Hell Is For Children? Or The Violence of Inculcating Hell

Abstract

The notion that there is a place where the damned are sent to wallow in pain and shame for eternity is to many minds jejune, if not conceptually bizarre and incompatible with divine beneficence. To invoke just two philosophers who in their own ways dismissed the idea of Hell, Russell and Mill both held that the idea of Hell hardly passed muster in terms of logical consistency with the characterization of God in charge of the cosmos or as adequate for human morality. For believing in a place of everlasting torment, Russell (1927, section “The Moral Problem”) questioned Christ’s very character,1 whereas Mill (1991, p. 56) argued that belief in the “hope of heaven and the threat of hell” as the primary motives for living virtuous lives reduced human morality to a “selfish character” and made religious conviction a doctrine of “passive obedience.” Even the theologian Pascal wrote in the Pensees that the apprehension about what may happen after death is neither a sign nor manifestation of genuine faith.