Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to a bow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name
Speaker 1: is Julie Douglas. Julie, do you believe in Hell? I
Speaker 1: didn't hear you ask me that. Well, you know, that's
Speaker 1: the kind of what this episode is about, about the
Speaker 1: belief in Hell, the problems of Hell, why where this
Speaker 1: idea comes from, and why it's problematic at times are
Speaker 1: are often problematic in our culture. So I thought we'd
Speaker 1: we creak it off by just talking about our own
Speaker 1: sort of viewpoints. Yeah, just there's a big loaded question.
Speaker 1: What do you think do you think I believe in Hell?
Speaker 1: I don't think you do. I don't you seem like
Speaker 1: a nonbeliever when it comes to especially to a place
Speaker 1: where demons torment souls for all eternity and that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. I think it's fascinating. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 1: I love the imagery. But no, I mean, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go out there say it seems a little silly to
Speaker 1: me at times, so well, silly in the best of
Speaker 1: circumstances meant to, it's not meant to, But um, it's
Speaker 1: just such a caricature of humans in a way, um
Speaker 1: are our worst thoughts that it's rendered to me in
Speaker 1: this way that seems kind of silly. And of course
Speaker 1: I've seen so much double imagery and satan imagery, and
Speaker 1: of late it seems like Satan has been kind of
Speaker 1: a silly figure in some modern works. Well, he certainly
Speaker 1: can be. Yeah, I mean the you know, comedy and
Speaker 1: Hell go way back, um. And we've recently been doing
Speaker 1: a lot of rather research about this and some of
Speaker 1: the earliest models of Hell that we encounter, um, you know,
Speaker 1: an ancient Mesopotamian mythology. You encounter comedic stories even then,
Speaker 1: stories that we think we're more about about being a
Speaker 1: little loose with material and then having a little fun
Speaker 1: with the material, with individuals going and having adventures in
Speaker 1: in the afterlife in some sort of underworld. So the
Speaker 1: idea of Hell ranges from yea, from silly too grotesque
Speaker 1: For my own part, when when I think about hell
Speaker 1: as is uh, the idea that there is a place
Speaker 1: where bad people are are tormented for all eternity or
Speaker 1: even for a finite amount of time. I tend to
Speaker 1: find that a difficult thing to believe in, and and
Speaker 1: you know, in this world, it takes a certain amount
Speaker 1: of mental power to believe in anything, and I feel
Speaker 1: like that's something that I don't want to focus that
Speaker 1: energy on. They're they're far more positive things outside of
Speaker 1: our experience than one can put faith into without thinking
Speaker 1: about where hell is, who's going into it, and how
Speaker 1: long they're going to be there. That being said, I've
Speaker 1: always found the idea just richly fascinating. And uh and
Speaker 1: and certainly Hell is this this fantastic place in in
Speaker 1: h in the history of human art, human writing, fiction, philosophy.
Speaker 1: We keep coming back to it. We can't help but
Speaker 1: visit it over and over again, despite all of the
Speaker 1: grotesque ideas that fill it. And uh, and sometimes the
Speaker 1: grotesque beliefs that prop it up. Well, Uh, I'm sure
Speaker 1: you guys have all guests we were gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about hell today. UM. In fact, we're gonna another episode
Speaker 1: coming out about the science of Hell. And I do
Speaker 1: think that it's one of those things that has gone
Speaker 1: by the wayside in terms, at least that's from my perspective,
Speaker 1: that people really feel invested in. UM. But as we'll
Speaker 1: discuss later, it actually is a belief that a lot
Speaker 1: of people hold regardless of this idea that it went um,
Speaker 1: you know, or according to the economists in the article
Speaker 1: and Everlasting Hell, that theologically it's gone by the wayside,
Speaker 1: because even the Vaticans sort of on the fence about
Speaker 1: it um. And in that article it says, you know,
Speaker 1: the devils and pitchforks, the brimstone clouds and whaling souls
Speaker 1: have been cleared away rather as a mad aunt might
Speaker 1: be shut up in an attic. So you know, that
Speaker 1: being said, it's still this idea that that's pervasive, and
Speaker 1: in fact, no matter where you stand on the issue,
Speaker 1: you have to admit that it's actually died into the
Speaker 1: fabric of our existence, that it is um sort of
Speaker 1: creating some of the rules that we we play by
Speaker 1: as humans, right at least in the West in certain cultures.
Speaker 1: And I mean just look at sort of at jail.
Speaker 1: This is a good example of a concrete, uh idea
Speaker 1: of the abstract hell that we think of and that
Speaker 1: has been told to us thousands of years now in
Speaker 1: various forms. Yeah, conceptions of hell or just go side
Speaker 1: by side with with our ideas about what what should
Speaker 1: happen to criminals and wrongdoers in the real world. To
Speaker 1: what extent is it is it punishment? To what extent
Speaker 1: are they being shuffled away? To what extenter there being
Speaker 1: m are they going to be saved and turned back
Speaker 1: into proper citizen? I mean there's some models of even
Speaker 1: um in the in the history of Christie Anity that
Speaker 1: saw there there would be a day when even the
Speaker 1: devil would be saved and brought back into God. I
Speaker 1: mean there. Um. So when you start looking at the
Speaker 1: history of hell, you see all these different takes on it,
Speaker 1: all these different ways that we make we make sense
Speaker 1: of it. Um. One way that I was thinking about
Speaker 1: it recently is it's been proposed that that language is
Speaker 1: the operating system, uh, you know, free the human mind
Speaker 1: that we we have this brain, we have to put
Speaker 1: language in it to deal with a lot of these
Speaker 1: higher concepts. Right. And then you might consider religion a
Speaker 1: data management program that we install to provide us with
Speaker 1: a certain worldview of reality. Okay, Um, it's an optional
Speaker 1: install and you may install another worldview software. You may
Speaker 1: install multiple ones and do kind of like the thing
Speaker 1: on Mac where you have the Windows and you go
Speaker 1: back and forth between the two. Um. More than that,
Speaker 1: in a second. But but you know how you but
Speaker 1: you know how, you install certain software and it comes
Speaker 1: with an antivirus program that you did not want, and
Speaker 1: suddenly it's there, and how do you get rid of it?
