishtar, who rules
over the heavens and the earth, while we're sister queen
Erska Gal or allowed to rules over the dead in
the Land of No Return. And we live in that
space between, this borderland between heaven and a sort of hell.
(18:16):
Uh and and and and we quickly find Gilgamesh traveling
to the other side in the first of many descent
stories to fill human history. Um. And then there's another
story where Erska Gal even takes a hostage from the heavens,
ushering in cyclical seasons, which is another trope that occurs
throughout myth, the idea that that one of the sky
beings is taken and has to live a certain part
(18:37):
of the year, the winter uh in the underworld. Uh.
And then there's even another tale where Erska Gal threatens
to flood the earth with the dead quote so that
they might devour the living, which also makes it kind
of the oldest zombie account, or at least the threat
of zombies. But even in these these uh, these stories,
the afterlife remains a place of sort of generic in life,
a sort of limbo uh. In another world, there's no
(19:00):
true punishment or reward. It's just this idea that well,
the soul, the consciousness lives on and what does it do?
I guess it just kind of bums about in a gray,
shadowy world. And this is an idea that that sticks
with us for a very long time. Now, if we
look back at the Egyptian Book of the Dead uh
from around we we find some very fascinating, very rich
(19:23):
views of what the afterlife would be. Now, in the
ancient Egyptian religion, it failed to travel well, as Alice K.
Turner makes makes this point. Also, it didn't survive a
test of time. But it's just not something that really spread.
And it didn't have legs, you could say, no, and
if it did, we would probably all worship cats, right, Yes,
they loved they love their cats more than we do now. Yeah.
(19:46):
But but it was a rich religion and it put
extreme emphasis on the afterlife. It had just a lot
of a lot of amazing ideas about what the soul was.
For instance, the soul was just one aspect of the person.
He had a soul or bo the often depicted as
a human headed bird uh. And there's just one part
of the cocktail of being which and also involved a
(20:06):
car or life force, a coup or spiritual intelligence, a
sekim or power, and a cohibit shadow and a wren name.
So all these things come together to make up who
we are. Um. But then the idea is that if
you die, then your soul will continues on this journey.
And this is where I think it's really interesting because
in the Egyptian Book of Dead you begin to see
(20:28):
this judicial system evolve because your soul can actually be weighed,
and it can be weighed against the feather from the
head dress of Matt who is the goddess of truth.
And if your heart is burdened with sin, well you'll
find out that Amt, a tiny little creature that's sitting nearby,
will gobble up your heart. This will be your fate.
(20:49):
So here we have this idea of the afterlife coming
to fruition in the Book of Dead. Um. So again
you might not think of this coloring our world view now,
but but later on, later on, yeah, things are things
are being put into place about what happens when you sin. Yeah.
So the idea is that if you're good, you get
to pass on into this other world. This saki Haru,
(21:11):
the field of rushes, and if you're bad, it's just annihilation.
This monster eats your soul and that's it. Uh. And
but but then the interesting thing is the field of
Russia is is is not a heaven, and it's not,
but it's also not just that gray area of Limbo.
It's kind of like it's his own fabulous world. They're
fifteen regions, each ruled by a god. One of them
is that there's just one place where there's no air
(21:32):
and an egg. God rules over everything. Or it's like
the God is in an egg. It's very cryptic and
and wonderful, and you have to take with you stuff.
As you know, his evident by anyone who's ever watched
the documentary about pyramids. Um, this is a world where
you're gonna needs, you know, you might want to farm there.
You're gonna need some protection against giant beetles. You might
need some spells. Uh, you might you might need to
(21:54):
bring some loved one, some pets, some golds and foods,
some comfort, do you know. And I didn't realize this
until I read this book, Um, that there were gollums
that were buried with them in the Golems, of course,
are like this sort of not mindless person or creature,
but it does your bidding. Yeah, it's a like an
inanimate form that is given life through some manner of sorcery.
(22:15):
So in the afterlife, if you have like forty gollum,
you are set because they're doing everything for you. So anyway,
just an interesting little that idea too. In the Terracotta Warriors,
you know, Yeah, you need an army in the afterlife.
