I read an article recently in The New Yorker (Issue Jan. 21, 2019) by Vinson Cunningham called The Bad Place; How the idea of Hell has shaped the way we think. I think it was meant to be a review of a book, called, aptly enough, The Penguin Book of Hell, edited by Scott G. Bruce, but Cunningham’s discussion meanders widely, including Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s Odyssey, as well as his own Christian upbringing in a Harlem church.
I was reminded of the cultural difference between America and Australia, when it comes to religion. A difference I was very aware of when I lived and worked in America over a combined period of 9 months, including New Jersey, Texas and California.
It’s hard to imagine any mainstream magazine or newspaper having this discussion in Australia, or, if they did, it would be more academic. I was in the US post 9/11 – in fact, I landed in New York the night before. I remember reading an editorial in a newspaper where people were arguing about whether the victims of the attack would go to heaven or not. I thought: how ridiculous. In the end, someone quoted from the Bible, as if that resolved all arguments – even more ridiculous, from my perspective.
I remember reading in an altogether different context someone criticising a doctor for facilitating prayer meetings in a Jewish hospital because the people weren’t praying to Jesus, so their prayers would be ineffective. This was a cultural shock to me. No one discussed these issues or had these arguments in Australian media. At least, not in mainstream media, be it conservative or liberal.
Reading Cunningham’s article reminded me of all this because he talks about how real hell is for many people. To be fair, he also talks about how hell has been sidelined in secular societies. In Australia, people don’t discuss their religious views that much, so one can’t be sure what people really believe. But I was part of a generation that all but rejected institutionalised religion. I’ve met many people from succeeding generations who have no knowledge of biblical stories, whereas for me, it was simply part of one’s education.
One of the best ‘modern’ examples of hell or the underworld I found was in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novel series. It’s arguably the best graphic novel series written by anyone, though I’m sure aficionados of the medium may beg to differ. Gaiman borrowed freely from a range of mythologies, including Orpheus, the Bible (in particular the story of Cain and Abel) and even Shakespeare. His hero has to go to Hell and gets out by answering a riddle from its caretaker, the details of which I’ve long forgotten, but I remember thinking it to be one of those gems that writers of fiction (like me) envy.
Gaiman also co-wrote a book with Terry Pratchett called Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter (1990) which is a great deal of fun. The premise, as described in Wikipedia: ‘The book is a comedy about the birth of the son of Satan, the coming of the End Times.’ Both authors are English, which possibly allows them a sense of irreverence that many Americans would find hard to manage. I might be wrong, but it seems to me that Americans take their religion way more seriously than the rest of us English-speaking nations, and this is reflected in their media.
And this brings me back to Cunningham’s article because it’s written in a cultural context that I simply don’t share. And I feel that’s the crux of this issue. Religion and all its mental constructs are cultural, and hell is nothing if not a mental construct.
My own father, whom I’ve written about before, witnessed hell first hand. He was in the Field Ambulance Corp in WW2 so he retrieved bodies in various states of beyond-repair from both sides of the conflict. He also spent 2.5 years as a POW in Germany. I bring this up, because when I was a teenager he told me why he didn’t believe in the biblical hell. He said, in effect, he couldn’t believe in a ‘father’ who sent his children to everlasting torment. I immediately saw the sense in his argument and I rejected the biblical god from that day on. This is the same man, I should point out, who believed it was his duty that I should have a Christian education. I thank him for that, otherwise I’d know nothing about it. When I was young I believed everything I was taught, which perversely made it easier to reject when I started questioning things. I know many people who had the same experience. The more they believed, the stronger their rejection.
I recently watched an excellent 3 part series, available on YouTube, called Testing God, which is really a discussion about science and religion. It was made by the UK’s Channel 4 in 2001, and includes some celebrity names in science, like Roger Penrose, Paul Davies and Richard Dawkins, and theologians as well; in particular, theologians who had become, or been, scientists.
In the last episode they interviewed someone who suffered horrendously in the War – he was German, and a victim of the fire-storm bombing. Contrary to many who have had similar experiences he found God, whereas, before, he’d been an atheist. But his idea of God is of someone who is patiently waiting for us.
I’ve long argued that God is subjective not objective. If humans are the only connection between the Universe and God, then, without humans, there is no reason for God to exist. There is no doubt in my mind that God is a projection, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many variants. Xenophanes, who lived in the 5th century BC, famously said:
The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.
At the risk of offending people even further, the idea that the God one finds in oneself is the Creator of the Universe is a non sequitur. My point is that there are two concepts of God which are commonly conflated. God as a Creator and God as a mystic experience, and there is no reason to believe that they are one and the same. In fact, the God as experience is unique to the person who has it, whilst God as Creator is, by definition, outside of space and time. One does not logically follow from the other.
In another YouTube video altogether, I watched an interview with Freeman Dyson on science and religion. He argues that they are quite separate and there is only conflict when people try to adapt religion to science or science to religion. In fact, he is critical of Einstein because Dyson believes that Einstein made science a religion. Einstein was influenced by Spinoza and would have argued, I believe, that the laws of physics are God.
John Barrow in one his books (Pi in the Sky) half-seriously suggests that the traditional God could be replaced by mathematics.
This brings me to a joke, which I’ve told elsewhere, but is appropriate, given the context.
What is the difference between a physicist and a mathematician?
A physicist studies the laws that God chose for the Universe to obey.
A mathematician studies the laws that God has to obey.
Einstein, in a letter to a friend, once asked the rhetorical question: Do you think God had a choice in creating the laws of the Universe?
I expect that’s unanswerable, but I would argue that if God created mathematics he had no choice. It’s not difficult to see that God can’t make a prime number non-prime, nor can he change the value of pi. To put it more succinctly, God can’t exist without mathematics, but mathematics can exist without God.
In light of this, I expect Freeman Dyson would accuse me of the same philosophical faux pas as Einstein.
As for hell, it’s a cultural artefact, a mental construct devised to manipulate people on a political scale. An anachronism at best and a perverse psychological contrivance at worst.
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