Speaker 1: Sometimes I feel that that's what hell is and need
Speaker 1: not be Christianity. But but we can take Christianity Christianity
Speaker 1: as an example. We can also take uh Tibetan Buddhism
Speaker 1: as an example, where once one finds something really um
Speaker 1: enamoring about the concept, something really positive, like you know,
Speaker 1: like that there's this guy named Jesus and he's gonna
Speaker 1: he's gonna save my soul, or there's this there's this
Speaker 1: thing called karma and there and I can eventually work
Speaker 1: myself through all these different phases of life and find
Speaker 1: liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. But both
Speaker 1: Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity, if you if you look at
Speaker 1: them closely enough, you you get into these problematic um
Speaker 1: concerns about hell in the in the Christian tradition and
Speaker 1: in Tibetan Buddhism, a lot of a lot of thought
Speaker 1: goes into how to avoid reincarnation into the lower realms
Speaker 1: and actually to Devot tibetan Buddhist can cause a great
Speaker 1: goal of anxiety. Um, well, and what we're talking about
Speaker 1: when we talk about anxiety is the psychology of this. Yes,
Speaker 1: and uh I thought it was very interesting in the
Speaker 1: book The History of Hell. But les K Turner that
Speaker 1: she brought up psychoanalysis and hell. And she said that
Speaker 1: the Journey of Dante, because this is sort of the
Speaker 1: gold standard that we'll talk about, and Dante's Inferno. The
Speaker 1: journey of Dante and Virgil through the Inferno was an
Speaker 1: interior metaphor, and it was an allegory of the human
Speaker 1: experience that you have to, you know, trudge through the
Speaker 1: dark knight of the soul before spiritual re emergence. And
Speaker 1: so she said that this has really turned out our
Speaker 1: idea of psycho analysis. She says, a patient must explore
Speaker 1: with his guide the deep sources of his unhappiness and
Speaker 1: inability to follow the true path, and he must endure
Speaker 1: the painful purgatory of examining and challenging his behavior before
Speaker 1: achieving the relative paradise of mental health. So, even in
Speaker 1: this way, Hell has pervaded our idea of of how
Speaker 1: we experience things as human beings. How we talk about them,
Speaker 1: even psycho analysis. You know, I was thinking about this
Speaker 1: in terms of mad Men, because this past season has
Speaker 1: been all about a journey and certainly sins and dealing
Speaker 1: with sin and the weight of that sin. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: there's an early scene where Don Draper is reading The
Speaker 1: Inferno on the beach. Yeah. And there's another great scene
Speaker 1: where Roger Sterling is in psychoanalysis with with and he's, uh,
Speaker 1: he's sitting there trying to explain his frustration in life
Speaker 1: and where he's arrived. And it's really interesting because usually
Speaker 1: Roger Sterling is just sort of cutting up and making jokes,
Speaker 1: but here he is sort of giving you a portal
Speaker 1: into his soul and he says, uh, he's on this
Speaker 1: path and it's a frustrating path. He says, what are
Speaker 1: the events in life? It's like you see a door
Speaker 1: the first time you come to you say, oh, what's
Speaker 1: on the other side of the door. Then you open
Speaker 1: a few doors, Then you say, I think I want
Speaker 1: to go over that bridge this time. I'm tired of doors. Finally,
Speaker 1: you go through one of these things and you come
Speaker 1: out on the other side and you realize that that's
Speaker 1: all there are doors and windows and bridges and gates,
Speaker 1: and they all open the same way, and they all
Speaker 1: closed behind you. Look, life is supposed to be a
Speaker 1: path and you go along and these things happen to you,
Speaker 1: and they're supposed to change you, change your action. But
Speaker 1: turns out that's not true. Turns out the experiences are nothing.
Speaker 1: They're just some pennies you pick up off the floor
Speaker 1: you stick in your pocket, and you're just going in
Speaker 1: a straight line to you know where, Hell, of course,
Speaker 1: And so that imagery again, it's and we'll get more
Speaker 1: into this when we talk about Dante and we talk
Speaker 1: about the nine circles of Hell. But the bridges and
Speaker 1: the doors and the gates in the path and the
Speaker 1: meandering is all part and parcel of what we think
Speaker 1: of um when we think about a journey of our
Speaker 1: soul or trying to transcend our physical selves. Yeah. Medievalist
Speaker 1: Howard Roland Patch he actually broke down a number of
Speaker 1: the elements appearing in nearly all known accounts of the underworld,
Speaker 1: you know, the afterlive, hell, hades, what have you, both
Speaker 1: in the Eastern and Western world. And he said that
Speaker 1: they include a mountain, barrier, a river, a boar, and
Speaker 1: a boatman, a bridge, gates and guardians and import in
Speaker 1: an important tree. And except for the bridge, all were
Speaker 1: present in ancient Mesopotamian mythol And of course Roger Sterling
Speaker 1: alludes to these uh and the passage that you read well,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's still summer and people are still
Speaker 1: taking their their summer trips, their pilgrimages. Even even these
Speaker 1: trips that we take to escape the monotony of life
Speaker 1: and to find new experiences is in a way reach
Speaker 1: writing some of this idea of transcending hell. Yeah, brings
Speaker 1: me back to the very first line in Dante's Inferno.
Speaker 1: In the middle of the journey of our life, I
Speaker 1: came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight
Speaker 1: way was lost. There you go. That's what I say
Speaker 1: every time I get in the car to go on
Speaker 1: a road trip. One more thing to to touch on
Speaker 1: before we start breaking down some of the roots of
Speaker 1: hell Um is important to note that a lot of
Speaker 1: us have multiple ideas of what the soul is and
Speaker 1: what the afterlife is um or isn't in our head
Speaker 1: at the same time. You know, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: bit simplistic to say, uh, my name is Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: and I don't believe in ghosts because they're generally I
Speaker 1: don't believe in ghosts, but there are times where I'm
Speaker 1: more inclined to believe in it, or more inclined to
Speaker 1: want to believe in it. And uh, you know, the
Speaker 1: same goes with a lot of religious and mythic things. Um.
Speaker 1: And I've talked before about this idea of like a
Speaker 1: spiritual salad bar, where you take what you want and
Speaker 1: you leave the rest. And apparently it's even more popular
Speaker 1: with the with millennials these days, where they feel completely
Speaker 1: you know, okay with with saying, all right, I like
Speaker 1: this stuff in Buddhism, I'm gonna take that. Um, I
Speaker 1: like this bit from Christianity, I'm gonna take that, and
Speaker 1: then you sort of build your one faith or worldview
Speaker 1: out of that. Uh. But but really we do a
Speaker 1: lot of that anyway. It's kind of the the the
Speaker 1: view of the world that I have right now is
Speaker 1: not necessarily the one I have, um, you know, yesterday tomorrow.
Speaker 1: So a lot of people have varying and conflicting ideas
Speaker 1: about what the soul is and and who we are
Speaker 1: and and really really we talked about human consciousness and
Speaker 1: our views of that in the past, and and a
Speaker 1: lot of that is part and partial to this to
Speaker 1: do hell and and beliefs in the after live, because
Speaker 1: a lot of it comes down to our queens and
Speaker 1: our inability to to come to terms with the difference
Speaker 1: between between flesh and mind and trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what the mind is. And we get into this idea
Speaker 1: of the mind slash soul is this thing that exists
Speaker 1: outside of ourselves and therefore continues after we're gone. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so fascinating when you start to think about it
Speaker 1: that way, that hell is not only the way that
Speaker 1: we color our perception of the world and we organize
Speaker 1: our world again, think of jail's I think of our
Speaker 1: judicial system, but also it is part and parcel of consciousness. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, since the beginning of time that man
Speaker 1: became conscious that you know, he or she was alive
Speaker 1: and looked up at the stars and wondered about death
Speaker 1: and wondered about what would happen afterwards, there has always
Speaker 1: been some sort of afterlife story put in place, or
Speaker 1: some sort of exploration of that topic, which you can't
Speaker 1: have consciousness without having this idea of what would happen afterwards.
Speaker 1: Even if even if that that thing that happened afterwards
Speaker 1: was nothing, that's still a story in a sense, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And it comes down to early people and even modern
Speaker 1: people trying to figure out how the world works. And
Speaker 1: there are things that you can test and that you
Speaker 1: can you can throw a scientific investigation at um, and
Speaker 1: then there are things that you cannot. And when you
Speaker 1: cannot answer those questions with science, that's where all of
Speaker 1: this myth building comes into play. Um. Now we're gonna
Speaker 1: go into kind of a brief history of Hell, and
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna go through everything. If you want to
Speaker 1: really fabulous uh examination of the history of Hell and
Speaker 1: our belief in it, do check out The History of
Speaker 1: Hell by Alice K. Turner is a fabulous book, very readable,
Speaker 1: wonderful illustrations throughout. Um. But we're not going to give
Speaker 1: that concise of a journey because we'll be here all day. Uh.
Speaker 1: One thing to keep in mind though with all of
Speaker 1: this is that is that you you have to look
Speaker 1: at religion not as a thing that comes off the press,
Speaker 1: is you know, completely made it is um. It's more
Speaker 1: like a pit through which humans have thrown ideas down
Speaker 1: or like an ice cream cone where we're piling ideas up. Um.