Build one, bring it with you. It makes me want
to I mean, I think my plan is to be
cremated when I die, but maybe I can still have
(22:36):
a gollum. I feel like I need a gollum to
help me out. Well, your a could be contained in
a gollum. I like that, But does that mean I
become the gollum? It becomes kind of complicated. Now. I
definitely want a psychopomp, which you also see a lot
in these tales. Um psychopomp being a spirit guide or
a creature that takes you through the afterlife. So maybe
(22:56):
the gollum could be my psychopomp. Are kind of hoping
that my psychopomp is a at but let's see. Okay,
So anyway, Egyptian Book of the Dead that contribution um. Now,
eventually you get some really cool ideas in the form
of Zoroastrianism. Uh. And this is uh like pretty much
everything else, it has its roots and ancient Vedic beliefs
of India and it's it is a duellist religion, meaning
(23:18):
that there is an absolute force of good in the
universe counterbalanced by an absolute force of evil. The good
is Otto Mazda, who lives in the sky, and the
evil is Ottoman, who lives in the hell beneath the earth.
And after death, the soul is judged by an angelic
spirit named Rashnu uh and the good pot pass on
into the House of Song. The evil descend into Hell,
(23:40):
which is ruled by Yama. The first man to die
and the rest they go into this limbo that resembles
this original Babylonian vision of the afterlife again shadowy world
where souls just kind of bum around and bounce into
each other. And uh and this this is also really
key with those Zoroastrianism is that a cosmic battle will
ultimately decide everything. Avior will descend into Hell. Yeah, said,
(24:02):
will descend into Hell, save everybody. Hell will be destroyed,
and new Kingdom of God will be born on earth.
What does that sound like. Oh, my goodness, that sounds
like Christianity. In fact, a savior name Socian is born
of a virgin impregnated with the seed of Zoroaster. Who
So that's pretty specific, right, You can see the influence
there pretty clearly. Yeah, And you know, and and that
doesn't take away from any beliefs. Like I said, I
(24:24):
think it's just about realizing that this is how we
get our beliefs. We build up these stories over time,
and you know, you should be happy that your system
of belief has deep roots. Um, there's some other ideas
that of course kicked around as well. The Greeks, Romans,
and Jews had some very similar ideas in many respects.
With the ancient Greeks, we see the the afterlife hades
(24:44):
is a mere repository for the dead, and there's some
punishment there, but it's generally you know, the Titans that
are chained, the you know, the the elder beings that
that the God's word with and they so you'd have
to really commit a crime against the gods to be
punished you in the afterlife. Otherwise it's just gray souls
shadows bumping into each other. Well, it's kind of like
(25:05):
a house of horrors, right, almost like that the team
like um house of horrors that are put on by
churches where you can see all this ins in those
typical stories. Um, it's more of like just hey, we're
gonna cruise through here and we're gonna just see a
little bit a little flavor of this. Well, yeah, everybody
wants to visit hell. So many of our stories are
(25:25):
like that. I mean, Dante's story is a big one.
But you know, Dante was not the first person to
write a story where someone toured the afterlife. Virgil did
it before. And that's my Virgil is his guide or
his psychopomp in the Inferno and uh, and you just
sell countless versions of this before. People are always going
down into the underworld to save somebody or just tour
(25:46):
it to learn something, to grow. It's just a it's
a common trope that we keep coming back to when
we're gonna continue to do it. Um. Speaking of Virgil,
of course, the Romans initially had views more in keeping
with Shintoism, where he had spirits and everything. Um. But
with the increasing doses of Greek myth, uh, you know,
it changed and really grew more into that model. And
(26:06):
then Virgil wrotevia Neid, which sees our hero and Nias
travel to the land of the dead in search of
advice from his dead father. And again, of course Virgil
goes on to the influence Dante, which will discuss later.
And then you have the Jews who believed in a
place so called Shiel, which is often translated as the
grave or the pit. And again just another gray, ghostly
world of shades. Uh. Turner says in her book that
(26:28):
there was a lot of cross pollenization going on in
the Roman Empire because you had the great influence, you
have Roman influence and mister influences coming in as well. Right,
she sees like all sorts of things starting to converge.
And uh, there's a good little passage here that says
the old religions were assaulted by mosaic of novelties entirely.
