Social foo: A case for Hell

[stryck]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/opinion/25douthat.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

If choices do not have consequences; if all choices lead to the same result, then we are not truly free to choose.

Comments

[siege]

I have to agree, and also to say that infinity is deeper than time.

[kishiriadgr]

I'd rather do good and avoid evil for the sake of doing good than because I fear punishment. Doing the right thing for fear of punishment is the motive of a slave as some writer once said. I don't know if there's a literal hell, and I think it is wiser to concentrate on how one lives than on what happens after death.

[stryck]

In saying this, though, you aren't saying that there are no consequences ("there is no hell"), you're saying that you wish to take your own actions without fear of those consequences ("I will be true to myself no matter what comes.")

Christians don't do well when all we speak of is Hell, but neither should we deny it exists.

[kishiriadgr]

I'll never say that there are no consequences. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, after all. Pope John Paul II said that hell is absence of God and that we choose it for ourselves. I think that's valid, and that its effects are visible in this life. We've all known the mean-spirited person who dies alone, for instance. If there is an afterlife, and I'm inclined to say that there is, hell would be an eternal dying alone rather than the fiery place we were all conditioned to imagine.