Suppose there is a hell...

Or tolerate, depending on how one looks at it, but is there any practical difference between ultimate forgiveness and ultimate tolerance?

 

I think that for a majority of people, when employed to carry out a task, especially if they are trained for the job (education + exams) and are getting a salary, it affects how they think about their work.

Education and exams can have a strong psychological effect on people. For the most part it may be benign and even good, but I want to demonstrate how it can easily be harmful:

(1) Firstly, the fact that there is a teacher/trainer automatically creates the illusion that someone knows better than you. Usually benign; could be harmful.

(2) The group setting (training room) undermines personal thinking, and undermines your own moral compass through negative evaluation by peers, which in turn makes people more suggestible. This is a well known psychological technique that is used extensively by cultists to brainwash people. Again, usually benign but could be harmful.

(3) Exams and grading reinforce your belief that the education you're receiving is the correct way of looking at a situation. You only score marks if you train yourself to agree; and everybody wants high marks, so everybody is willing to agree.

So people tend to do whatever they are employed and trained to do, and their sense of right and wrong adapts to the requirements of their employment. Morals are assumed to be higher up the ladder, resting with your employer, not with you.


The people in any line of work may not have any malicious intentions at all if they believe in their work.
The teachers within that industry may believe in what they teach because they've gone through a similar training process, and have been in this line of work all their life.

What I hope to illustrate is that most people's sense of right and wrong is more about what they are taught, and less about what they derive for themselves. Things that are taught tend to be taught again, so a malformed ethic can be sustained if enough people are taught to believe in it.

Malformed ethics can be the norm in any societal culture. Consider burning of witches as an example. Consider the people who believed they were doing the right thing by piling up the wood and setting the person alight. Consider the crowds that gathered to watch and cheer.

If the above is how people form their sense of right and wrong, and if one of these malformed ethics causes harm, then is that malformed ethic innocently formed in ignorance, or is it formed through willful ignorance? Which (if either) should be punishable by hell?

 

I shy away from even contemplating the dynamics of heavan and hell...whatever those realities might be. We are long on imagery and hints, but short on facts (naturally). We are simply far too linear to grasp it all. God is supremely good....whatever that means (and it apparently means a good number of things) I am good with that. I cannot judge in eternal terms simply due to lack of information.

I also shy away from applying too much of my own logic to God....like "he knows all therefore"......... or "he can do anything so why can't he...". God (while unlimited) does also have limits....and our respecting our freedom seems on the list.

If one wants to know God more fully, I think one has to pursue this through silence and stillness. The swirling sea of ideas, noise, ego-centricity, opinions, and technology (the thin veneer we operate within) have dumbed us down significantly as a culture. I hope we can move past this some day to think in a more integrated fashion. I think the ancients (many of whom enjoyed a more connected relationship with the natural world) may have had something on us in this regard.

 

I think there is not a physical hell but it is more of a mental thing. Being with the person you hate most is what hell ends up being.

 

Well just because I know why someone comitts a crime doesn't mean that he isn't guilt of commiting the crime. In fact this idea takes away all responsibility from the individual for their crimes, because they were in some circumstance that just forced them to commit said crime.

 

Well, if we look at the Judeo-Christian concept of hell, the truth is people were never supposed to go there. Hell was meant for the demons who rebelled against God when they tried to overthrow heaven (with Satan). Ultimately it's supposed to be for Satan and his demons.

The problem is, human beings rebel all the time, and this is what slates us for hell. Despite our best intentions and "want to be good" isms, we intentionally do things that we know we shouldn't do because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Or we do things because we want to do them, and to hell (hee) with the consequences. It's that decision, that rebellion, that is the problem. We've been set up with a conscious. It's not just society that tells us right from wrong - I think toddlers can tell when they shouldn't do something after they've been told not to touch something. We make a conscious act of our will to do something we know we shouldn't do. We all have this innately inside of us, except for perhaps sociopaths and psychopaths. We have the conscious capacity to choose right from wrong, and I personally think this capacity extends outside of a societal "norm."

That being said...in the Judeo-Christian belief, there was only one man who did not have this problem, and he followed to the letter what he was supposed to do, 100% of the time, because it was said he was God in the flesh. Also in Judeo-Christian religion that man supposedly died while taking on all of our determination to be self-destructive. Basically he became all of our self-destructive tendencies so we won't have to fear or worry about hell. But you'd have to do this by trusting and believing what he did, and believing he was also God incarnate...and by giving him control over your self-destructive tendencies. He was the forgiveness.

'Course, this depends on whether or not you believe Judeo-Christian theology. But that was the reason why hell existed, and how you can avoid it according to Judeo-Christian beliefs.

 

I liked Nietzsche's take on the concept of god in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

God is dead, because his pity of humanity killed him, indeed the ugliest man in the world slayed him simply by being.