New gods like the Greco Egyptian therapists were fabricated, while
(26:51):
old ones arrived from strange lands. It goes on to
say that there's influence in Turkey and so on and
so forth, so you get a lot of the sharing
of ideas here. And again this rich fabric of what
the story of hell and the afterlife becomes for us. Yeah,
and then the Zoroastrian influence continues, uh, and it continues
(27:12):
to democratize hell. In in Turner's words, um, the good
souls have to go somewhere right, and then the bad
souls have to go somewhere else. And then you get
this rich, dark, disturbing, and endlessly fascinating vision of what
hell might consist of. And then we have to rationalize
all of that with our belief in and or a
devotion to a divine being. So you get into this
(27:34):
problem of hell and you have to work out the kinks.
And like the idea of a program that is built
upon a previous program, in a previous one, you have
all these problems that need to be worked out in
the program, Or like a novel that has each chapter
has been written by a different author, and you have
to go back and somehow work all these plot holes
out well. And it is really interesting because depending on
the culture your your Hell is going to be very different.
(27:55):
So if you have a culture that has a lot
of different levels of classes, then you're gonna have many
different classes in Hell. Or as you say, there's one
version of hell that is democratized, um. And it's it's
talking more about perhaps the Greek culture and people existing.
If you've sinned, then then you're all on the same
page or all you know, nobody is higher than the
(28:15):
other person. And I couldn't help but think about the
blog post that you recently wrote. This is a little
bit of a diversion, but it's about cubicles and office
space and which version of hell your your open office
or your cubicle hell um. And there's an element of
the democratization to that as well. All Right, we're gonna
(28:37):
take a quick break and we come back. We're gonna
get even more into this idea of the problem with
healthy Alright, we're back. So what could be the problem
with a place where sinners are flayed, staked, disemboweled and
(28:59):
eating a lot. What's wrong with that? Well, because in
most of these you have to it has to make
sense with the rest of this university you've built and uh,
and there are different ways you attempt to do that.
But certainly any kind of monotheistic religion you have a
god at the head of it, and what kind of
god do you want to invest your time in? Is
it a Is it a god who has something called
(29:20):
it a hell and allows it to exist and sends
people there. That sends dead infants there, That sends people
who hadn't heard about the message of the truth, people
that had varying uh, you know, faith and varying beliefs
that they go there as well. I mean, how do
you how do you deal with that? Or do you
decide your God is that type of God? And then
(29:42):
does that shake your belief in the whole system? So
there's two issues there, Like one is how do you
meet out justice in the afterlife? Right? And how do
you determine what is sin and what is not sin?
Because everybody has a different take on that. And as
you said, if you have innocence, let's say, babies who
are not baptized, then well they're going to help. Right,
You've got to create new rules to figure out how
(30:02):
that works. And you've got a choice. You can have
a God who was warm and cuddly and fuzzy that
you take a positive message from and you just kind
of say, you know what, Hell is not my concern.
Heaven is my concern. Yeah, And uh, this God would
like me to join him in heaven clearly, or you
could say I may not be worthy for heaven, and
(30:24):
many other people may not be as well. Yeah, now
they're There are various ways of dealing with this, and
one is just exactly what kind of a view of
hell there is? And it's not quite as simple as
they are those of us who do not believe there's hell.
And then there are those of us who believe there
is a literal place where where Devil's torture sinners. It's
not quite that kind of right. You do have literal
there is literal belief in hell where it is that
(30:46):
where there is a place probably under the earth, where
sinners are tormented. But then there's also a more psychological
view where instead of being physically tormented at the at
the behalf or at least the permission of a statistic God. Uh,
it's more about being separate from God. Being separate from
God is torture. Um. There's like a mild cycule tychological view.
There's Um, there's the idea that hell is self inflicted.
