The case for hell

I think it is unfortunate that he chose Tony Soprano as an example.  Is a 
fictional character from a T.V. show the best he could come up with?  Another 
example of the pop culturization of everything?

Mike F.  



http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/opinion/25douthat.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss



April 24, 2011
A Case for Hell
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Here’s a revealing snapshot of religion in America. On Easter Sunday,  two of 
the top three books on Amazon.com’s Religion and Spirituality  best-seller list 
mapped the geography of the afterlife. One was “Heaven  Is for Real: A Little 
Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and  Back,” an account of a 
4-year-old’s near-death experience as dictated to  his pastor father. The other 
was “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell,  and the Fate of Every Person Who 
Ever Lived,” in which the evangelical preacher Rob Bell argues that hell might 
not exist. 

The publishing industry knows its audience. Even in our supposedly  disenchanted 
age, large majorities of Americans believe in God and  heaven, miracles and 
prayer. But belief in hell lags well behind,  and the fear of damnation seems to 
have evaporated. Near-death stories  are reliable sellers: There’s another book 
about a child’s return from  paradise, “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven,” just 
a little further  down the Amazon rankings. But you’ll search the best-seller 
list in vain  for “The Investment Banker Who Came Back From Hell.” 

In part, hell’s weakening grip on the religious imagination is a  consequence of 
growing pluralism. Bell’s book begins with a provocative  question: Are 
Christians required to believe that Gandhi is in hell for  being Hindu? The 
mahatma is a distinctive case, but swap in “my  Hindu/Jewish/Buddhist neighbor” 
for Gandhi, and you can see why many  religious Americans find the idea of 
eternal punishment for wrong belief  increasingly unpalatable. 

But the more important factor in hell’s eclipse, perhaps, is a peculiar  paradox 
of modernity. As our lives have grown longer and more  comfortable, our sense of 
outrage at human suffering — its scope, and  its apparent randomness — has grown 
sharper as well. The argument that a  good deity couldn’t have made a world so 
rife with cruelty is a staple  of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster 
inspires a round of soul-searching over how to reconcile with God’s omnipotence 
with human anguish. 

These debates ensure that earthly infernos get all the press. Hell means  the 
Holocaust, the suffering in Haiti, and all the ordinary “hellmouths”  (in the 
novelist Norman Rush’s resonant phrase) that can open up  beneath our feet. And 
if it’s hard for the modern mind to understand why  a good God would allow such 
misery on a temporal scale, imagining one  who allows eternal suffering seems 
not only offensive but absurd. 

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians  to 
make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also  threatens 
to make human life less fully human. 

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and  not in 
hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices.  If there’s no 
possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our  no’s have any real 
meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts  in a children’s game where 
nobody’s keeping score. 

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as  
deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism.  Instead of 
making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us  prisoners of God 
himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can  never really leave. 

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, 
indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, 
the murderer  can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn 
and be  forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so. 

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of  Dante’s 
“Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s  a way of 
asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is  more than just a 
series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one  man’s free will, at one 
moment, can mean life or death ... salvation or  damnation.” 

If there’s a modern-day analogue to the “Inferno,” a work of art that  
illustrates the humanist case for hell, it’s David Chase’s “The  Sopranos.” The 
HBO hit is a portrait of damnation freely chosen: Chase  made audiences love 
Tony Soprano, and then made us watch as the mob boss  traveled so deep into 
iniquity — refusing every opportunity to turn  back — that it was hard to 
imagine him ever coming out. “The Sopranos”  never suggested that Tony was 
beyond forgiveness. But, by the end, it  suggested that he was beyond ever 
genuinely asking for it. 

Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious  chauvinism 
and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a  question that 
should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in  heaven? 

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