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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Anyone who conceives of Hell as a concept, as opposed to an actual thing, is already atheist right?

[Hell] is an attempt to control other people. If these people, who always say I should trust them, already want to control me, they'd probably be willing to lie to me. Once I saw that, the lie was plain.

So to be clear, the people being deterred can't know they're being deterred, right?

People have believed in hell, or similar, without a concomitant heaven. The classic example is the view of the afterlife for the Greeks and Romans, as shown in the Odyssey where the shades of the dead are mindless twittering things until they lap up the blood of the sacrifice and where Achilles says 'better a live dog than a dead lion', more or less:

Another key scene relating to the Homeric portrayal of the underworld and death is the interaction between Achilles and Odysseus. Achilles confronts Odysseus: ‘How did you dare to come below to Hades’ realm, where the dead live on as mindless disembodied ghosts?’ Achilles, arguably the greatest hero of Homeric epic, seems to despise the underworld. Later, he comments, ‘I would rather work the soil as a serf on hire to some landless impoverished peasant than be King of all these lifeless dead.’ The contrast between ‘serf’ and ‘King’ is significant and would speak volumes to the Greeks - death is so negative and unbearable to Achilles that he would even prefer to endure the pain of losing his freedom to a peasant than to exist within the underworld.

Hence why the Elusinian and other mystery cults which held out promises of a better life after death were popular.

Other cultures have similar concepts, or concepts of the dead as malevolent, jealous of the living and so eager to work them harm. The idea that ordinary people could go on to a pleasant afterlife may not be unique to Christianity, but I think it had to be a big selling point.

This depends on what you mean by “actual thing”. Philo of Alexandria was an influential Jewish Platonist who interpreted the Old Testament allegorically and had a large influence on early Christianity. Does this mean he didn’t think the stories were “actual things”? He believed that they conveyed actual, spiritual truths by way of allegory and symbolism. Same with Origen, another influential early Christian. When we talk about the reality of religion we also have to understand that perfect certainty in God is rare; hence the leap of faith, the “I believe, help my unbelief” in the Gospel. Believing with all your mind and heart that God is real, and tries you and judges you, and hell is an ever-present danger, is hard even for the most fervent literalist.

the people being deterred can't know they're being deterred

Religions must persuade people, and they are competing against lifestyles that abound in much more primitive pleasures. A person can believe in hell and know that hell is a deterrence IMO, but there’s a moral or philosophical development that must take place, or else they might opt out of the entire religion.

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