(31:08):
And you throw full free will into the equation and say, well,
it's not really God tormenting you. You had the free
will and you're choosing to live this way, and in
some of these models, you can get out in any
time you want. It's just do you do you have
the belief, you have the faith to do so. There's
a There are also plenty of versions of it where
hell is temporary, the idea that hell is like a
place where souls only have to burn for a certain
(31:30):
amount of time and then they either are saved or
they're annihilated at the end. There's some versions of of
hell belief where hell is annihilation. Being cast into the
fiery furnace is is death is annihilation. It is that
crocodile faced beast from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
And then you have, especially in Eastern models of the
(31:51):
Hell's such as the Nakaras in you know, Hinduism, Buddhism,
and various other Asian myth cycles, the idea that we
go through these different lives, there's reinca ornated into different
phases of being, and you can fall down the chain
of being, you can fall into these lesser realms of existence,
such as the Hellishnkaras. But it's but it's not a
permanent place. Um it's a place that you can you experience,
(32:14):
and it's kind of a refining of the soul, and
then you can you can work your way back up
to better stages of existence and ultimately ideally free yourself
from the wheel entirely. The problem is that nobody can
really agree on what hell is right, so uh, and
I think the issue of this is that you know,
(32:34):
from from classical texts, back to very very ancient text
it was thought that Hell dwelled under us right um,
and the main things a lot easier back than to
think that in a sense, because what you're talking about
is that it's low ground geographically. You can point at
that time and say clearly it's it's right underneath us um.
(32:55):
In fact, Pausanias, a Greek geographer, said that Hell was
as far beneath Hades, says Hades is beneath the earth.
But along comes Galileo and Galleto suggests, well, you know,
the Earth is not the center of the universe. The
Sun does not revolve around the Earth, and therefore, if
the Earth is not the center of the universe, then
where where does Hell now reside? So that was really
(33:20):
one of the big problems with the Church is that
they said, okay, if Heaven is hanging above us, and
Hell is below us, and you're telling us that there's
something beyond the earth that is the universe um, and
we're not central to it. Then it really does displace Hell,
and it makes it much less likely as a logical
(33:41):
construct or you just have to make You have to
imagine that exists in like another dimension, that Heaven and
Hell are both extradimensional places. You couldn't even fly there
in a spaceship. But this is the teasing a part
of Hell and the logistics of it in a sense,
because now that it is banished to even a further
round of imagination, that is to have been taken out
(34:03):
of the ground, the soil, it's been turned into Narnia,
has been turned into Narnia, then you begin to understand
that it is perhaps a construct of the human mind.
And that's all part of the problem too, because you
have you have individuals who who see it this way,
and then you have individuals who either do believe in
a Hell, or more likely they cling to a faith
(34:23):
that also has Hell somewhere in the fabric. And we've
all had that situation where we've if we're not you know,
uber religious, ourselves you will end up encountering someone who is.
And if you don't, actually you may not actually discuss
it with them, but there will come a point. And
I remember this and thinking about this alting like junior
high in high school, where you know, I had friends
that were mostly were Protestant um but there were all
(34:45):
these different Protestant faiths, some of which supposedly, uh thought
they were the only ones who would actually make it
to happen. I don't know how much of that was
just sort of inviting and bickering, but that was kind
of the charge, Like I would say, oh, well, those
guys at that shirts they think they're the only ones
going to happen. And then we also had there were
some there were Catholics in the area. They were Jehovah's witnesses,
had a number of friends who are who are Mormon,
and and so you end up in these situations where
(35:08):
you're like, now, if their faith is right, that means
I'm going to hell. And then my preacher just the
other day, so that these guys are going to hell,
and you start trying to map out these different relationships
and if you you know, if you let this kind
of thing get the better off you. It can lead
to some uncomfortable confrontations. It can, and I think because
(35:28):
some of this is predicated on what Turner calls abominable fancy.
