For those in Hell
Yes, I’m writing this because of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. He was a good and brave man and I admired him. He was 31. Now he’s eternal.
Since I am Christian and do believe in an afterlife, I am confident Charlie’s life has entered a new realm with new opportunities awaiting him. It is this to which I subscribe, as I believe many faithful do, not as susceptible as children to a constant heaven made of clouds and angels and long trumpets and hosannas to the One who cannot really be seen. If this makes me a blasphemer to some, I don’t care. Heaven as a gated community with a good view seems a limited and boring retirement from the excitements of life. To me anyway. Most of the problems people have with the concept of divinity are similarly small-minded and short-sighted. It’s human to keep trying to cut God and his domain down to size in ways that make him open to dealmaking or derision if that’s your preference.
Imagine that Heaven might be a roll your own kind of transition state, a celebration involving the company of close family and friends, with lovely sights and sounds and nothing or no one to remind you of the bad times. Which would, for many of us, probably become confining in short order. When you talk to an old friend on the phone, what do you do after you’ve reminded each other of this time and that time in the past, and those people, and, uh, time to walk the dog, great talking to you…
Something after that no doubt and probably mind-blowing awaits, brand new dimensions of creativity and ways of living within and outside physical reality as we’ve lived it here.
But you must have gathered I’m not here to talk about Heaven today. The other place. That’s what it’s a good time to be ruminating about. I’ve shown you a classic engraving of the place tradition has it you’re destined for if you commit or are complicit in the assassination of another living person because he has offended some opinion or set of opinions you hold. That would be Dante’s Seventh Circle of the Inferno. Not a great address in which to be spending eternity. Modern sophistication enables us to brush off such static renditions of punishment as cartoonish, hokey, ridiculously black and white in their judgmentalism. Flying Spaghetti Monster type stuff.
But what if Hell is not a place at all? What is it’s many places? And many times as well? Even Dante gives us nine circles. You don’t have to be a great lawyer to build a case for the possibility that everybody has dipped at least a toe into all the different pots of sin the old Italian poet is threatening us with. It’s not likely, it’s not reasonable, it’s not — our favorite modern word — rational. Reality’s gotta be more smeary than that or it’s just a cartoon.
Which is where the modern mind kind of spazzes out because personal imagination has been trained out of us by scientists and digital technologists who see the universe as ones and zeros interacting randomly to no particular purpose except that the sheer volume of such digits accidentally produces combinations that seem to have meaning until the energy leaves the system and what is left is cold and motionless and dead. Like the fantasy we choose to call real death. Where clichéed rationalism seems to have landed us. Armed to the teeth with cellphones but devoid of explanations about where the unique energy called life comes from or where it goes when it departs the worn out physical vehicle it was using to get around and experience things. Ask Siri. See what she says. Unless your cellphone is out of electricity.
What if Hell is as immense on the other side of death as the universe is on this side? Wouldn’t that be big enough to be punished in for eternity? And what if the biggest limitation we perceive about our own universe isn’t the same on the other side? I’m talking now about time. Here we see and experience time as a line. What if it’s as multidimensional as matter is? What if past and present and probabilities and possibilities are all sitting on either side of and above and below the linear little row of clock ticks we call time. Meaning Hell could also be now as well as after, and even the past might be…
Not going to spell all this out for you, because my real point is that the only good definition of Hell I have heard is “the Absence of God.” Sad to tell you, but if you really, truly are an atheist in this life, you are in Hell, a state of mind without meaning or purpose beyond the satisfaction of appetites. What are appetites? Sensations the body desires to feel. They can be mental as well as physical. But what they have in common with lust and gluttony is that they have no perpetuity, meaning, or permanence. They can be experienced but not a path to wisdom because thought is impossible of meaning in a universe made of random units of electricity firing in whatever order the unexamined architecture dictates.
The absence of God is the prison. It is the absence of meaning or the hope of meaning that leads to despair, violence, and obsession with physical death. The random universe underlies most of what we call science these days, but it is a profound lie. The existence of the laws of physics, the synchrony of the laws of mathematics together demonstrate that there is an architecture to the entire universe. Which means it was designed, somehow brought into being, and is far larger than we can ever understand. Our only defense against the intimidation of a concept of divinity that immense is the almost equally enormous denial that such an all-encompassing divinity could not possibly be personal as well to every planet, species, earthly primate, and bedbug. Of course it could. Couldn’t do it if it were a bestselling author of books about blind watchmakers. But it could if we started looking for the abundant evidence that it’s as alive as we are and, shall we say, a lot more intelligent, subtle, and interactive than any of us are capable of imagining.
And where is our pure atheist right now? Probably in Hell. Thinking that the best you can hope for is eating and drinking and fucking and hating the ones who are to blame for the things you want and don’t have. Wondering if others have the guts to spill the blood you’d like spill. Wondering how to get the money or the title or the sex partner that would make you feel something more than you feel right now. Which is unhappy, pissed off, and sick of the whole fucking thing.
That’s the Absence of God. What will change about that state after death? Who knows? Some will become bodiless spirits trapped in a limbo much like Dante describes or you can see on an episode of “Most Haunted.” Others will have to skip the joyful reunions or find them foreshortened by early induction into the phase where there is no hellfire but the pain of experiencing how it felt to be the person you were hurting or wanting to hurt in life. Maybe this phase lasts for a very long time in what we call human years, repeated again and again until the soul finally learns something about consequence and empathy. No forgiveness? Too soon to say.
There are probably souls too limited to continue anything like a conscious life. They may be allowed simply to go OUT, OFF, No Signal. Or get demoted to caterpillars or parameciums and such. Where the Far Eastern Spaghetti Noodle Monsters get their reincarnational theologies from.
What can you do from here? Get your rationalizations back. Tell yourself you’re waaay smarter than I am and go about your greedy hateful existence as scheduled. But consider this. If I’m wrong, I’ll never know it. Lights out, no regrets, no big party, call it a draw. If you’re wrong, you’ll be very sorry for expending so many vile thoughts on those you assumed yourself superior to.
If you wished Charlie Kirk dead or rejoiced in his passing, I don’t hate you, but I sure don’t envy what might be waiting for you on the other side.
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