Civil Commotion

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.

A guest post at Spiritual Sounding Board reprises something I’ve said repeatedly through the years: Christianity’s indispensable metaphysical claim is … You’re no damn good.

Free will is meaningless, because each and every instinct we have is sinful anyway, and should NOT be validated. Besides, what difference does free will make when God chose the “elect” before the foundations of the earth?

The law is our SCHOOLMASTER, but we will never “graduate” this side of heaven. We will NEVER be “sanctified” until we are “glorified” in death, in heaven.

Total depravity — nothing in us is innately good. We are putrid, vile, worthless, helpless sinners, and can ONLY be loved perfectly by a perfect GOD, and ONLY by His “mercy,” since we are all undeserving. Mercy is NOT something man can ever possess in the “flesh,” because the flesh is sinful. And we shouldn’t expect ANYONE to ever truly love us since we aren’t worthy of it, so we shouldn’t complain or be at all surprised when we are treated like shit, especially by our loved ones, and especially by authority figures, since God appoints them over us for our sanctification.

I know, I know … My church doesn’t teach that!

Listen more carefully; Original Sin is part and parcel of every sermon ever preached, and it’s your willing participation in your own degradation that sustains the entire rickety edifice.

And this sustained reliance on the big con has, over time, exerted a strong selection effect both on the party’s leadership and on its base. G.O.P. politicians tend disproportionately to be con men (and in some cases, con women), because playing the party’s political game requires both a willingness to and a talent for saying one thing while doing another. And the party’s base consists disproportionately of the easily conned — those who are easily fooled by claims that Those People are the problem and don’t notice how much the true Republican agenda hurts them.

Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate

Right: If you’re not obsessing about pleasing Our Invisible Friend, you’re wasting your life. This is the same crowd that says a woman who puts her children first is just as pleasing to Satan as a woman with a career. The mythology of Christianity is different than the mythology of Scientology — but the ethical teachings are identical, and cultish; the difference in the size and public acceptance of the cult is irrelevant.