Speaker 1: But for instance, UM, you know, I've read a little
Speaker 1: bit about the Hinduism here and there, and I often
Speaker 1: um read that it described as something that you can't
Speaker 1: really sum up, like you can't give like a really
Speaker 1: good one paragraph summary of what Hinduism is, because Hinduism
Speaker 1: is such an old religion built on you know, earlier
Speaker 1: Vedic models. It just it's just a pit that goes
Speaker 1: down through the centuries, through through millennia, and there have
Speaker 1: just been all these ideas about gods and goddesses and
Speaker 1: the human soul thrown down there, ranging from the literal
Speaker 1: to the philosophic and uh. And there are there are
Speaker 1: shallower pits as well, such as the pits of of
Speaker 1: of of Judeo Christian and Islamic tradition and uh. And
Speaker 1: those two are are built upon all these ideas that
Speaker 1: have built up over over the years. And like the
Speaker 1: Christianity of today is not the Christianity of a few
Speaker 1: centuries ago, etcetera. So keep all of that in mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I kind of think of it as those being sentiments, right,
Speaker 1: the layers of stories that have just been built upon
Speaker 1: each other. And if you were to take a soil
Speaker 1: sample and bringing out you could be you would be
Speaker 1: able to identify like, oh, look there's the Egyptian Book
Speaker 1: of Dead, Um, you know, there's Judaiciah, there's you know,
Speaker 1: and and be able to say like that informed this,
Speaker 1: and this informed that and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: And to go back to the the analogy of religion
Speaker 1: as a as a program on the operating system, it
Speaker 1: probably makes for a pretty unruly program that I'm sure
Speaker 1: some of our programmer listeners out there can can attest
Speaker 1: to that. It's it's the system that's just built up
Speaker 1: over time and probably you know, you probably need to
Speaker 1: go in there and just recreate everything. But you have
Speaker 1: all this stuff that's in there. Uh fie a legacy. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we should all pull up a chair right now,
Speaker 1: get settled and uh laid on us, give us, give
Speaker 1: us the roots of hell. Okay. Well, uh fabulous notion
Speaker 1: that was presented in some of the texts we're looking at,
Speaker 1: uh is the idea that what happens when you go
Speaker 1: back to like really ancient man, hunter gatherer man, what
Speaker 1: what what are they? What kind of gods are they? Glimpsing. Well,
Speaker 1: certainly gods that had to do with hunting, right, because
Speaker 1: this was not an agrarian society yet. So they're on
Speaker 1: the move, and uh, it seems to me like they
Speaker 1: would be things would be a lot less um stable
Speaker 1: for them. Yeah, be like the winds of change all
Speaker 1: the time, chaotic even, Yes. So the argument is that
Speaker 1: the the early humans they looked to horned gods, gods
Speaker 1: of the hunt, gods that were like, you know, like
Speaker 1: the dear God that is over the deer that we hunt. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a god of chaos, and it's a god that
Speaker 1: you're just kind of really you're really hoping that the
Speaker 1: dear God will shine on you so that you can
Speaker 1: actually find enough deer, kill enough deer, and bring back
Speaker 1: enough meat where your people can survive for another day.
Speaker 1: So those are the gods of the hunt. But then
Speaker 1: in time we learn to grow things. This agrarian society
Speaker 1: begins to grow up, and suddenly we begin to adopt
Speaker 1: new gods. So we'd bring in celestial gods, gods that
Speaker 1: are in line with the seasons and cycles, because now
Speaker 1: we're farming and we're much more tied to the land
Speaker 1: and things are a lot more predictable. Right, So you
Speaker 1: kind have all of these demi gods hanging out from
Speaker 1: from years past, right, Yeah, you don't want to throw
Speaker 1: out the old gods thousands years past. It sounds like
Speaker 1: a bad idea. And they're chaotic and they have horns,
Speaker 1: so we keep them, but they're more resided to the earth,
Speaker 1: and so we end up with these these hornet Earth
Speaker 1: gods and these celestial sky gods. Um. So that's one
Speaker 1: kind of cool idea of just sort of looking at
Speaker 1: the roots of some of our beliefs about uh, not
Speaker 1: only ruling uh, you know, superhuman deities, but also the
Speaker 1: places they inhabit. This idea of sky and deep Earth
Speaker 1: and then the middle ground where we humans do our things.
Speaker 1: And speaking of deep Earth, where are we burying people
Speaker 1: but in the earth. So again there's this idea of
Speaker 1: afterlife being tied to what is under us. Now I
Speaker 1: already mentioned some of the the the elements that you
Speaker 1: find and even the most ancient ideas of the afterlife
Speaker 1: and uh, and this all takes back to to just
Speaker 1: ancient Mesopotamian mythology. This is the age of Gilgamesh four
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. And even here you had, you had
Speaker 1: a celestial queen named in Nana or Ishtar, who rules
Speaker 1: over the heavens and the earth, while we're sister queen
Speaker 1: Erska Gal or allowed to rules over the dead in
Speaker 1: the Land of No Return. And we live in that
Speaker 1: space between, this borderland between heaven and a sort of hell.
Speaker 1: Uh and and and and we quickly find Gilgamesh traveling
Speaker 1: to the other side in the first of many descent
Speaker 1: stories to fill human history. Um. And then there's another
Speaker 1: story where Erska Gal even takes a hostage from the heavens,
Speaker 1: ushering in cyclical seasons, which is another trope that occurs
Speaker 1: throughout myth, the idea that that one of the sky
Speaker 1: beings is taken and has to live a certain part
Speaker 1: of the year, the winter uh in the underworld. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then there's even another tale where Erska Gal threatens
Speaker 1: to flood the earth with the dead quote so that
Speaker 1: they might devour the living, which also makes it kind
Speaker 1: of the oldest zombie account, or at least the threat
Speaker 1: of zombies. But even in these these uh, these stories,
Speaker 1: the afterlife remains a place of sort of generic in life,
Speaker 1: a sort of limbo uh. In another world, there's no
Speaker 1: true punishment or reward. It's just this idea that well,
Speaker 1: the soul, the consciousness lives on and what does it do?
Speaker 1: I guess it just kind of bums about in a gray,
Speaker 1: shadowy world. And this is an idea that that sticks
Speaker 1: with us for a very long time. Now, if we
Speaker 1: look back at the Egyptian Book of the Dead uh
Speaker 1: from around we we find some very fascinating, very rich
Speaker 1: views of what the afterlife would be. Now, in the
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptian religion, it failed to travel well, as Alice K.
Speaker 1: Turner makes makes this point. Also, it didn't survive a
Speaker 1: test of time. But it's just not something that really spread.
Speaker 1: And it didn't have legs, you could say, no, and
Speaker 1: if it did, we would probably all worship cats, right, Yes,
Speaker 1: they loved they love their cats more than we do now. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But but it was a rich religion and it put
Speaker 1: extreme emphasis on the afterlife. It had just a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of amazing ideas about what the soul was.
Speaker 1: For instance, the soul was just one aspect of the person.
Speaker 1: He had a soul or bo the often depicted as
Speaker 1: a human headed bird uh. And there's just one part
Speaker 1: of the cocktail of being which and also involved a
Speaker 1: car or life force, a coup or spiritual intelligence, a
Speaker 1: sekim or power, and a cohibit shadow and a wren name.
Speaker 1: So all these things come together to make up who
Speaker 1: we are. Um. But then the idea is that if
Speaker 1: you die, then your soul will continues on this journey.
Speaker 1: And this is where I think it's really interesting because
Speaker 1: in the Egyptian Book of Dead you begin to see
Speaker 1: this judicial system evolve because your soul can actually be weighed,
Speaker 1: and it can be weighed against the feather from the
Speaker 1: head dress of Matt who is the goddess of truth.
Speaker 1: And if your heart is burdened with sin, well you'll
Speaker 1: find out that Amt, a tiny little creature that's sitting nearby,
Speaker 1: will gobble up your heart. This will be your fate.
Speaker 1: So here we have this idea of the afterlife coming
Speaker 1: to fruition in the Book of Dead. Um. So again
Speaker 1: you might not think of this coloring our world view now,
Speaker 1: but but later on, later on, yeah, things are things
Speaker 1: are being put into place about what happens when you sin. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the idea is that if you're good, you get
Speaker 1: to pass on into this other world. This saki Haru,
Speaker 1: the field of rushes, and if you're bad, it's just annihilation.
