Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The Absurdity of Hells

Throughout history horrific visions of a fiery afterlife have been engineered for those among us failing to meet the standards of our societies. No stretch of the imagination is required to understand the mechanisms at work in the creation of these devilish domains. One prominent reason is balance. People were and are painfully aware that deeds committed in the here in now, especially notoriously grievous ones, seem to call out for some notoriously grievous sanction. Hells are a salve for the collective conscious, a catch all punishment for those who through subterfuge, stealth or skill, legal or otherwise, managed to avoid paying the cost of their injurious deeds. Society could rest easy in the "knowledge" that the doers of evil would ultimately pay for their crimes. Thus, from a need for balance, sprang from the minds of men (yes, largely men), post-mortem maleficence; orgies of torment the likes of which no earthly ruler could inflict. Rulers, temporal and spiritual, would came to value these mythologies as effective instruments of control. One might evade the government agent, the jail and the rack in this life, but the gods, who see all, miss nothing and demand obedience would gather up every malefactors at a time when they had left to themselves no place to hide.

Of course, for these other worldly punishments to pack the necessary punch belief in them had to be near universal. Thus, stories were told, paintings were painted and from tot-hood on up, the populace was infected with visions and fears of punishment extraordinare. A study of Hell-type mythologies shows a progression in the severity of these stories. Just like the "one that got away" stories of fishermen, Hells became over the centuries more and more gruesome. The Hindu Hell, predating the Christian Hell by some twenty centuries, paled in comparison both in severity and duration to that of the Christians. It's Christianity that holds the dubious honor of being the first, followed some six centuries later by Islam, to create a Hell that was by design the most painful and eternal.

But, over time, as Hell became more and more, well, hellish, doubts began to arise as to the veracity of the claims. The innate need for balance was threatened by the over-kill of the visions. How could a loving God inflict such tortures? What acts could a man or woman commit while living that required an eternity of ultimate suffering? The more intellectual conjectured that experience and knowledge are transformative and thus even the most hideous sinner in much less than an eternity, would learn the error of his or her ways. Also, people became aware of the usefulness of Hell fables to their leaders and began to see Hell not as a reach for balance, but a reach for control.

A lesson we can all learn from the mythologies of the Hells is that when we indulge our questions, our uneasiness with mind-created delusions, we do not really create anything other than error and its consequences. We cannot actually create an other-worldly hell, but we have created real hells in the here and now. How much angst and fear and psychological torment have we inflicted on our children through these fiery fantasies? What real torments flowed from belief in diabolical damnation? How many normal, healthy people were perverted, twisted and warped into self-doubting mental and emotional cripples fearing each act, doubting each decision, scrutinizing every intention? It has been reported recently that the late Pope, John Paul II flogged himself regularly to drive back the (fictional) demons in his mind. What's even more stunning is that the current Pope, Benedict XVI has judged his predecessor's masochism a cause for sainthood. There is a story arc in the old Superman comics that explores the concept of a "Bizarro" world. In that world, up is down, good is evil and night is day. Only in a Bizarro World can it be considered holy to beat oneself and psychologically disable children by inculcating fear both every choice encountered in this world and eternal suffering in the next. But Bizzaro World is the only destination possible when we choose mind created images over reality; when we try to make existence conform to our under-informed concepts of what we think it should be. Any departure from merely being content to see things as they are, as they really are, will without fail bring us to lands where life becomes not something to be lived, explored, enjoyed and shared, but a fearful test which must be endured. Hell myths and all mind created UN-realities snatch us from "what is" depositing us in flames of error where we burn in ways often unrecognized. Choosing to live one's life in such a manner is, like the Hells themselves is patently absurd.