David Barash. Skeptic. Volume 25, Issue 3, Summer 2020.
Religions, especially the abrahamic religions OF Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have long used the threat of hell to terrify, manipulate, and thus control believers. Western holiday music, ostensibly Christian but largely secular, contains this mild remonstrance: “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!” Traditionally, the worst that came from not being good was a lump of coal in one’s Christmas stocking—a threat that might have loomed large for many children, but is less than intimidating for most adults. On the other hand, the threat of eternal torment is another story. In at least some cases it may have resulted in behavior that is more prosocial than would otherwise have been the case, leading many to claim that without god and the threats that he imposes, morality would not exist.
Even though Judaism says very little about either heaven or hell, there are numerous cases of divine retribution announced, with apparent satisfaction, in the Hebrew bible. Here is just a sample.
For the sin of disobedience, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden (Genesis 3:14-24). The Noahic Flood was imposed upon a sinful planet (Genesis 6-7); the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were obliterated because of their indiscretions, chiefly sexual (Genesis 19:23-29); ditto for Onan because of, as one might expect, onanism (masturbation) (Genesis 38:6-10); plagues were visited upon the Egyptians because they ignored the entreaties of Moses (Exodus 7-14); different plagues scourged the Israelites for worshipping the Golden Calf (Exodus 32), and Uzzah was struck dead for having touched the Ark of the Covenant (Samuel 6:1-7).
The Christian bible also contains many statements of God’s retributive inclinations, such as, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him” (John 3:36); “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18); and “Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 5:6). Although it is widely believed that a signal quality of Christianity is its focus on love, kindness, and forgiveness, this is to some extent belied by the focus on anger, violence, and retribution, not only in the afterlife, but especially in this life as a means of intimidating the living.
The idea that God’s wrath can be discerned in natural disasters, from epidemics to floods, hurricanes, and so forth, although denied in some quarters, is widespread, especially among fundamentalists and evangelicals. For example, televangelist Pat Robertson claimed that the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti may well have been a delayed divine punishment for Haitians having made a “pact with the devil” when they overthrew their French slave-holding overlords two centuries earlier. A week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when appearing on The 700 Club, a television show hosted by Robertson, the Rev. Jerry Falwell announced:
The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.”
To this, Robertson added, “I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government.”
One month into the devastation caused by the coronavirus, in mid-March, 2020, Ralph Drollinger of Capitol Ministries and a senior “faith adviser” to the Trump Administration, announced that America was “experiencing the consequential wrath of God.”
These assertions of God’s wrath in the here-and-now, however controversial, are mild compared with threats of damnation and eternal torment. It is not uncommon to invoke such outcomes in a nonthreatening mode; one might say, just for the hell of it. But, when intended and taken seriously, as they have been for most of the past two millennia, notably in the Christian and Islamic worlds, they are serious indeed.
Shockingly, a 2011 survey found that 14.7% of Americans were “somewhat sure” that hell existed, whereas 48.4% were “absolutely sure.” In 2018, a study by the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life found that although more Americans believe in heaven than in hell, more than 80% of “highly religious” and “somewhat religious” Americans maintain that hell is a “real place,” whereas fewer than 5% of nonreligious Americans believe similarly.
It can be argued that proclaiming an unpleasant afterlife for sinners is merely intended to encourage pious and socially acceptable behavior in this life. Leon Bloy, a late 19th-century French writer and poet, had referred to the oxymoronic “good news of damnation” under the assumption that only the fear of perpetual hellfire would motivate moral behavior. Such encouragement might seem worthwhile if it results in more prosocial behavior. And, indeed, crosscultural research has found that belief in what Michael Shermer calls a “cosmic courthouse” waiting to condemn miscreants to divine punishment correlates with lower national crime rates. Moreover, at least among developing countries, greater belief in hell is even associated with more rapid increases in gross domestic product growth.