Speaker 1: This monster eats your soul and that's it. Uh. And
Speaker 1: but but then the interesting thing is the field of
Speaker 1: Russia is is is not a heaven, and it's not,
Speaker 1: but it's also not just that gray area of Limbo.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like it's his own fabulous world. They're
Speaker 1: fifteen regions, each ruled by a god. One of them
Speaker 1: is that there's just one place where there's no air
Speaker 1: and an egg. God rules over everything. Or it's like
Speaker 1: the God is in an egg. It's very cryptic and
Speaker 1: and wonderful, and you have to take with you stuff.
Speaker 1: As you know, his evident by anyone who's ever watched
Speaker 1: the documentary about pyramids. Um, this is a world where
Speaker 1: you're gonna needs, you know, you might want to farm there.
Speaker 1: You're gonna need some protection against giant beetles. You might
Speaker 1: need some spells. Uh, you might you might need to
Speaker 1: bring some loved one, some pets, some golds and foods,
Speaker 1: some comfort, do you know. And I didn't realize this
Speaker 1: until I read this book, Um, that there were gollums
Speaker 1: that were buried with them in the Golems, of course,
Speaker 1: are like this sort of not mindless person or creature,
Speaker 1: but it does your bidding. Yeah, it's a like an
Speaker 1: inanimate form that is given life through some manner of sorcery.
Speaker 1: So in the afterlife, if you have like forty gollum,
Speaker 1: you are set because they're doing everything for you. So anyway,
Speaker 1: just an interesting little that idea too. In the Terracotta Warriors,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, you need an army in the afterlife.
Speaker 1: Build one, bring it with you. It makes me want
Speaker 1: to I mean, I think my plan is to be
Speaker 1: cremated when I die, but maybe I can still have
Speaker 1: a gollum. I feel like I need a gollum to
Speaker 1: help me out. Well, your a could be contained in
Speaker 1: a gollum. I like that, But does that mean I
Speaker 1: become the gollum? It becomes kind of complicated. Now. I
Speaker 1: definitely want a psychopomp, which you also see a lot
Speaker 1: in these tales. Um psychopomp being a spirit guide or
Speaker 1: a creature that takes you through the afterlife. So maybe
Speaker 1: the gollum could be my psychopomp. Are kind of hoping
Speaker 1: that my psychopomp is a at but let's see. Okay,
Speaker 1: So anyway, Egyptian Book of the Dead that contribution um. Now,
Speaker 1: eventually you get some really cool ideas in the form
Speaker 1: of Zoroastrianism. Uh. And this is uh like pretty much
Speaker 1: everything else, it has its roots and ancient Vedic beliefs
Speaker 1: of India and it's it is a duellist religion, meaning
Speaker 1: that there is an absolute force of good in the
Speaker 1: universe counterbalanced by an absolute force of evil. The good
Speaker 1: is Otto Mazda, who lives in the sky, and the
Speaker 1: evil is Ottoman, who lives in the hell beneath the earth.
Speaker 1: And after death, the soul is judged by an angelic
Speaker 1: spirit named Rashnu uh and the good pot pass on
Speaker 1: into the House of Song. The evil descend into Hell,
Speaker 1: which is ruled by Yama. The first man to die
Speaker 1: and the rest they go into this limbo that resembles
Speaker 1: this original Babylonian vision of the afterlife again shadowy world
Speaker 1: where souls just kind of bum around and bounce into
Speaker 1: each other. And uh and this this is also really
Speaker 1: key with those Zoroastrianism is that a cosmic battle will
Speaker 1: ultimately decide everything. Avior will descend into Hell. Yeah, said,
Speaker 1: will descend into Hell, save everybody. Hell will be destroyed,
Speaker 1: and new Kingdom of God will be born on earth.
Speaker 1: What does that sound like. Oh, my goodness, that sounds
Speaker 1: like Christianity. In fact, a savior name Socian is born
Speaker 1: of a virgin impregnated with the seed of Zoroaster. Who
Speaker 1: So that's pretty specific, right, You can see the influence
Speaker 1: there pretty clearly. Yeah, And you know, and and that
Speaker 1: doesn't take away from any beliefs. Like I said, I
Speaker 1: think it's just about realizing that this is how we
Speaker 1: get our beliefs. We build up these stories over time,
Speaker 1: and you know, you should be happy that your system
Speaker 1: of belief has deep roots. Um, there's some other ideas
Speaker 1: that of course kicked around as well. The Greeks, Romans,
Speaker 1: and Jews had some very similar ideas in many respects.
Speaker 1: With the ancient Greeks, we see the the afterlife hades
Speaker 1: is a mere repository for the dead, and there's some
Speaker 1: punishment there, but it's generally you know, the Titans that
Speaker 1: are chained, the you know, the the elder beings that
Speaker 1: that the God's word with and they so you'd have
Speaker 1: to really commit a crime against the gods to be
Speaker 1: punished you in the afterlife. Otherwise it's just gray souls
Speaker 1: shadows bumping into each other. Well, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a house of horrors, right, almost like that the team
Speaker 1: like um house of horrors that are put on by
Speaker 1: churches where you can see all this ins in those
Speaker 1: typical stories. Um, it's more of like just hey, we're
Speaker 1: gonna cruise through here and we're gonna just see a
Speaker 1: little bit a little flavor of this. Well, yeah, everybody
Speaker 1: wants to visit hell. So many of our stories are
Speaker 1: like that. I mean, Dante's story is a big one.
Speaker 1: But you know, Dante was not the first person to
Speaker 1: write a story where someone toured the afterlife. Virgil did
Speaker 1: it before. And that's my Virgil is his guide or
Speaker 1: his psychopomp in the Inferno and uh, and you just
Speaker 1: sell countless versions of this before. People are always going
Speaker 1: down into the underworld to save somebody or just tour
Speaker 1: it to learn something, to grow. It's just a it's
Speaker 1: a common trope that we keep coming back to when
Speaker 1: we're gonna continue to do it. Um. Speaking of Virgil,
Speaker 1: of course, the Romans initially had views more in keeping
Speaker 1: with Shintoism, where he had spirits and everything. Um. But
Speaker 1: with the increasing doses of Greek myth, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it changed and really grew more into that model. And
Speaker 1: then Virgil wrotevia Neid, which sees our hero and Nias
Speaker 1: travel to the land of the dead in search of
Speaker 1: advice from his dead father. And again, of course Virgil
Speaker 1: goes on to the influence Dante, which will discuss later.
Speaker 1: And then you have the Jews who believed in a
Speaker 1: place so called Shiel, which is often translated as the
Speaker 1: grave or the pit. And again just another gray, ghostly
Speaker 1: world of shades. Uh. Turner says in her book that
Speaker 1: there was a lot of cross pollenization going on in
Speaker 1: the Roman Empire because you had the great influence, you
Speaker 1: have Roman influence and mister influences coming in as well. Right,
Speaker 1: she sees like all sorts of things starting to converge.
Speaker 1: And uh, there's a good little passage here that says
Speaker 1: the old religions were assaulted by mosaic of novelties entirely.
Speaker 1: New gods like the Greco Egyptian therapists were fabricated, while
Speaker 1: old ones arrived from strange lands. It goes on to
Speaker 1: say that there's influence in Turkey and so on and
Speaker 1: so forth, so you get a lot of the sharing
Speaker 1: of ideas here. And again this rich fabric of what
Speaker 1: the story of hell and the afterlife becomes for us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then the Zoroastrian influence continues, uh, and it continues
Speaker 1: to democratize hell. In in Turner's words, um, the good
Speaker 1: souls have to go somewhere right, and then the bad
Speaker 1: souls have to go somewhere else. And then you get
Speaker 1: this rich, dark, disturbing, and endlessly fascinating vision of what
Speaker 1: hell might consist of. And then we have to rationalize
Speaker 1: all of that with our belief in and or a
Speaker 1: devotion to a divine being. So you get into this
Speaker 1: problem of hell and you have to work out the kinks.
