Hellish vengeance fantasy takes a hit

What do you know? It seems that Pope Francis may not believe in Hell, easily the cruelest vengeance fantasy ever conceived.

Scalfari says to the Pope, “Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will disappear in a certain moment and that God, still out of his creative force, will create new species. You have never spoken to me about the souls who died in sin and will go to hell to suffer it for eternity. You have however spoken to me of good souls, admitted to the contemplation of God. But what about bad souls? Where are they punished?”

Pope Francis says, “They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”

I think the entire Christian narrative is crazy, and have never believed in Hell or worried about going there, so I have no dog in this theological fight over unevidenced vengeance fantasies.

I’m sure a lot of Southern Baptist preachers will remark this kerfuffle, though, for they are adamant that after you die your body is restored and goes to a real place where it spends eternity on fire if you die unsaved — and their carrot-and-stick theology becomes (more) laughable and childish if there is no stick.

This story has been a Big Deal for the past day, and if you read around you’ll see a lot of remarks like, “If people no longer believe in Hell, there will be no restraints on behavior.” Don’t believe it. People are good and bad according to their nature, and Hell has nothing to do with it. The real reason Hell is part of the storyline is that childish people — which is basically all believers — enjoy thinking about their enemies suffering forever.

This entry was posted in General. Bookmark the permalink.