However there is a line, fine or not, between providing a gentle spur to prosocial behavior and sharpening that spur into a laceration. It is one thing to demand, as in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, “You can’t have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat,” but what of threatening the same child with a beating? Or brandishing the prospect of unending torture? In short, when does encouragement morph into abuse? Sure enough, research reported under the descriptive title “The Emotional Toll of Hell” found that, despite its positive societal effects, belief in hell is associated with lower happiness and life satisfaction, at both the individual and national levels. Hell makes people more likely to follow prescribed norms, but also more liable to be unhappy.
It is possible, although difficult to confirm, that some believers substitute confidence that a righteous God will punish sinners here on Earth for diminished conviction about hell and its terrors. Nonetheless, the dangling of postmortem torments as a way of manipulating the living has evoked criticism from, among others, Voltaire, whose sardonic Philosophical Dictionary includes the following reply to someone who had the effrontery to question the existence of hell: “I no more believe in the eternity of hell than yourself; but recollect that it may be no bad thing, perhaps, for your servant, your tailor, and your lawyer to believe in it.” Voltaire’s personal feelings, however, were quite clear, as evidenced when he asked, “Were the time ever to arrive in which no citizen of London believed in a hell, what would be adopted? What restraint upon wickedness would exist?” To which he answered, “The feeling of honor, the restraint of the laws, that of die Deity Himself, whose will it is that mankind shall be just, whether there be a hell or not.”
It is an optimistic expectation, but one that most of the world’s religious traditions have not embraced. Even many nonbelievers have touted the benefits of religion as a mechanism of social hygiene, allegedly restraining some of humanity’s more unpleasant and antisocial impulses. This is in addition to the older tradition of believers holding to the beneficence of threatening hellfire and brimstone as appropriate to the salvific responsibility of religious leadership, not to manipulate those who would otherwise misbehave but because those who sin and do not repent really will suffer hellfire and brimstone.
For the classical Greeks and Romans, hell was neither a place of punishment nor a restraint upon wickedness; it was simply the abode of the dead where all mortals ended up, regardless of their merit or lack thereof. Heroes could visit there under special circumstances, hang out and converse with the “shades” of the deceased, and then return—for example, Odysseus in The Odyssey and Aeneas in The Aeneid, who met Achilles, Agamemnon, Tiresias, and the like. In most of the world’s better known religious traditions, by contrast, fear of death has been augmented by additional fears: that the afterlife has particular horrors in store for those who have transgressed in this life.
For the ancient Egyptians, one traveled after death through different regions of the Duat, which was more a place of judgment than of punishment, although those who failed the former were subject to the latter—notably, being chomped and then swallowed by Ammit, the devourer of souls, who had the rear end of a hippo, the upper body of a lion, and the head and jaws of a crocodile. This unpleasant experience could be avoided, however, by successfully passing the “weighing of the heart,” during which Osiris—Lord of the Underworld and Judge of the Dead—assessed each dead person’s heart, comparing it with the “feather of Maat” a stand-in for fairness and truth. Those whose hearts were heavier than the feather (which presumably was rather light, and thus a challenging threshold) were in big trouble.
In a related telling, one might escape this outcome by uttering a series of denials, such as “I have not cheated,” “I have not blasphemed,” and so forth. It is unclear how intimidating early Egyptians found either version of the postmortem evaluative process, because there does not appear to be any evidence that anyone ever ended up consigned to Ms. Ammit. In the great majority of other religious traditions, some version of the West’s conception of hell can be found, complete with explicit threats that associated torture with failure to live up to social rules and expectations. Some versions of Buddhism and Taoism competed by literally multiplying their visions of hell, with each proposing different numbers, in a kind of posthumous poker. For example, the Buddhists promoted eight different levels of hell, to which the Taoists responded with ten, after which the Buddhists countered with eight cold ones and eight hot ones, and the bidding went on, mostly in the double digits, until the Buddhists jumped to 84,000, whereupon the Taoists gave up.