Speaker 1: And like the idea of a program that is built
Speaker 1: upon a previous program, in a previous one, you have
Speaker 1: all these problems that need to be worked out in
Speaker 1: the program, Or like a novel that has each chapter
Speaker 1: has been written by a different author, and you have
Speaker 1: to go back and somehow work all these plot holes
Speaker 1: out well. And it is really interesting because depending on
Speaker 1: the culture your your Hell is going to be very different.
Speaker 1: So if you have a culture that has a lot
Speaker 1: of different levels of classes, then you're gonna have many
Speaker 1: different classes in Hell. Or as you say, there's one
Speaker 1: version of hell that is democratized, um. And it's it's
Speaker 1: talking more about perhaps the Greek culture and people existing.
Speaker 1: If you've sinned, then then you're all on the same
Speaker 1: page or all you know, nobody is higher than the
Speaker 1: other person. And I couldn't help but think about the
Speaker 1: blog post that you recently wrote. This is a little
Speaker 1: bit of a diversion, but it's about cubicles and office
Speaker 1: space and which version of hell your your open office
Speaker 1: or your cubicle hell um. And there's an element of
Speaker 1: the democratization to that as well. All Right, we're gonna
Speaker 1: take a quick break and we come back. We're gonna
Speaker 1: get even more into this idea of the problem with
Speaker 1: healthy Alright, we're back. So what could be the problem
Speaker 1: with a place where sinners are flayed, staked, disemboweled and
Speaker 1: eating a lot. What's wrong with that? Well, because in
Speaker 1: most of these you have to it has to make
Speaker 1: sense with the rest of this university you've built and uh,
Speaker 1: and there are different ways you attempt to do that.
Speaker 1: But certainly any kind of monotheistic religion you have a
Speaker 1: god at the head of it, and what kind of
Speaker 1: god do you want to invest your time in? Is
Speaker 1: it a Is it a god who has something called
Speaker 1: it a hell and allows it to exist and sends
Speaker 1: people there. That sends dead infants there, That sends people
Speaker 1: who hadn't heard about the message of the truth, people
Speaker 1: that had varying uh, you know, faith and varying beliefs
Speaker 1: that they go there as well. I mean, how do
Speaker 1: you how do you deal with that? Or do you
Speaker 1: decide your God is that type of God? And then
Speaker 1: does that shake your belief in the whole system? So
Speaker 1: there's two issues there, Like one is how do you
Speaker 1: meet out justice in the afterlife? Right? And how do
Speaker 1: you determine what is sin and what is not sin?
Speaker 1: Because everybody has a different take on that. And as
Speaker 1: you said, if you have innocence, let's say, babies who
Speaker 1: are not baptized, then well they're going to help. Right,
Speaker 1: You've got to create new rules to figure out how
Speaker 1: that works. And you've got a choice. You can have
Speaker 1: a God who was warm and cuddly and fuzzy that
Speaker 1: you take a positive message from and you just kind
Speaker 1: of say, you know what, Hell is not my concern.
Speaker 1: Heaven is my concern. Yeah, And uh, this God would
Speaker 1: like me to join him in heaven clearly, or you
Speaker 1: could say I may not be worthy for heaven, and
Speaker 1: many other people may not be as well. Yeah, now
Speaker 1: they're There are various ways of dealing with this, and
Speaker 1: one is just exactly what kind of a view of
Speaker 1: hell there is? And it's not quite as simple as
Speaker 1: they are those of us who do not believe there's hell.
Speaker 1: And then there are those of us who believe there
Speaker 1: is a literal place where where Devil's torture sinners. It's
Speaker 1: not quite that kind of right. You do have literal
Speaker 1: there is literal belief in hell where it is that
Speaker 1: where there is a place probably under the earth, where
Speaker 1: sinners are tormented. But then there's also a more psychological
Speaker 1: view where instead of being physically tormented at the at
Speaker 1: the behalf or at least the permission of a statistic God. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's more about being separate from God. Being separate from
Speaker 1: God is torture. Um. There's like a mild cycule tychological view.
Speaker 1: There's Um, there's the idea that hell is self inflicted.
Speaker 1: And you throw full free will into the equation and say, well,
Speaker 1: it's not really God tormenting you. You had the free
Speaker 1: will and you're choosing to live this way, and in
Speaker 1: some of these models, you can get out in any
Speaker 1: time you want. It's just do you do you have
Speaker 1: the belief, you have the faith to do so. There's
Speaker 1: a There are also plenty of versions of it where
Speaker 1: hell is temporary, the idea that hell is like a
Speaker 1: place where souls only have to burn for a certain
Speaker 1: amount of time and then they either are saved or
Speaker 1: they're annihilated at the end. There's some versions of of
Speaker 1: hell belief where hell is annihilation. Being cast into the
Speaker 1: fiery furnace is is death is annihilation. It is that
Speaker 1: crocodile faced beast from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Speaker 1: And then you have, especially in Eastern models of the
Speaker 1: Hell's such as the Nakaras in you know, Hinduism, Buddhism,
Speaker 1: and various other Asian myth cycles, the idea that we
Speaker 1: go through these different lives, there's reinca ornated into different
Speaker 1: phases of being, and you can fall down the chain
Speaker 1: of being, you can fall into these lesser realms of existence,
Speaker 1: such as the Hellishnkaras. But it's but it's not a
Speaker 1: permanent place. Um it's a place that you can you experience,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of a refining of the soul, and
Speaker 1: then you can you can work your way back up
Speaker 1: to better stages of existence and ultimately ideally free yourself
Speaker 1: from the wheel entirely. The problem is that nobody can
Speaker 1: really agree on what hell is right, so uh, and
Speaker 1: I think the issue of this is that you know,
Speaker 1: from from classical texts, back to very very ancient text
Speaker 1: it was thought that Hell dwelled under us right um,
Speaker 1: and the main things a lot easier back than to
Speaker 1: think that in a sense, because what you're talking about
Speaker 1: is that it's low ground geographically. You can point at
Speaker 1: that time and say clearly it's it's right underneath us um.
Speaker 1: In fact, Pausanias, a Greek geographer, said that Hell was
Speaker 1: as far beneath Hades, says Hades is beneath the earth.
Speaker 1: But along comes Galileo and Galleto suggests, well, you know,
Speaker 1: the Earth is not the center of the universe. The
Speaker 1: Sun does not revolve around the Earth, and therefore, if
Speaker 1: the Earth is not the center of the universe, then
Speaker 1: where where does Hell now reside? So that was really
Speaker 1: one of the big problems with the Church is that
Speaker 1: they said, okay, if Heaven is hanging above us, and
Speaker 1: Hell is below us, and you're telling us that there's
Speaker 1: something beyond the earth that is the universe um, and
Speaker 1: we're not central to it. Then it really does displace Hell,
Speaker 1: and it makes it much less likely as a logical
Speaker 1: construct or you just have to make You have to
Speaker 1: imagine that exists in like another dimension, that Heaven and
Speaker 1: Hell are both extradimensional places. You couldn't even fly there
Speaker 1: in a spaceship. But this is the teasing a part
Speaker 1: of Hell and the logistics of it in a sense,
Speaker 1: because now that it is banished to even a further
Speaker 1: round of imagination, that is to have been taken out
Speaker 1: of the ground, the soil, it's been turned into Narnia,
Speaker 1: has been turned into Narnia, then you begin to understand
Speaker 1: that it is perhaps a construct of the human mind.
Speaker 1: And that's all part of the problem too, because you
Speaker 1: have you have individuals who who see it this way,
Speaker 1: and then you have individuals who either do believe in
Speaker 1: a Hell, or more likely they cling to a faith
Speaker 1: that also has Hell somewhere in the fabric. And we've
Speaker 1: all had that situation where we've if we're not you know,
Speaker 1: uber religious, ourselves you will end up encountering someone who is.
