Oh Hell

Hell is really just an game of one-upmanship.

As bad as the Tanakh / Old Testament in terms of punishment, bigotry, and genocide, Bible readers really have to wait until the all-loving Jesus arrives on the scene before we really get an inkling that it’s a place to be worried about.  The word translated into Hell in the OT is the word Sheol.  To quote from a Bible study site, Sheol simply refers to the abode of the dead in general, not particularly the place of the punishment for the wicked. In fact, Sheol was divided into two compartments, one for the righteous dead and one for the wicked dead.

When the Christian writers got a hold of the concept, they made it a much more interesting place, and a place only for the naughty.  The Christians added fire and brimstone, everlasting thirst, weeping and gnashing of teeth, shame and everlasting contempt, and permanent separation from God.

But then the people REALLY began having fun with the concept.  Dante added all kinds of delightfully evil conceptions.  Eternal whippings, burying in excrement, heads twisted completely so people have to walk backwards, snakes that make those they bite undergo all kinds of gruesome transformations.  This was the REAL fun stuff that Christians could get some gristle from.  Nothing like eternal torture to prove how necessary it is to obey the wishes of the all-loving God.

One of my favorite versions of hell comes from the Christ Clone Trilogy by James BeauSeigneur.  In these books, a black ooze emerges from the ground which he describes as “… evil — the sum total of all the evil that had been done upon the earth — every murder, every lie, every rape, every torture, every act of cannibalism, every beating of an innocent, every human sacrifice, every destructive act upon the earth itself, every brutal mutilation of a child, every gulag, every pogrom, every death camp of every war, every slaughter of the blameless, every cruelty to a helpless animal. All of it had been absorbed and held in by the earth until now it could be held no longer, and it gushed forth like nefarious vomit.”

This is what the protagonist suffered under for several days, with several additional cool sufferings thrown in.  Senseless and suffering and insensibly is suffered.  The devil character later described Hell as being like that, only forever.

I can imagine that there are people out there itching to top this one.  Maybe if they make it sound bad enough, it will finally convince some people to accept the pure love of Jesus.  Gotta be worth a try, eh?