It is more than a little synchronistic that I saw this article at TPM on the same day I had decided to do a little post on hell. I continue to find it amusing that the best these folks can come up with in their visions of eternal damnation is rooted in an early Renaissance poem. Not only are they unbiblical, they are unoriginal as well.
Most takes on hell - in literature, music, and the graphic arts - rely on Dante's poem as a guide. To think that the worst anyone can imagine is to be physically tortured by fire for all eternity shows a lack of understanding about what hell actually is. Hell is nothing more or less than complete and utter separation from God. Not the kind of separation we experience in this life, with its pain, temptation, more than occasional horrors, and the inevitability of our own deaths. It is a separation that leaves a hole that can never be filled. One may still be aware of God's existence; yet one will be forever cut off from that avenue of assistance.
As a Christian, I cannot imagine a torment more horrible than that. To exist knowing that one will never again be in any kind of communion with God is far more horrible than having demons burn me with pokers, or sinking in a vat filled with human excrement, or even rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again just as I reach the summit.
The best visual representations of this idea, to my mind, are videos by the heavy metal band Tool. These little animated explorations of the bizarre and strange offer, to me, a glimpse of what it would be like to exist in a place without God's presence. Creatures that cannot exist roving about. A place where the relationship between cause and effect does not exist. Most of all, these videos portray an aloneness that is irredeemable. The videos always strike me as horrific precisely because the little characters seem unable to access others when needed. It is through others that we confirm the basic rationality of our existence. It is with others that we console ourselves at our darkest moments. It is by others that our understanding of the world is confirmed. In an existence without any access to others there is no way to confirm our suspicions about the world. In hell, there is no sympathy, no fellow-feeling, no others that can agree with us, confirm our suspicions that what is around us makes no sense, or might make some sense. It is an existence without rules, without sense, without any escape whatsoever.
The kinds of "scary" offered up by fundamentalists and others just don't cut it for me. If Randall Terry showed up somewhere near me, I'd just laugh at this kind of thing. I can imagine something far more horrible, especially for people like Randall Terry who are willing to kill in the name of life - that's hell on earth.