One version of Burmese Buddhism had (and for some devotees still has) 40,040 different hells, each associated with its own misbehavior, such as one for not returning borrowed books and another for throwing shards of pottery over a wall. It is problematic to generalize about any of the world’s great sacred traditions; consider, for example, the differences within Christianity between Roman Catholicism and, say, Unitarianism or Quakerism. Given that caveat, here is a generalization: insofar as most Eastern religions identified a version of hell, they usually mandated a prolonged duration, but short of eternity. One story in Tibetan Buddhism posits a great cube of sesame seeds one hundred miles on a side, from which a small bird removes one seed every thousand years; when the seeds are all gone, the sinner gets a kind of parole to try living their life again.
The Jewish perspective is closer to this conception of hell as a kind of nothingness than as understood in the Christian or Islamic world. It contains many descriptions of God’s power, evidently intended to erase any doubts as to the advisability of complying with divine commands, but it has no explicit mention of hell as is found in the other two major monotheistic traditions, although the Hebrew Bible identifies a realm called sheol: a circumstance of oblivion and nonspecific darkness. Translated into Greek, it became hades, but there are conflicting views among Jewish scholars whether sheol should be seen as a place of punishment or merely a situation experienced by all dead souls, regardless of their virtue or iniquity.
By contrast, the Christian perception of hell has long been quite explicit and dire. “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). Jesus subsequently goes on to leaven the “good news” of the gospels with dire warnings about a place of darkness where “the worm dies not, the fire is not quenched, and there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 9:48). In the sinister valley of Gehenna, Moloch’s followers allegedly sacrificed their victims, a place considered so real that Jesus repeatedly threatened his own followers with punishments that were similar, or worse: “If you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell [Gehenna] of fire,” he declared in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:22). And the synoptic gospels attribute this warning to the Savior many more times:
It is better for you to lose one of your members, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell [Gehenna]” (Matthew 5:29)…. If your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into the hell [Gehenna] of fire (Matt. 18:9)…. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell [Gehenna], to the unquenchable fire (Mark 9:43)…. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has the authority to cast into hell [Gehenna]” (Luke 12:5).
The Islamic conception of hell (Jahannam), derived from the Qur’an, contains seven different levels of misery, each successively more intense and intolerable, and each correlated with the severity of the misbehavior being punished. Jahannam is well stocked with boiling water, and especially fire (sometimes Jahannam is translated as “blazing” or “roaring fire”), along with the tree of Zaqqum, which has germinated from the transgressions committed by each malefactor, and is thus tailored individually to each suffering soul. Sinners are forced to consume the fruit of this tree, which in various ways tears at their insides. Islamic scholars are divided over whether the trip to Jahannam is one-way or if, eventually—and depending on the misdeeds in question—inhabitants are finally permitted access to heaven.
The early church father, Tertullian, who wrote extensively about hell in the second century after Jesus, maintained that, after death, the pious would get to delight in witnessing forever the suffering of the damned—among whom Tertullian included essentially anyone who disagreed with him. A 12th- century text, the Vision of Tundale, enjoyed great currency in its day, not the least (one suspects) because of its explicitly horrifying images of the suffering of the damned—a kind of extreme schadenfreude a la Tertullian. Here is the comeuppance undergone by nuns and especially monks, priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and even popes who violated their vows of celibacy: “The genitals of the men and the women were like serpents, which eagerly mangled the lower parts of their stomachs and pulled out their guts.”
Within Christianity, hell had become especially prominent after the fifth century AD, with its horrors becoming more strenuous as the Church faced more dissenters—a situation that began long before the famous protests of Martin Luther. Christian proselytizing usually occurred not by the sword, but by pointing to the gospel (literally “good news”) of Jesus’s coming, but also by threatening that non-adherents would, also literally, be “damned to hell.” Vigorous debate ensued over whether hell was awaiting those poor souls who had not been saved by Christianity, specifically heathens, who, through no fault of their own, died without having encountered Jesus’s teachings. Augustine was particularly unrelenting in this regard, insisting that unbaptized babies, no less than unrepentant sinners, were doomed.