Speaker 1: And if you don't, actually you may not actually discuss
Speaker 1: it with them, but there will come a point. And
Speaker 1: I remember this and thinking about this alting like junior
Speaker 1: high in high school, where you know, I had friends
Speaker 1: that were mostly were Protestant um but there were all
Speaker 1: these different Protestant faiths, some of which supposedly, uh thought
Speaker 1: they were the only ones who would actually make it
Speaker 1: to happen. I don't know how much of that was
Speaker 1: just sort of inviting and bickering, but that was kind
Speaker 1: of the charge, Like I would say, oh, well, those
Speaker 1: guys at that shirts they think they're the only ones
Speaker 1: going to happen. And then we also had there were
Speaker 1: some there were Catholics in the area. They were Jehovah's witnesses,
Speaker 1: had a number of friends who are who are Mormon,
Speaker 1: and and so you end up in these situations where
Speaker 1: you're like, now, if their faith is right, that means
Speaker 1: I'm going to hell. And then my preacher just the
Speaker 1: other day, so that these guys are going to hell,
Speaker 1: and you start trying to map out these different relationships
Speaker 1: and if you you know, if you let this kind
Speaker 1: of thing get the better off you. It can lead
Speaker 1: to some uncomfortable confrontations. It can, and I think because
Speaker 1: some of this is predicated on what Turner calls abominable fancy.
Speaker 1: Um did you come across this in the book? I
Speaker 1: thought it was really interesting. It's ultimately this Catharsis that's
Speaker 1: built on the foundation of shaken Freud. So Turner says
Speaker 1: that it's a it's one of the less savoring notions
Speaker 1: of the early Church. And it's this idea that part
Speaker 1: of the joy of being saved laying contemplating the souls
Speaker 1: of the damned. Yeah, it's there's also in this idea
Speaker 1: is this kind of notion that in this world old
Speaker 1: in the real world, evils often go unpunished and goods
Speaker 1: often go unrewarded. But eventually, if we're faithful in the afterlife,
Speaker 1: God's going to sort it all out. And these people
Speaker 1: that that were that were vicious or vile or lived
Speaker 1: outside of my group, uh, they will get their come
Speaker 1: upance and I will get my rewards. Uh So, And
Speaker 1: and that can be I guess you know, like you said,
Speaker 1: it can be a comforting idea, especially if someone is
Speaker 1: in a is downtrodden, if your life really is not
Speaker 1: working out and is filled with a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of torment. There's gotta be something rewarding about the
Speaker 1: notion will in the next life, I'm going to be rewarded,
Speaker 1: and these people who are living high in the hog
Speaker 1: off of my misery, they're going to be the ones
Speaker 1: to suffer. So that can be both rewarding and a
Speaker 1: disturbing concept. Likewise, there's the the ever present concept of
Speaker 1: hell as the Boogeyman story, Hell is the thing that
Speaker 1: someone is, that the threat that someone gives you in
Speaker 1: order to make you fall into line. But at also
Speaker 1: it's cathartic in the sense that it what they're saying
Speaker 1: with abominable fancies that you can occupy the station of
Speaker 1: the Boogeyman meeting out justice. Right, So if you're sitting
Speaker 1: there saying I'm saved and you're damned, then in a sense,
Speaker 1: you're inhabiting the sort of false humility. And it reminded
Speaker 1: me of the episode we did on Pride when we
Speaker 1: did the Seventh Sins, because there was a study in
Speaker 1: which it was talked about how humility, which is thought
Speaker 1: to be the opposite of pride, is actually pretty similar
Speaker 1: in terms of what's going on in the noggin, and uh,
Speaker 1: there's cognitive neuroscientist Julian Paul Keenan. He looked at transcranial
Speaker 1: magnetic stimulation to disrupt deliberate self deprecation, this humility. He
Speaker 1: found that the patterns of brain activation during self deprecation
Speaker 1: are fundamentally the same as self deceptive pride, so the
Speaker 1: same part of the brain is activated. And I thought
Speaker 1: that was really interesting because maybe some of this is
Speaker 1: tied to that, that this idea that you're hardwired or
Speaker 1: humans are hardwired in a way to try to uh
Speaker 1: put themselves on a pedestal and meet out justice and
Speaker 1: assume this false humility in order to see themselves feel
Speaker 1: vindicated in any sort of do gooding that they've performed.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of it's like vigilante justice on a
Speaker 1: on a weird kind of like thought way, you know,
Speaker 1: in a mental vigilante action. Yea, right, right, So it
Speaker 1: would be very interesting if they could take that study
Speaker 1: and then uh, you know, slice it up with people
Speaker 1: who are contemplating hell for others since see if that corresponded.
Speaker 1: But I just wanted to mention that because I think, again,
Speaker 1: this is a problem of hell. Is it meant to
Speaker 1: um to divert us in a way that's cooperative for
Speaker 1: the community, that's a positive? In other words, can hell
Speaker 1: exist as this example that we point to say you're
Speaker 1: gonna go to hell if you don't, you know, do
Speaker 1: what you're supposed to do? Or is it a way
Speaker 1: of us occupying maybe the darkest reaches of our minds
Speaker 1: and um and playing out this drama in a safe way? Right?
Speaker 1: You don't not actually want anybody to be hurt or
Speaker 1: tormented or eaten in hell, but it's a it's an
Speaker 1: easy way to say, oh, that person, they drive me nuts,
Speaker 1: They're going to Hell. Yeah, And that's where a lot
Speaker 1: of the problem comes in, like how do you separate
Speaker 1: the oh, you know, there they suck, They're going to
Speaker 1: go to hell, Like how do you have It's one
Speaker 1: thing to think that, but then how do you rationalize
Speaker 1: that with some sort of notion that, oh, yeah, they'll
Speaker 1: actually go to a place where you know, demons will
Speaker 1: you know, torment their flesh forever. You know, that's like
Speaker 1: you know who deserves that well? And it's funny because
Speaker 1: we talk about it more in this this abstract realm.
Speaker 1: But back in the day, particularly in Galilet, it was
Speaker 1: just just a real threat. Right, if someone thought that
Speaker 1: you were committing a sin, they wouldn't meet out that
Speaker 1: justice for you. They wouldn't wait for for they wouldn't
Speaker 1: sit around and say, oh, when he gets to Hell,
Speaker 1: he's going to suffer. Well. In the medieval church, of course,
Speaker 1: they had a tremendous amount of power over the faithful
Speaker 1: because they ultimately had the power to decide who goes
Speaker 1: to Hell and who goes to heaven. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: you could, you could put you know, a nation on
Speaker 1: an interdict. You could, you could excommunicate somebody, and that
Speaker 1: was if you believed in into it enough, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people did. That was that was a tremendous
Speaker 1: threat to level against an individual and it it It can,
Speaker 1: It could and did decide like you know, whole international incidents.
Speaker 1: Which again, if you don't think that Hell has some
Speaker 1: sort of shaping of our current culture, you're wrong because
Speaker 1: you have to look back again at these examples which
Speaker 1: have informed how we live today. Yeah, if we didn't
Speaker 1: have have some sort of theology involving Hell at varying
Speaker 1: stages in the history of Western civilization, we'd be speaking
Speaker 1: different languages. Now, it's true. I shouldn't say you're wrong,
Speaker 1: but I would say, please reconsider. Yeah, I mean, just
Speaker 1: let's look back at the events of ten sixty six
Speaker 1: and imagine a world in which the Catholic Church didn't
Speaker 1: level this kind of supposed power over the fate of
Speaker 1: the soul. And and you know, we did an episode
Speaker 1: on witchcraft, so or rather which is and I won't
Speaker 1: go into that, but you can certainly see the trail
Speaker 1: that that led to. I did want to mention that
Speaker 1: Turner says that Dante and exploring Hell so richly in
Speaker 1: The Divine Comedy that he unintentionally killed Hell. Again. This
Speaker 1: is that the notion that if you make something into
Speaker 1: a story, or you abstracted enough that the logic of
Speaker 1: it begins to be teased apart. She said, it's because
Speaker 1: he invited readers to join him in Virgil in a story.
Speaker 1: And she said that Dante made it easier for intellectuals
Speaker 1: of Renaissance and the Enlightenment to reject its reality. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and it's also worth noting that with the Inferno,
Speaker 1: he was not written in Latin. It was written in
Speaker 1: Italian because he wanted it to be accessible by a
Speaker 1: general audience without having to undergo particularly possibly brutal translation
Speaker 1: by others. And it was. It was wildly popular. So
Speaker 1: you might be sitting here thinking, Okay, hell is this construct? Um?