He mentioned how God is such an amateur to make a class of being so flawed such as us.

This is all to be taken in jest, but I can relate to the notion.

When I think of the notion of God, I think of infinity, of full comprehension. If you have full comprehension, you do not need to think, for what is there required to find out through thought? There is only being, and simply being infinity transcends measurement.

The only concept of hell I can relate to is that of limited comprehension, the need to survive, the constant need to think. The constant need to need. Existing as a bottomless pit that constantly requires more until the day we die. Of course, you can discipline yourself which gets you closer to not taking so much, but ultimately the only way to truly stop the cycle of need is death.

Oh, and in response to Uberrogo, I find that I am myself that which I despise most. So by your definition I am already living in hell. Some days it feels like it!

 

There is. It's other people. :becky:


Namaste,
Ian

 

... then I would rather hang with the Adversary who rebelled against the god who created hell, and made sins out of the things I enjoy doing.

Anyway, fuck servitude. LHP ftw!

 

I like thinking of hell as in C.S. Lewis' book " The Great Divorce". Here, it is merely the absence of heaven. If you hold onto your self, your sense of mortality, and are unable to relinquish greed, vanity, overbearing love and jealousy, and even (to my surprise) your need for mental stimulation, it is suggested that you cannot enter into heaven. When you are happy that you have experienced all that can be felt or thought, you can move onto the next level. In this sense, Lewis doesn't so much differentiate between good and evil, he more talks about giving up your life to live eternally, because God can forgive all as long as you are willing to give yourself to him completely.

 

I am sorry i don't have any proper answer for your questions. But yes, i can try to complete your title.

Suppose there is a hell...Then we have capacity to transform the hell into heaven, that's for sure, i believe.

 

1. Yes. God said Do Not Kill. Not, do not kill except in accordance with state penal code yadda yadda yadda. The death penalty is abhorant to god who demands peaceful resistance from all his followers regardless of the circumstances. A secular law might be right in MANs eyes, but that does not mean it is not breaking gods laws.

2. Man is meant to Obey GOD in all things, not other Men. It does not matter what orders you are given. people are not robots, we are self governing beings. The Nazis had the choice to become peaceful resistors, but chose not to for a number of reasons, each personal. "It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to get into Heaven." also, "I did not come to break the Law, but to make it stricter".

3. Actions count more than stated intent. Accidents are one thing, but killing a person, the intent is to kill someone, regardless of the social outcome, for whatever cause you choose to champion.

4. Sure, it is easy to have sympathy for people in harsh decisions. But that does not mean our weakness and slack discipline to Gods Law can excuse them, or us should we break said law.

"Kill someone or He will kill my son?"
I will leave my family behind and follow the lord. I will not break gods commandments regardless of your threats. I have another son, I shall turn the other cheek.

The above was the only answer you could give that would be in line with The Lords teaching. You want Morality and Obediance? That's it right there. It is the hardest thing in existence.

I have no need for belief in God. I believe in Humanity.

 

I basically agree with the OP, if there is a/re god(s), there would be no need for hell. If this god is all knowing and just, it wouldn't care about what we do as humans. It would realize our faults, and being all knowing, wouldn't ever "punish" us for being human. I have a friend that made an analogy that I liked. It's like god went to god school and put everything in our existence in a terrarium. God messed some stuff up, so God got a B on the project, put it under his bed, and forgot all about it.

If there is a god, it most likely doesn't give a shit about us, and wouldn't punish us for being its own faulted creation.

 

This exactly.

 

Apparently, some can (and do) choose to seperate themselves from God, or reject the principles that God created us to live within. They can do this now...they can do this in the next life, too. This is probably, more than anything, the nature of Hell....seperation from God who is a Creative Presence of goodness, love, wholeness. Heaven would be the opposite...connection.

Again, who knows the details of how this all may play out....but I find the "principles of God" to be quite workable and functional in the real world of the here and now, and a very good framework for life...understanding myself, others, creation. I find it to be welcoming, warm, accepting and unafraid. The other route just "does not work" in the long run...it is "missing the mark." Seen this way I see little reason to not align myself with the cosmos and journey down that particular road/path.

There is another way though....many religious traditions speak to this "two ways" of living.

 

I do not need an ultimatum of hell in order to be a moral person. I am better than that.

I don't need bribes either.

 

Have you considered the possibility that God might have an unlimited capacity for sadism?

 

I personally think that hell is a state of mind, but if there were to be a fiery inferno and all that, well, see y'all there.

 

There are Hells, that includes the existentialists ideas of reality as hell, only within some local society. Over all societies at all times, it becomes absurd.

Unfortunately for most beliefs, they also insist their god is ultimate, and not just the god of some local society. There they lose credibility. Those gods are just made up representations of some social contracts, and are never universal.