Um did you come across this in the book? I
thought it was really interesting. It's ultimately this Catharsis that's
built on the foundation of shaken Freud. So Turner says
that it's a it's one of the less savoring notions
of the early Church. And it's this idea that part
of the joy of being saved laying contemplating the souls
(35:51):
of the damned. Yeah, it's there's also in this idea
is this kind of notion that in this world old
in the real world, evils often go unpunished and goods
often go unrewarded. But eventually, if we're faithful in the afterlife,
God's going to sort it all out. And these people
(36:12):
that that were that were vicious or vile or lived
outside of my group, uh, they will get their come
upance and I will get my rewards. Uh So, And
and that can be I guess you know, like you said,
it can be a comforting idea, especially if someone is
in a is downtrodden, if your life really is not
working out and is filled with a lot of a
lot of torment. There's gotta be something rewarding about the
(36:34):
notion will in the next life, I'm going to be rewarded,
and these people who are living high in the hog
off of my misery, they're going to be the ones
to suffer. So that can be both rewarding and a
disturbing concept. Likewise, there's the the ever present concept of
hell as the Boogeyman story, Hell is the thing that
someone is, that the threat that someone gives you in
(36:56):
order to make you fall into line. But at also
it's cathartic in the sense that it what they're saying
with abominable fancies that you can occupy the station of
the Boogeyman meeting out justice. Right, So if you're sitting
there saying I'm saved and you're damned, then in a sense,
you're inhabiting the sort of false humility. And it reminded
me of the episode we did on Pride when we
(37:20):
did the Seventh Sins, because there was a study in
which it was talked about how humility, which is thought
to be the opposite of pride, is actually pretty similar
in terms of what's going on in the noggin, and uh,
there's cognitive neuroscientist Julian Paul Keenan. He looked at transcranial
magnetic stimulation to disrupt deliberate self deprecation, this humility. He
(37:44):
found that the patterns of brain activation during self deprecation
are fundamentally the same as self deceptive pride, so the
same part of the brain is activated. And I thought
that was really interesting because maybe some of this is
tied to that, that this idea that you're hardwired or
humans are hardwired in a way to try to uh
(38:04):
put themselves on a pedestal and meet out justice and
assume this false humility in order to see themselves feel
vindicated in any sort of do gooding that they've performed.
So it's kind of it's like vigilante justice on a
on a weird kind of like thought way, you know,
(38:25):
in a mental vigilante action. Yea, right, right, So it
would be very interesting if they could take that study
and then uh, you know, slice it up with people
who are contemplating hell for others since see if that corresponded.
But I just wanted to mention that because I think, again,
this is a problem of hell. Is it meant to
(38:45):
um to divert us in a way that's cooperative for
the community, that's a positive? In other words, can hell
exist as this example that we point to say you're
gonna go to hell if you don't, you know, do
what you're supposed to do? Or is it a way
of us occupying maybe the darkest reaches of our minds
(39:07):
and um and playing out this drama in a safe way? Right?
You don't not actually want anybody to be hurt or
tormented or eaten in hell, but it's a it's an
easy way to say, oh, that person, they drive me nuts,
They're going to Hell. Yeah, And that's where a lot
of the problem comes in, like how do you separate
the oh, you know, there they suck, They're going to
go to hell, Like how do you have It's one
(39:29):
thing to think that, but then how do you rationalize
that with some sort of notion that, oh, yeah, they'll
actually go to a place where you know, demons will
you know, torment their flesh forever. You know, that's like
you know who deserves that well? And it's funny because
we talk about it more in this this abstract realm.
But back in the day, particularly in Galilet, it was
just just a real threat. Right, if someone thought that
(39:51):
you were committing a sin, they wouldn't meet out that
justice for you. They wouldn't wait for for they wouldn't
sit around and say, oh, when he gets to Hell,
he's going to suffer. Well. In the medieval church, of course,
they had a tremendous amount of power over the faithful
because they ultimately had the power to decide who goes
to Hell and who goes to heaven. Uh, you know,
you could, you could put you know, a nation on
(40:12):
an interdict. You could, you could excommunicate somebody, and that
was if you believed in into it enough, and a
lot of people did. That was that was a tremendous
threat to level against an individual and it it It can,
It could and did decide like you know, whole international incidents.
Which again, if you don't think that Hell has some
(40:33):
sort of shaping of our current culture, you're wrong because
you have to look back again at these examples which
have informed how we live today. Yeah, if we didn't
have have some sort of theology involving Hell at varying
stages in the history of Western civilization, we'd be speaking
different languages. Now, it's true. I shouldn't say you're wrong,
but I would say, please reconsider. Yeah, I mean, just
(40:55):
let's look back at the events of ten sixty six
and imagine a world in which the Catholic Church didn't
level this kind of supposed power over the fate of
the soul. And and you know, we did an episode
on witchcraft, so or rather which is and I won't
go into that, but you can certainly see the trail
that that led to. I did want to mention that
(41:15):
Turner says that Dante and exploring Hell so richly in
The Divine Comedy that he unintentionally killed Hell. Again. This
is that the notion that if you make something into
a story, or you abstracted enough that the logic of
it begins to be teased apart. She said, it's because
(41:37):
he invited readers to join him in Virgil in a story.
