History of Hell

Arghhh!

My thesaurus has a lot of fun with the concept: Hell, Hades, Gehenna, Sheol, Erebus, Acheron, Tartarus, Tophet, Abaddon, Pandemonium, Dis, Avernus
aka
underworld, infernal regions, abode of the damned, abyss, inferno, hellfire, lower world, nether regions, bottomless pit, PASTMAD (pain agony suffering torment

misery anguish despair)

I just ran across a u-tube video of a purported actual recording of the screams of the damned coming from hell, discovered by Russians drilling into the earth, and lowering a microphone down the hole. If you believe in heaven, and it seems most of us want to, then it's not so hard to consequently dream up a place of corresponding damnation for those who don't please God, the sinners, those who break his law. You might even live in fear of being a member of such a class.

Also on u-tube, there are videos describing experiences with RSD (reflexive sympathetic dystrophy), a rare disease in which the constant pain can be worse than childbirth or amputation. Also called CRPS (complex regional pain syndrome), this mysterious and misunderstood disease suffered by over 1 million Americans, in which the body overreacts to injury (like a spider bite), who I would imagine are often suicidal, can require, in the patients most unresponsive to treatment, going to Germany (the fda hasn't approved the procedure) to be put into a coma to allow the body to reset. It has worked for almost half the patients.

Another such experience of incredible pain, besides burning, was a torture I've read about in which the judged were sentenced to receive tattoos covering the entire body. There's a guy who voluntarily did this, and is in the Guinness Book of World Records, but people have different tolerances.

Well, I, God, am telling you...Don't worry, Be happy. All pain shall pass. Death is like sleeping. What dreams may come in this sleep of death? Well, none. You won't have a brain.

Anyway, where was I. Oh yes, hell.

Mythology has not dealt kindly with the direction of down. D words in general, I've noticed, have gotten quite a rough deal. Demons, death, decay, destruction, depravity, despair, disaster, danger, devil, degradation, depression, demoralization, defenestration, depreciation, delay, devaluation, dunno what else... Dad? dungeons and dragons? Anyway, the invisibility and inaccessibility and darkness has led to the association of unhappiness with the underworld, where most people are buried.

Hades, the predecessor to the Christian hell, the very concept of which may have sent Jesus straight to his creation, was originally the name given to the god who ruled the "infernal regions." That god later became Pluto. It was a real place for the ancients, which Virgil located near Mt. Vesuvius, "from which sulfurous flames arise, while the ground is shaken with pent-up vapors, and mysterious sounds issue from the bowels of the earth."

It was not so much a place of perpetual torment as it was of boredom and frustration. Sisyphus was condemned to keep pushing a boulder up a hill. Tantalus was condemned to eternal hunger and thirst. It was cold and dark, not fiery with flaming brimstone.

As portrayed in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, it's the final dwelling place of the dead after they've been condemned at the Last Judgment.

The traditional Christian notion of a heinous hell of fiery torment stems from Judaism, in which Jerusalem's real city dump, Ge (valley of) Hinnom (once a site where children were burned as sacrifices to the god Moloch), was transformed into the fiery but mythical Gehenna.

From there, it was a short step to the blazing domain of Satan and his evil angels and minions, portrayed by such artists as Hieronymus Bosch, William Blake, and Gustave Dore.

A poll taken in 1990 revealed that 60% of Americans still believe in a literal hell.

I actually haven't reached a conclusive decision on the matter, for myself. I figure I won't experience anything after I'm dead, but maybe my atoms will. Then again, most of the atoms that made up my body in the past have long since been replaced, and I have not heard one update from them (how unthoughtful!). I've had such thoughts as: incarceration could be hell, torture could be hell, being burnt alive could be hell. Being buried alive with a spider could be hell. After death: is there consciousness in dead matter? Will the army's microwave weapon cause hell for rocks and such? Will burning my body, if I'm not buried but cremated, cause my dead neurons any pain? Could a nuclear weapon, by vaporizing a body, cause any part of it (soul, thetan, ghost) to suffer? Could the expansion of the sun, heating up or engulfing the earth, cause everyone who is not taken up into space like Jesus to suffer? Could there be a virtual consciousness, where pain is experienced, separate from a body? Okay, I'm starting to think I've been pretty nuts. I'm fairly certain that when you're dead, that's it, and if there is a God, including me, there is not going to be any eternal torment from a jolly ol' soul like Him, benevelent, all-merciful, loving, kind, compassionate, and such.

As Ionesco said, "only the ephemeral is of lasting value."
And, since hell seems to be a result of hate, as Dale Evans said, "I'm so busy loving everybody, I don't have any time to hate anybody."

Hell is a way to put the fear of God into people. "Guilt is the mafia of the mind." -Bob Mandel
"Guilt is never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion."

Never feel guilty about having warm human feelings toward anyone.