Speaker 1: Some people believe in hell? But just how many people
Speaker 1: believe in hell? What are we talking about here? Well,
Speaker 1: we were looking at a particular article here of titled
Speaker 1: who Believes in Religious Evil and Investigation of sociological patterns
Speaker 1: of belief in Satan, Hell and Demons by Joseph Baker
Speaker 1: at Baylor University. He basically deals with with just the
Speaker 1: United States in this but in breaking down some of
Speaker 1: the uh, the demographics here, it is a bit telling
Speaker 1: um and you can you can find this article online.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna just read through the numbers and stats
Speaker 1: where you but I thought I would read just a
Speaker 1: little bit from the discussion section of the article. So
Speaker 1: Baker says um in in in summarizing his stats about
Speaker 1: these different groups and who believes what he said, African
Speaker 1: Americans tend to have stronger belief in religious evil than
Speaker 1: do whites. Women have stronger degree of belief than men.
Speaker 1: Uh not a net of religious controls. Younger Americans hold
Speaker 1: stronger belief and conceptions of religious evil than older Americans. Finally,
Speaker 1: social class plays an important role in how certain an
Speaker 1: individual is about the existence of religious evil, with those
Speaker 1: of higher social class having weaker confidence about the existence
Speaker 1: of religious evil. However, these effects are conditioned by church attendance.
Speaker 1: For those exhibiting a high level participation in organized religion,
Speaker 1: the influence of social class is neutralized. For those not
Speaker 1: actively participating in organized religion, the influence of social class
Speaker 1: is more pronounced. These results indicate that traditionally power and
Speaker 1: resource deprived groups, African Americans and those of lower social
Speaker 1: classes exhibit strong beliefs in religious evil. Difficult life circumstances
Speaker 1: and suffering often lead individuals to search for meaning. Moreover,
Speaker 1: suffering forces people to conceive of God as removed from
Speaker 1: this you know, hell equation, or they attribute the source
Speaker 1: of suffering to some other form of evil. So I
Speaker 1: thought that was interesting because it it does not only
Speaker 1: with just sort of the demographics. It lets you know,
Speaker 1: like where you fall in the socioeconomic ladder, how that
Speaker 1: influences your belief. And I thought it interesting. The more
Speaker 1: downtrodden you are, it's the less likely you are to
Speaker 1: be worried by the problem of hell because you kind
Speaker 1: of remove God from the source of suffering. God is
Speaker 1: the source of relief, not suffering well, and the perspective
Speaker 1: of God is a good cop in Satan as that
Speaker 1: cop right, Yeah, and then you end up falling back
Speaker 1: into this more duellist view of the great evil and
Speaker 1: the great good, because in Christian tradition, Satan is just
Speaker 1: a fallen angel. He's a disgruntled former employee who wields
Speaker 1: a great amount of power. But he's not the equal
Speaker 1: of God. It's not it's not the you know, the
Speaker 1: ancient uh, you know, Mesopotamian idea. It's not the Zoroastrian
Speaker 1: or the or the Gnostic notion of these two forces.
Speaker 1: And in fact, the Catholic Church show in persecuting heresies
Speaker 1: UH tried really hard to keep dualism from creeping its
Speaker 1: way back into the into this into the understanding of
Speaker 1: the universe. Well, let me put a hard stat against
Speaker 1: all of this u least here in the United States.
Speaker 1: According to Alice K. Turner, six of Americans believe in Hell,
Speaker 1: up from fifty in nineteen fifty three. Now here's the
Speaker 1: real kicker and then here's where American optimism really shines.
Speaker 1: Only four percent think that they'll end up in hell.
Speaker 1: There you go, I mean it. I was reading some
Speaker 1: some thoughts on this too, where in his particularly in
Speaker 1: the United States, No, no one really thinks they're going
Speaker 1: to go to hell. And then we tend to even
Speaker 1: we may, you know, subscribe to a religion that has
Speaker 1: some pretty uh well confusing, but some certain rules in
Speaker 1: placing who gets to go and who's who's good who's bad.
Speaker 1: But then ultimately we kind of fall back on the
Speaker 1: idea that most people go to heaven and only really
Speaker 1: bad people go to hell. And certainly all the celebrities
Speaker 1: go to heaven, oh of course, yeah, yeah, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: even the Kardashians. Yeah, well, you know, they're really just
Speaker 1: sort of wandering maybe. But it's interesting because of that
Speaker 1: sixty six two percent of Americans who believe in how
Speaker 1: nineties six percent think that they're not going to go there.
Speaker 1: So do they really in their heart of hearts And
Speaker 1: we can't obviously, um answer this, but do they really
Speaker 1: in their heart of hearts believe in a health they
Speaker 1: don't think they're going there, or do they just sort
Speaker 1: of say, well, I believe in heaven, and they said
Speaker 1: there's a hell, So I guess I believe in that too,
Speaker 1: because it was recently listened to an interview Terry Gross
Speaker 1: interviewed Stephen King last month, I think, and she was
Speaker 1: asking him about some of this, like belief in heaven
Speaker 1: and hell and supernatural and uh. And he he said
Speaker 1: that did he found it a bit silly to believe
Speaker 1: in heaven and not in hell. You know, it's like,
Speaker 1: why would you just believe in the one when they're
Speaker 1: kind of a pair, And you know, I, I guess
Speaker 1: that's a valid argue. You could, you know, point back
Speaker 1: to some of these ancient models, uh, the Mesopotamian uh,
Speaker 1: one of the Mesopotanian models, with some of the the
Speaker 1: other models and say, well, there's alway there's always this duality.
Speaker 1: But then it's not always the case. There are plenty
Speaker 1: of examples of of afterlife views in which there's really
Speaker 1: there's only one place the soul was going, and it
Speaker 1: may be neutral, or it may be varying the degrees
Speaker 1: of positive. So again, the problem of hell is the
Speaker 1: problem of death and the limits of knowledge. Yes, I
Speaker 1: mean not to to be so reductionless about it, but
Speaker 1: it all points back to this idea where we can't, uh,
Speaker 1: we can't really wrap our minds around what's going to
Speaker 1: happen to us. Um. So this is what's really interesting
Speaker 1: about it is that nonetheless supernatural punishment informs how we
Speaker 1: go about our daily lives. Apparently. Yeah, and this is uh,
Speaker 1: We're gonna get into a couple of studies here, um
Speaker 1: sociology studies that that look at and look at correlations
Speaker 1: between different facts, between beliefs in the in supernatural evil,
Speaker 1: between beliefs in heaven and hell, and how people behave,
Speaker 1: how economies behave. And you know, it's not all cut
Speaker 1: and dry. It's more about correlation. The authors are not
Speaker 1: saying this is the relationship. They're saying, this is interesting,
Speaker 1: we need to study this more. But it it's in
Speaker 1: a way, these these studies that were about to discuss,
Speaker 1: they represent a kind of problem hell for you know,
Speaker 1: for for me, even because when I was first researching this,
Speaker 1: I was kind of had it in my mind. I
Speaker 1: you know, I was reading uh in in Banks, a
Speaker 1: book that deals with the matter that I was discussing
Speaker 1: in the summer reading episode, and you know, I kept
Speaker 1: thinking of, hell, is this barbaric idea that that the
Speaker 1: more advanced of society becomes, the more we need to
Speaker 1: get rid of it. It's a dinosaur or you know,
Speaker 1: a brutal fantasy, and we're better off without it. What
Speaker 1: good could it possibly do us? And then here are
Speaker 1: these two studies. They kind of make a case for
Speaker 1: Hell being a positive motivator. Again, positive motivator. We say this,
Speaker 1: and that the studies quick to point out again this,
Speaker 1: these are correlations. So there's a lot more going on.