And she said that Dante made it easier for intellectuals
of Renaissance and the Enlightenment to reject its reality. Yeah.
And and it's also worth noting that with the Inferno,
he was not written in Latin. It was written in
Italian because he wanted it to be accessible by a
general audience without having to undergo particularly possibly brutal translation
(42:00):
by others. And it was. It was wildly popular. So
you might be sitting here thinking, Okay, hell is this construct? Um?
Some people believe in hell? But just how many people
believe in hell? What are we talking about here? Well,
we were looking at a particular article here of titled
who Believes in Religious Evil and Investigation of sociological patterns
(42:22):
of belief in Satan, Hell and Demons by Joseph Baker
at Baylor University. He basically deals with with just the
United States in this but in breaking down some of
the uh, the demographics here, it is a bit telling
um and you can you can find this article online.
I'm not gonna just read through the numbers and stats
where you but I thought I would read just a
(42:44):
little bit from the discussion section of the article. So
Baker says um in in in summarizing his stats about
these different groups and who believes what he said, African
Americans tend to have stronger belief in religious evil than
do whites. Women have stronger degree of belief than men.
Uh not a net of religious controls. Younger Americans hold
stronger belief and conceptions of religious evil than older Americans. Finally,
(43:07):
social class plays an important role in how certain an
individual is about the existence of religious evil, with those
of higher social class having weaker confidence about the existence
of religious evil. However, these effects are conditioned by church attendance.
For those exhibiting a high level participation in organized religion,
the influence of social class is neutralized. For those not
actively participating in organized religion, the influence of social class
(43:30):
is more pronounced. These results indicate that traditionally power and
resource deprived groups, African Americans and those of lower social
classes exhibit strong beliefs in religious evil. Difficult life circumstances
and suffering often lead individuals to search for meaning. Moreover,
suffering forces people to conceive of God as removed from
this you know, hell equation, or they attribute the source
(43:53):
of suffering to some other form of evil. So I
thought that was interesting because it it does not only
with just sort of the demographics. It lets you know,
like where you fall in the socioeconomic ladder, how that
influences your belief. And I thought it interesting. The more
downtrodden you are, it's the less likely you are to
be worried by the problem of hell because you kind
of remove God from the source of suffering. God is
(44:15):
the source of relief, not suffering well, and the perspective
of God is a good cop in Satan as that
cop right, Yeah, and then you end up falling back
into this more duellist view of the great evil and
the great good, because in Christian tradition, Satan is just
a fallen angel. He's a disgruntled former employee who wields
a great amount of power. But he's not the equal
of God. It's not it's not the you know, the
(44:37):
ancient uh, you know, Mesopotamian idea. It's not the Zoroastrian
or the or the Gnostic notion of these two forces.
And in fact, the Catholic Church show in persecuting heresies
UH tried really hard to keep dualism from creeping its
way back into the into this into the understanding of
the universe. Well, let me put a hard stat against
(44:58):
all of this u least here in the United States.
According to Alice K. Turner, six of Americans believe in Hell,
up from fifty in nineteen fifty three. Now here's the
real kicker and then here's where American optimism really shines.
Only four percent think that they'll end up in hell.
There you go, I mean it. I was reading some
(45:20):
some thoughts on this too, where in his particularly in
the United States, No, no one really thinks they're going
to go to hell. And then we tend to even
we may, you know, subscribe to a religion that has
some pretty uh well confusing, but some certain rules in
placing who gets to go and who's who's good who's bad.
But then ultimately we kind of fall back on the
(45:40):
idea that most people go to heaven and only really
bad people go to hell. And certainly all the celebrities
go to heaven, oh of course, yeah, yeah, uh yeah,
even the Kardashians. Yeah, well, you know, they're really just
sort of wandering maybe. But it's interesting because of that
sixty six two percent of Americans who believe in how
(46:02):
nineties six percent think that they're not going to go there.
