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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Hot and bothered Visions of Hell through the centuries By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 791 words Publication date: December 11, 2005 So we’ve failed the test. We murdered our wife or we spilt our seed or we voted Democrat or we coveted our neighbor’s ass (in either sense of the word) and God has sentenced us to Hell. We’re on our way down but there’s a technical hitch, so we’re in the waiting-room reading Fodor’s Guide to Inferno. It appears that hell has gone through a few changes since it first opened. In ancient Greece it was known as Tartarus, and was half of the kingdom of the dead ruled by Hades – brother of Zeus and one Chronos’ sons. The other, pleasanter, half was the Elysian Fields. To get to Tartarus, the dead soul ran the gauntlet of various spirits, such as the Furies, who had serpents in their hair and blood dripping from their eyes. At the bronze gates to the kingdom waited Cerberus, the watchdog with three heads dripping venom from each mouth. Cerberus prevented souls from leaving the city but he could occasionally be bribed with honey or sweet music to look the other way. Tartarus was ringed by fire and filled with sinners spending eternity in torture. The anguish was usually more mental than physical. Tantalus stood in water that receded as he bent to drink; again and again Sisyphus pushed a rock up a hill only to see it roll to the bottom each time before it reached the top; forty-nine women known as Danaids had to fill a barrel with water carried in sieves. Others suffered physical pain: Ixion was condemned to roll around Tartarus on a wheel of fire. Yahweh was hanging out in Palestine when Hades was running Tartarus, but the afterlife wasn’t one of his priorities. There are only a couple of references in the Old Testament that refer to Hell – the “pit” in Numbers 16.30 and sheol in Psalms 55:15. Followers of the Big Y sometimes talked about a place called Gehenna as a kind of prison for bad souls, but it never became very popular. When Hades eventually retired, Christians took over the Underworld and made several renovations. The Elysian Fields were renamed Heaven and relocated in the sky. Yahweh, now known as God, became CEO and assigned Tartarus – rebranded Hell – to the rebel angel Satan (known as Shaitan to his Islamic friends). Satan may be the boss of Hell, but it’s designed by God. No longer will some souls be spared the physical tortures that beset Ixion; each one of us sinners will burn. It was marketing guru Jesus who first brought us the good news that the fire is never quenched and the worm does not die. Two millennia later, the fire is still burning but the worm seems to have dropped out of favor. Chapter 20 in Revelation adds the icing to the divine sadist’s cake. At the end of time, an angel from Heaven gives us a 1,000 year glance into Hell. Satan himself, despite having filled in for God, is trapped there for eternity. In the lake of fire and brimstone languish “the beast and false prophet" are to be joined by those who fail the test of faith in God. Not surprisingly, the Islamic hell, Jahannam, is similar to the Christian version. The fire first gets mentioned in The Family of Imran, verse 192, and hell itself is named in The Immunity, verse 63 and again in Suad 55-56. Evil Muslims can look forward to one variation, however: “a boiling fluid, and a fluid dark, murky, intensely cold! And other penalties of a similar kind to match them!” (The Tidings 25). There are differences between Jahannam and Hell. In Christianity it already exists, with the souls of sinners who have died throughout history, while Muslims claim that it will only be created on Judgement Day. And while Christians are not bound by Dante’s vision of the nine circles, Muslim scholars seriously debate whether there seven or eight levels of torment. The worst is reserved for yours truly and others who utterly reject God, no matter how blameless and selfless a life they’ve led. I suspect that when we meet up, we’ll probably form our own little cliques, depending on the extent of our sins other than rejection of the deity. I argued in an earlier column that the idea of eternity is impossible and meaningless. The various depictions of hell, like the suggestion of virgins in Paradise, are no more than the product of human imagination. People who claim they will reach Heaven while the rest of us suffer ceaseless torture are describing nothing more than their own unforgiving nature. If there really is a Hell, it is found on the streets of Baghdad and in the mountains of earthquake-devastated Kashmir, not in some imaginary afterlife.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |