I was reading the comics yesterday when I found this great Dilbert. I have loved the strip for years and some of the funniest strips for me have been those dealing with religion and spirituality. Be it Saint Dogbert and his “Out out Demons of Stupidity” or Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light who rules over “Heck” with his pitch-spoon where people are “darned to Heck for minor infractions,” I have always gotten a chuckle or even a belly laugh out of them.
Of course many people and religions have different conceptions of the afterlife for both the saved, sometimes known as the elect or the unsaved that are sometimes referred to as the damned. Without getting into anyone’s knickers I want to just have some fun with what can be a subject of speculation and even controversy.
Of course heaven is the place of the elect and is usually characterized by streets of gold, angels, pearly gates and lots of time around whichever Deity that the religion in question believes in. Heaven is a good place and probably where you want to be going if you have to spend the rest of eternity, which I am assured sports fans is a very long time. Now there are variations on heaven. Some religions have different concepts about it and others have looser or tighter rules as to who gets in, everything from the “All dogs go to heaven” of universalists to the 144,000 of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to the real strict fundamentalists of various religions (fundamentalists of all religions tend to be peas in a pod) who are even more select that the JWs.
Some even have different levels of heaven. To go back to the JWs they have “real heaven” where the 144,000 go and then a perfect earth where the rest of the JWs go to pick fruit and pet animals for eternity. If you ask me that kind of sucks because it is a works system based around how many people you convert to be JWs. The thing that would suck is like you thought you had gotten the last of the 144,000 available spaces and someone that you converted knocked you out of the competition. If you are not a JW forget it, you just get annihilated, not even the eternal punishment of hell to look forward to. The Latter Day Saints have a cool belief that if you are a super cool Mormon man you get to be God of your own planet while everyone else gets regular heaven and only the really bad people go to hell. Of course some Moslems believe that if you are martyred for your faith you get to have 72 virgins in heaven to have eternal sex with, no mention of what happens to female martyrs but I wonder if their virgins would be the ones with pimples and wearing rape control glasses, Moslem nerds so to speak. The Hindus have a number of different beliefs but the prevailing trend is that heaven and hell are things to help get you perspective in between periods of reincarnation. Since the soul is immortal and you keep getting reincarnated this sounds like summer school. Have you ever noticed that a lot of people who believe in reincarnation believe that they were someone famous in a previous life? I think that Kevin Costner playing “Crash” Davis in Bull Durham asked the same question to Susan Sarandon but regardless why don’t you hear people say that they were a flea on Napoleon’s horse at Waterloo? In Buddhism the endless quest is to attain Nirvana whose lead singer Kurt Cobain off’d himself. Actually it is to attain Nirvana but that has nothing to do with Curt Cobain. Nirvana is a state of nothingness which in my mind is kind of boring if you worked really hard to get things right for a multitude of lifetimes. I guess that I’m too western and wonder what the payback is for working hard only to end up as nothing. I am also uncomfortable that there will be no more “me” if I am successful, I like me. The folks who are Jewish have a number of ideas about heaven and hell that are not too much different than those of Christians except the little fact of who gets in. Now this will vary between the three major groups of Jews from the pretty open minded Reformed Jews, to the Conservative and then to the Orthodox Jews who come in various strains of strictness. The Reformed folks are pretty open-minded and the more extreme versions or Orthodox don’t think that anyone apart from them will get in.
Now as far as Christians we have a wide number of interpretations of both heaven and hell and to whom might be qualified to be admitted to either location. The Calvinists that are really serious believe in something called double predestination which basically means that people were either saved or damned before the creation of the world. Not much room for choice in that theology. There is a subgroup of these folks who sometimes are called Antinomians who believe that since they are saved that they can do anything that they want, any sin, no matter how big and still be saved. Personally I think that is really pretty presumptuous and downright scary. Then those who are more Wesleyan or Armenian weigh in on the side of choice even including that one can “lose their salvation” after they were saved this is often found in Wesleyan and Pentecostal groups. A similar stream is found in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, where though not technically losing salvation keeps you on edge wondering if you made it or not until you die. In Roman Catholicism this might mean that you end up in heaven, hell or purgatory. There are a wide number of interpretations within the Christian faith other than these but these are probably the most common views and interpretations.
So since I have in a nutshell (you are what you eat) in a manner of speaking have presented what different religions think of heaven and hell I shall move on to some of the interpretations of what this means.
As I said heaven, regardless of the religion is “good” unless of course that your religion does not have one in which case it is what it is. Of course the opposite is true as well, if you don’t have a hell that can’t be too bad, unless of course you guess wrong which would really suck. It would be almost as bad as when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson missed the Rapture.
Moving on the Roman Catholic Church has a doctrine that is called Purgatory. Now Purgatory much to the disappointment of some is now “junior hell.” It is a place for the elect, or the saved to go to clean up their act and learn to love Jesus better before getting admitted into heaven proper. It is a place like being elected to the baseball Hall of Fame you may get elected to the Hall but there is a period of time that you get to wait before the plaque goes up at Cooperstown. Likewise there must be a “Purgatory” because the state of West Virginia is described as “Almost Heaven” which would mean that it is in reality Purgatory. Since that is where my family originally comes from and from where my current driver’s license is issued that I too am headed there?
Map of Hell
Now Hell, with the exception of Hinduism is pretty much universally a place that you don’t want to go, kind of like Detroit. There are many images of Hell including the best which come out of Dante’s Inferno which should not be confused with Disco Inferno even if you despised Disco.
I like the image of Hell as the “Lake of Fire.” This conveys to me the image of a lake in the deep south which is painfully hot, overwhelmingly humid and swarming with flies, mosquitoes and other vermin. I cannot imagine anywhere worse. Rowan Atkinson has a great skit called Welcome to Hell where he plays the Devil welcoming a fresh group of the damned to the infernal regions. I’ve linked that here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFGrQMD6Uqc
Now I have already mentioned “Heck” which is ruled by Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light who “darns you to Heck for minor infractions and Helvin the place that souls are outsourced to due to the unionization of the Angels and Demons. It seems to me that heck is not a particularly bad place however Helvin may not be too great of place to be. I really don’t want to know how they would give my harp to me.
So anyway, I guess I shall invoke Saint Dogbert to banish the Demons of Stupidity as I go to sleep dreaming of the real heaven where the baseball diamond is the lushest green field with foul lines that extend to eternity. In this heaven the game never ends and you never get tired. Not much longer until the earthly baseball season begins again.
Peace,
Padre Steve+
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 