So do they really in their heart of hearts And
we can't obviously, um answer this, but do they really
in their heart of hearts believe in a health they
don't think they're going there, or do they just sort
of say, well, I believe in heaven, and they said
there's a hell, So I guess I believe in that too,
because it was recently listened to an interview Terry Gross
interviewed Stephen King last month, I think, and she was
(46:25):
asking him about some of this, like belief in heaven
and hell and supernatural and uh. And he he said
that did he found it a bit silly to believe
in heaven and not in hell. You know, it's like,
why would you just believe in the one when they're
kind of a pair, And you know, I, I guess
that's a valid argue. You could, you know, point back
to some of these ancient models, uh, the Mesopotamian uh,
(46:46):
one of the Mesopotanian models, with some of the the
other models and say, well, there's alway there's always this duality.
But then it's not always the case. There are plenty
of examples of of afterlife views in which there's really
there's only one place the soul was going, and it
may be neutral, or it may be varying the degrees
of positive. So again, the problem of hell is the
problem of death and the limits of knowledge. Yes, I
(47:07):
mean not to to be so reductionless about it, but
it all points back to this idea where we can't, uh,
we can't really wrap our minds around what's going to
happen to us. Um. So this is what's really interesting
about it is that nonetheless supernatural punishment informs how we
go about our daily lives. Apparently. Yeah, and this is uh,
(47:30):
We're gonna get into a couple of studies here, um
sociology studies that that look at and look at correlations
between different facts, between beliefs in the in supernatural evil,
between beliefs in heaven and hell, and how people behave,
how economies behave. And you know, it's not all cut
and dry. It's more about correlation. The authors are not
saying this is the relationship. They're saying, this is interesting,
(47:52):
we need to study this more. But it it's in
a way, these these studies that were about to discuss,
they represent a kind of problem hell for you know,
for for me, even because when I was first researching this,
I was kind of had it in my mind. I
you know, I was reading uh in in Banks, a
book that deals with the matter that I was discussing
(48:12):
in the summer reading episode, and you know, I kept
thinking of, hell, is this barbaric idea that that the
more advanced of society becomes, the more we need to
get rid of it. It's a dinosaur or you know,
a brutal fantasy, and we're better off without it. What
good could it possibly do us? And then here are
these two studies. They kind of make a case for
(48:32):
Hell being a positive motivator. Again, positive motivator. We say this,
and that the studies quick to point out again this,
these are correlations. So there's a lot more going on.
There's very complex things going on in societies to determine
the crime rate. But that being said, let's roll out
some of the data here. Okay, alright, So Azim F.
(48:55):
Sharif Uh he co authored the two thousand and twelve
paper Diversion Effect of Belief in Heaven and Hell on
National crime rates and UH his findings are encouraging or
discouraging compendently on how you look at the matter. H.
He compared the national crime rates UH with rates of
belief in Heaven and Hell in sixty seven countries, and
he came up with with these findings. First of all,
(49:17):
Heaven's belief rate is almost always higher than Hell's belief. Right,
all right, that's totally by that, uh, and that kind
of collaborates my theory that that helps kind of an
unwanted add on, you know, as I mentioned earlier. But
then the papers major statistical finding was that nations with
higher belief rates in Hell predicted lower crime rates, while
(49:38):
higher belief rates in Heaven predicted higher crime rates. So
the idea is that health fearing set of citizens are
more mindful of screwing up in this life, while the
heaven crowd think that they've got it knocked, you know,
in the next life, so they might as well do
what they want in this one. Okay. So this is
from a comprehensive analysis of twenty six years of data
involving over one forty three thousand people in sixty seven countries.
(50:03):
Now in two thousand and three, a Harvard University researcher
Robert J. Borrow and Rachel M. Then clearly found that
the gross domestic product was higher in developed countries when
people believed in Hell more than they did in heaven.
So here's another aspect of it. That being said, if
the gross domestic product is higher and uh, there's a
(50:26):
bigger belief in Hell in those communities and there's less crime.