Some support for a more lenient Christian approach to those who predated Jesus comes from the “harrowing of hell,” whereby Jesus is said to have descended into hell after his death and resurrection to liberate worthy souls, especially those who had preceded him in life, including—in the case of a famous medieval painting by Benvenuto di Giovanni—Adam and Eve. In contrast to its eastern, Constantinople-based component, the Roman Catholic Church particularly emphasized that punishment for mortal sins would be fixed and unyielding, with no recourse, perhaps because, given this doctrine, repentance alone was inadequate to avoid hell, which in turn generated a lucrative business through the sale of indulgences. Thus, prior to the Reformation, the Catholic Church literally made money off the threat of hell; indeed, this practice was among those to which Martin Luther vehemently dissented in The Ninety-five Theses, issued in 1517. Then, in 1563, as part of the counterreformation, the Council of Trent decreed that “all evil gains for the obtaining of [indulgences] be wholly abolished,” which was formally announced by Pope Pius V in 1567.
A popular focus on hell and its punishments nonetheless continued, of which by far the most renowned and influential was Dante’s magnificent poem The Divine Comedy, which had been composed two centuries earlier, when the sale of indulgences was in full flower. It is interesting that The Inferno, with its exuberantly graphic depiction of the tortures of hell, has always been read more widely and enthusiastically than the other two parts of Dante’s masterpiece, The Purgatorio and The Paradiso, although the latter were written with no less verve and brilliance.
Maybe this is testimony to a deep-seated fascination with the grotesque, combined with a hefty dose of schadenfreude along with concern about what might be awaiting the sinful, even though in its specificity The Inferno simply reveals the imagination of Dante Alighieri rather than any particular teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. In addition to the now-familiar torments of burning with fire, being eaten by ravenous beasts, and so forth, The Inferno achieves power and even a sort of credibility as an extended warning because of how it often shows punishments fitting crimes—poetically, but also with a gut-wrenching memorability. For example, the suffering of adulterers, notably Paulo and Francesca, is to be blown about by torrential winds that reflect their uncontrolled illicit passion, while simultaneously keeping the transgressors forever apart. Also among the punished, equivocators who refused to take sides in the “Rebellion of the Angels” (derived from the biblical Book of Revelation) are condemned to run about, naked and continually stung by swarms of hornets and wasps, while unavailingly chasing an indistinct banner that presumably represents their constant pursuit, when alive, of their own inconsequential self-interest.
Another cautionary tale presents the comeuppance of fortunetellers (evidently considered serious malefactors in medieval times), who are forced to walk eternally straight ahead, but with their head on backward. Then there are the politicians who accepted bribes who find themselves stuck in a lake of boiling hot tar—comeuppance for their sticky fingers—all the while harried by the Malebranche (literally, “evil claws”), which use those claws to rip their flesh if they try to get out of the scalding bath. In addition, we meet a sad collection of hypocrites forced to walk hopelessly along a narrow path, wearing robes that appear lovely to an observer, adorned with shining golden threads—resembling monk habits and thus appearing to be a reward for piousness—but are actually composed inside of unbearably heavy lead. Hence, they manifest hypocrisy made real, painful, and permanent.
The most appallingly suitable tortures are found deeper in The Inferno’s bowels. The Sowers of Discord were guilty of ripping asunder that which should have been left intact. Hence, they are dismembered by a ferocious demon, after which their lacerations heal, whereupon they are lacerated once again. Here we also find Mohammed, his body hacked open so that his guts spill out. Interestingly, his son-in-law, Ali, is similarly mutilated because of causing the schism between Shi’a and Sunni. Those generating discord within a family are also divided literally in their own bodies. Consigned to the deepest region of hell (not surprisingly) is Satan, who, in Dante’s version, is entombed waist-deep in ice and endowed with three horrible heads, the ones on each side chewing Brutus and Cassius, who are being punished for betraying Julius Caesar, while the middle one eternally masticates Judas, betrayer of Jesus. Satan himself is the ultimate betrayer, and in this particular version of hell, treachery against the established order (whether secular or divine) is the ultimate, irreconcilable sin.
