Heck, it's about time [*]
Current Music: Underworld -- Billy Goat
High amongst my top ten movie rants is a speech about Hell, delivered in cameo by author Tom Keneally in Fred Schepsi's semi-autobiographical The Devil's Playground. Keneally's bearded and softly-spoken Jesuit uses an extraordinary analogy to explain to his captive audience what the eternal part of "eternal punishment" really meant. Google didn't know the speech, so I torrented the film, clipped and YTed it:
(According to this Phillip Adams interview with Keneally, that speech was co-written "by everyone Catholic in the crew the night before".)
C'mon theists; give it up! Hell is a memetic nightmare; and frankly, preaching that people around you actually deserve it is a hate crime.
It's fundamentally impossible to believe in a wholly benign deity designing a system where there's a fair possibility that most most people will have some friends and family who will be die and go to Hell. And be tortured there forever, and ever, and some more ever (and they're really not liking this, though Baby Jesus doesn't seem to mind), and ever, and ever, and still the burning and the screaming! Face it, hellists: you cannot believe you will ever have your consciousness reprogrammed by angels, or overwhelmed by the heavenly opiate of the presence of God, so that you can come to terms with with that, and still be you. And really, how could you ever mistake a setup like this-even at a thousand meters, in a blizzard, at night-for love?
Basically, if you believe in Hell, you believe in something harmful to the future of civilisation, and the dangerous ideas that have caused you to go so awry needs to be swiftly detached from the memeplex which compromises your religion (no doubt there'll be a lot left to love) and flushed down the memetic garbage shute after human sacrifice, burning witches and pederasty. Religions are dynamic; you can shrug off this twisted, medieval thing and still be a viable faith with a nice god that other people don't talk about behind their hands.
Oh, and Cardinal Fang can leave off his hellist hate speech about atheists. At least we don't believe in TORTURING PEOPLE FOREVER. But then, perhaps there's an explanation for that.
[* This was written, but not published, on December 5th, 2007; forgive the dated references at the end. Because I'm paranoid, I'm going to keep it friends-locked until after I get back from the States. Update: Back now. Oh, and as per my last trip over, all Americans met were lovely people-even the LDSers in SLC.]
High amongst my top ten movie rants is a speech about Hell, delivered in cameo by author Tom Keneally in Fred Schepsi's semi-autobiographical The Devil's Playground. Keneally's bearded and softly-spoken Jesuit uses an extraordinary analogy to explain to his captive audience what the eternal part of "eternal punishment" really meant. Google didn't know the speech, so I torrented the film, clipped and YTed it:
(According to this Phillip Adams interview with Keneally, that speech was co-written "by everyone Catholic in the crew the night before".)
Click to viewC'mon theists; give it up! Hell is a memetic nightmare; and frankly, preaching that people around you actually deserve it is a hate crime.
It's fundamentally impossible to believe in a wholly benign deity designing a system where there's a fair possibility that most most people will have some friends and family who will be die and go to Hell. And be tortured there forever, and ever, and some more ever (and they're really not liking this, though Baby Jesus doesn't seem to mind), and ever, and ever, and still the burning and the screaming! Face it, hellists: you cannot believe you will ever have your consciousness reprogrammed by angels, or overwhelmed by the heavenly opiate of the presence of God, so that you can come to terms with with that, and still be you. And really, how could you ever mistake a setup like this-even at a thousand meters, in a blizzard, at night-for love?
Basically, if you believe in Hell, you believe in something harmful to the future of civilisation, and the dangerous ideas that have caused you to go so awry needs to be swiftly detached from the memeplex which compromises your religion (no doubt there'll be a lot left to love) and flushed down the memetic garbage shute after human sacrifice, burning witches and pederasty. Religions are dynamic; you can shrug off this twisted, medieval thing and still be a viable faith with a nice god that other people don't talk about behind their hands.
Oh, and Cardinal Fang can leave off his hellist hate speech about atheists. At least we don't believe in TORTURING PEOPLE FOREVER. But then, perhaps there's an explanation for that.
[* This was written, but not published, on December 5th, 2007; forgive the dated references at the end. Because I'm paranoid, I'm going to keep it friends-locked until after I get back from the States. Update: Back now. Oh, and as per my last trip over, all Americans met were lovely people-even the LDSers in SLC.]