Could you say that the economics of this are playing
a part. In other words, these communities are being served better,
they have better opportunities for people. And therefore, and I'm
just throwing devil's up here, just throwing in some other
(50:46):
nuances of what it means to have a high crime
rate or a low crime rate. And we know that
low opportunities, UM often predict higher crime. Right, so I
get the um. You know there's higher crime when people
in this correlation, uh say that they believe more in
(51:07):
heaven than they do in hell. But again, there's a
lot going on. In fact, Uh, there are some studies
coming out about how even weather affects crime, and so
you can't just say, oh, it's a belief system that's
keeping everything under wraps here. I found it interesting in
the uh the paper on Hell as a is an
(51:27):
its effect on crime, they pointed out that human trafficking
bucked the trend pretty much across the board. So so
human trafficking, as as as vile as it can be
in in in some situations like that, was just people
didn't even think of that as being something you could
go to Hell for, even in a country where otherwise
you would be like, you know, murders and thieves would
definitely be going. Really human traffic. Where does it say
(51:51):
in the Bible not to traffic humans and not to
forget to feed them in a in a you know,
a cargo container. M it doesn't. So it's kind of
a gray area there, I guess for some people. And
yet it seems so logical. Was something that that is,
you know, not something you should do. Yeah, I know,
not to do it. That's why I don't smuggle people
across the international borders. And not to get off on
(52:13):
another topic, but this is a huge problem in the
United States, especially for um, for sex trafficking, and these
are a lot of crimes that are perpetrated against women
and there sort of under the radar. But anyway, that's
neither here nor there right now. But it's kind of
mortifying to know that that's the perspective. Well, I guess
in some cases the individual is saying, I am allowing
(52:34):
you to take this journey, and if this journey ends
in a horrible place for you, well, my hands are clean,
which kind of reminds me of some of these arguments
about hell and God. God is sort of saying, look,
you have the free will. I am allowing you to
take this journey that's gonna into's gonna wind up in hell.
But but my hands are clean. Good cup, I'm a
(52:55):
good cup. Um we know what Jean Paul Sartre would say?
What would he say? Hell is other People? Oh? Well yes,
so And as a side note, there's actually an app
that's called hell is other People? Yeah. What does it do?
It tells you where your friends are so you can
avoid them. Oh my god, that is brilliant because, um,
(53:16):
my wife and I uh my wife particularly has this
thing about running into people. She knows that the grocery store,
which I totally understand because a lot of times you
go to the grocery store, you're not there to socialize,
you're not dressed up for it. You're there to to
carry out a task. And if you run into somebody, it's, uh,
it's awkward. You know, like you can say, hey, all right,
I said hi to you. Now you depart, and then
(53:37):
you run into them again and you have to either
be keeping store them and it's weird. It's awkward. So
if youah, if you had an app that let you
know that you know this co worker. This friend was
at Kroger. Then you might just go to publics instead,
but then you would feel like you had no free will,
like your life is being dictated by the coordinates of
your friends that you're trying to avoid because your hair
(53:57):
is mussy, Yeah, not messy, mussy. Well, it's it's a problem.
It's what it is. It is. All right, Well, there
you have it, the problem of Hell explored a little
bit there for you, the origins of Hell, the idea
of hell as a as a cultural, religious, theological, philosophical construct, um.
And certainly if you want to want to read more
about it again, highly recommend the History of Hell by
(54:19):
Alice K. Turner. Wonderful book. And uh, we're gonna do
another episode after this, published after this, where we're gonna
get into some of the science of hell, where we're
gonna deal a little more with this, but there's gonna
be less of a of a focus on on what
we believe and more about some of the science that
we've applied, um often as kind of a thought experiment
to what we think we know about Hell. That's right,
(54:41):
What is the trajectory of the fall or something like that? Cool?
All right, Well, In the meantime, everyone out there can
get in touch with us. You can let us know
what do you think about Hell? Do you think it's
a barbaric dinosaur that does the bone that some of
this cling to, is it? Is it important? Do you
do you feel like do you believe in Hell? If
you do, does it make you a better person or
(55:02):
do you feel kind of guilty about it? I mean,
anything that we've discussed in here is a fair game.
You can find us in the normal means. You can
go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
the main website. I have a number of blogs that
have done leading up to this about Hell and you
can find those there. You can find out our episodes,
and then you can find us on social media. We're
on that Twitter and Blow the Mind. We're on tumblers,
Facebook is Stuff to Blow your Mind? And where else
(55:25):
can they find us? Well, you can find us by
saying us an email and can do that at blow
the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Does it How Stuff Works
dot com
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