Speaker 1: There's very complex things going on in societies to determine
Speaker 1: the crime rate. But that being said, let's roll out
Speaker 1: some of the data here. Okay, alright, So Azim F.
Speaker 1: Sharif Uh he co authored the two thousand and twelve
Speaker 1: paper Diversion Effect of Belief in Heaven and Hell on
Speaker 1: National crime rates and UH his findings are encouraging or
Speaker 1: discouraging compendently on how you look at the matter. H.
Speaker 1: He compared the national crime rates UH with rates of
Speaker 1: belief in Heaven and Hell in sixty seven countries, and
Speaker 1: he came up with with these findings. First of all,
Speaker 1: Heaven's belief rate is almost always higher than Hell's belief. Right,
Speaker 1: all right, that's totally by that, uh, and that kind
Speaker 1: of collaborates my theory that that helps kind of an
Speaker 1: unwanted add on, you know, as I mentioned earlier. But
Speaker 1: then the papers major statistical finding was that nations with
Speaker 1: higher belief rates in Hell predicted lower crime rates, while
Speaker 1: higher belief rates in Heaven predicted higher crime rates. So
Speaker 1: the idea is that health fearing set of citizens are
Speaker 1: more mindful of screwing up in this life, while the
Speaker 1: heaven crowd think that they've got it knocked, you know,
Speaker 1: in the next life, so they might as well do
Speaker 1: what they want in this one. Okay. So this is
Speaker 1: from a comprehensive analysis of twenty six years of data
Speaker 1: involving over one forty three thousand people in sixty seven countries.
Speaker 1: Now in two thousand and three, a Harvard University researcher
Speaker 1: Robert J. Borrow and Rachel M. Then clearly found that
Speaker 1: the gross domestic product was higher in developed countries when
Speaker 1: people believed in Hell more than they did in heaven.
Speaker 1: So here's another aspect of it. That being said, if
Speaker 1: the gross domestic product is higher and uh, there's a
Speaker 1: bigger belief in Hell in those communities and there's less crime.
Speaker 1: Could you say that the economics of this are playing
Speaker 1: a part. In other words, these communities are being served better,
Speaker 1: they have better opportunities for people. And therefore, and I'm
Speaker 1: just throwing devil's up here, just throwing in some other
Speaker 1: nuances of what it means to have a high crime
Speaker 1: rate or a low crime rate. And we know that
Speaker 1: low opportunities, UM often predict higher crime. Right, so I
Speaker 1: get the um. You know there's higher crime when people
Speaker 1: in this correlation, uh say that they believe more in
Speaker 1: heaven than they do in hell. But again, there's a
Speaker 1: lot going on. In fact, Uh, there are some studies
Speaker 1: coming out about how even weather affects crime, and so
Speaker 1: you can't just say, oh, it's a belief system that's
Speaker 1: keeping everything under wraps here. I found it interesting in
Speaker 1: the uh the paper on Hell as a is an
Speaker 1: its effect on crime, they pointed out that human trafficking
Speaker 1: bucked the trend pretty much across the board. So so
Speaker 1: human trafficking, as as as vile as it can be
Speaker 1: in in in some situations like that, was just people
Speaker 1: didn't even think of that as being something you could
Speaker 1: go to Hell for, even in a country where otherwise
Speaker 1: you would be like, you know, murders and thieves would
Speaker 1: definitely be going. Really human traffic. Where does it say
Speaker 1: in the Bible not to traffic humans and not to
Speaker 1: forget to feed them in a in a you know,
Speaker 1: a cargo container. M it doesn't. So it's kind of
Speaker 1: a gray area there, I guess for some people. And
Speaker 1: yet it seems so logical. Was something that that is,
Speaker 1: you know, not something you should do. Yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: not to do it. That's why I don't smuggle people
Speaker 1: across the international borders. And not to get off on
Speaker 1: another topic, but this is a huge problem in the
Speaker 1: United States, especially for um, for sex trafficking, and these
Speaker 1: are a lot of crimes that are perpetrated against women
Speaker 1: and there sort of under the radar. But anyway, that's
Speaker 1: neither here nor there right now. But it's kind of
Speaker 1: mortifying to know that that's the perspective. Well, I guess
Speaker 1: in some cases the individual is saying, I am allowing
Speaker 1: you to take this journey, and if this journey ends
Speaker 1: in a horrible place for you, well, my hands are clean,
Speaker 1: which kind of reminds me of some of these arguments
Speaker 1: about hell and God. God is sort of saying, look,
Speaker 1: you have the free will. I am allowing you to
Speaker 1: take this journey that's gonna into's gonna wind up in hell.
Speaker 1: But but my hands are clean. Good cup, I'm a
Speaker 1: good cup. Um we know what Jean Paul Sartre would say?
Speaker 1: What would he say? Hell is other People? Oh? Well yes,
Speaker 1: so And as a side note, there's actually an app
Speaker 1: that's called hell is other People? Yeah. What does it do?
Speaker 1: It tells you where your friends are so you can
Speaker 1: avoid them. Oh my god, that is brilliant because, um,
Speaker 1: my wife and I uh my wife particularly has this
Speaker 1: thing about running into people. She knows that the grocery store,
Speaker 1: which I totally understand because a lot of times you
Speaker 1: go to the grocery store, you're not there to socialize,
Speaker 1: you're not dressed up for it. You're there to to
Speaker 1: carry out a task. And if you run into somebody, it's, uh,
Speaker 1: it's awkward. You know, like you can say, hey, all right,
Speaker 1: I said hi to you. Now you depart, and then
Speaker 1: you run into them again and you have to either
Speaker 1: be keeping store them and it's weird. It's awkward. So
Speaker 1: if youah, if you had an app that let you
Speaker 1: know that you know this co worker. This friend was
Speaker 1: at Kroger. Then you might just go to publics instead,
Speaker 1: but then you would feel like you had no free will,
Speaker 1: like your life is being dictated by the coordinates of
Speaker 1: your friends that you're trying to avoid because your hair
Speaker 1: is mussy, Yeah, not messy, mussy. Well, it's it's a problem.
Speaker 1: It's what it is. It is. All right, Well, there
Speaker 1: you have it, the problem of Hell explored a little
Speaker 1: bit there for you, the origins of Hell, the idea
Speaker 1: of hell as a as a cultural, religious, theological, philosophical construct, um.
Speaker 1: And certainly if you want to want to read more
Speaker 1: about it again, highly recommend the History of Hell by
Speaker 1: Alice K. Turner. Wonderful book. And uh, we're gonna do
Speaker 1: another episode after this, published after this, where we're gonna
Speaker 1: get into some of the science of hell, where we're
Speaker 1: gonna deal a little more with this, but there's gonna
Speaker 1: be less of a of a focus on on what
Speaker 1: we believe and more about some of the science that
Speaker 1: we've applied, um often as kind of a thought experiment
Speaker 1: to what we think we know about Hell. That's right,
Speaker 1: What is the trajectory of the fall or something like that? Cool?
Speaker 1: All right, Well, In the meantime, everyone out there can
Speaker 1: get in touch with us. You can let us know
Speaker 1: what do you think about Hell? Do you think it's
Speaker 1: a barbaric dinosaur that does the bone that some of
Speaker 1: this cling to, is it? Is it important? Do you
Speaker 1: do you feel like do you believe in Hell? If
Speaker 1: you do, does it make you a better person or
Speaker 1: do you feel kind of guilty about it? I mean,
Speaker 1: anything that we've discussed in here is a fair game.
Speaker 1: You can find us in the normal means. You can
Speaker 1: go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
Speaker 1: the main website. I have a number of blogs that
Speaker 1: have done leading up to this about Hell and you
Speaker 1: can find those there. You can find out our episodes,
Speaker 1: and then you can find us on social media. We're
Speaker 1: on that Twitter and Blow the Mind. We're on tumblers,
Speaker 1: Facebook is Stuff to Blow your Mind? And where else
Speaker 1: can they find us? Well, you can find us by
Speaker 1: saying us an email and can do that at blow
Speaker 1: the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Does it How Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com