Perhaps the most notable of all poetic justice punishments, however, is observed at a slightly less stygian level, reserved for a pair of former inhabitants of the city-state of Pisa: Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri. These two had engaged in a sequence of mutual betrayals, and so they are encased in one frozen hole, each gnawing forever on the other’s head. Although none of these portrayals represent explicit Church doctrine, they have been immensely influential—not merely as literature, but as the stuff of nightmares.
Those horrors have been somewhat allayed by an intermediate situation that has enjoyed theological traction as a kind of waystation between heaven and hell. According to current Catholic catechism, purgatory is “the state of those who die in God’s friendship, assured of their eternal salvation, but who still have need of purification to enter into the happiness of heaven.” This ritual purification is widely conceived as somehow involving fire that—whether literally or figuratively—burns away the dross of venial sin. It also satisfies the widespread need of those still alive to do something (typically through prayer) on behalf of their deceased loved ones. After all, there is no reason to pray for those in heaven, and ditto for those consigned irrevocably to hell.
Strange as it seems to secularists—and even to many believers—hell has often been conceived as an actual geographic location, a conception shared historically and even now by some of humanity’s greatest minds. As a 24-year-old math genius, Galileo—widely revered as perhaps the preeminent founder of Western science—was approached by the Florentine Academy to calculate some of the quantitative details of hell, using Dante’s poem as underlying data. The Inferno enjoyed such a reputation in Galileo’s day that many sophisticated scholars took it as literal truth.
In 1588, Galileo presented his results in two lectures to his Florentine sponsors. Using proportional scaling from Dante’s poem, Galileo had figured out that Satan was 1,180 meters (3,870 ft) tall and, taking Dante’s claim that Satan’s naval was at the center of the Earth, he determined the exact depth of hell and the thickness of its dome.
Did the great Galileo Galilei believe all this? We’ll never know, but it may be significant that what remains of him now is a bony finger—the middle one—from his right hand, on public display in Florence’s science museum, where it points upward to the universe or perhaps issues a defiant obscene gesture toward the Church that subsequently persecuted him.
Why do hell threats enjoy such cross-cultural credibility? Of course, they cannot be proved wrong; but neither can they be proved correct. Threats of a punishing afterlife may well satisfy a need to balance the scales of justice, to make the universe fair when our mortal life isn’t. Thus, a readily evoked sense of justice demands that the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot get their proper comeuppance, if not in this life, then in whatever comes after.
Or maybe the persistent credence given to hell threats exemplifies what psychiatrist Randy Nesse calls the smoke-alarm principle, which is a close relative of Pascal’s Wager. Here it is: We accept the annoying occasional screams of a kitchen smoke alarm when we accidentally burn the toast, because of benefit derived if in fact there is a genuine fire. Analogously, our ancestors were likely predisposed to respond with tense alertness to a whispering in their Pleistocene grassland, even though it might be a small rodent, because it could also be a leopard. Better safe than sorry. Better to believe in the legitimacy of hell’s smoke alarm—even though it might be false—than to discover, after death and deprived of any recourse, that your personal house really is aflame.
But a metaphor is like a cookie: tasty, but if squeezed too hard, it crumbles. The fear of eternal damnation isn’t a well-intended but hypersensitive smoke alarm or highly attuned awareness of a leopard’s exhalations. Although some people may indeed be induced to more prosocial behavior by threats of postmortem misery, it seems likely that many have also been consigned by them to lives of guilt, shame, and anxiety, not to mention sheer terror.
Those who have not been exposed as children to such a prospect will find it difficult, perhaps impossi treatise Anatomy of Melancholy, a remarkably prescient account of what today is labeled depression, Robert Burton noted, “If there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart.” It seems that one way to enhance that melancholy is to bring a hell to Earth by threatening hell to pay.