If you’d like a really deep belly laugh, I can do no better than suggest you visit some of the following links.

The first one here will take you to an interactive painting by an extremely confused artist that understands little about the religious views of the American founding fathers. This site, in and of itself, is hilarious.

If you can stand it, a “patriotic” video about the painting can be found here.

Finally, here is wonderful “parody” of the site – though I hesitate to call it that. The “parody” is far more in accord with reality than the original work.

Below are some excerpts from an essay by Pastor Douglas Wilson, as part of the promotional material for a new film that he made together with Christopher Hitchens, called Collision. It looks like a very interesting idea for a film, by the way, as it chronicles a series of debates between christian Wilson and atheist Hitchens. Unfortunately, based on the poor quality of Wilson’s arguments as sampled in the essay, it looks as though the theist side might be rather poorly represented. I also saw an online clip from the film that features him talking to a group of rather inarticulate college students that apparently were members of a campus atheism club. I hope more of the film features legitimate interlocutors for him.

In addition to the quoted excerpts from his article, I’ve added some of my thoughts. Wilson makes a number of facile arguments that have will provide a certain emotion compulsion to some people, and they warrant being corrected.

From the perspective of a Christian, the refusal of an atheist to be a Christian is dismaying, but it is at least intelligible. But what is really disconcerting is the failure of atheists to be atheists. That is the thing that cries out for further exploration.

What does it mean to be an atheist? It is a definition of negation. It says little about what you do believe. It merely means that there is one kind of thing that you do not believe in, namely, an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, All-Powerful Being Outside of Time that Somehow Created Everything. That is all. To say that most atheists somehow fail to be atheists is a bit odd, because it can only mean that the ostensible atheist really does believe in “God.” Is this what Wilson is trying to say? It turns out, no. He is rather setting up a strawman to represent all atheists, which he’ll then try to knock down.

The atheistic worldview is nothing if not inherently reductionistic, whether this is admitted or not.

First of all, there is not a single cut-and-dried “atheistic worldview” any more than a lack of belief in goblins constitutes some kind of worldview. One could, by definition, be an atheist and believe that we exist in some kind of computer simulation devised up by alien minds, for example. Some atheists as Buddhists, and others (myself included) are pantheists.

Second, the only reductionism that Wilson might be able to speak of, in trying to globally assign all atheists to a particular philosophy, is the reductionism that lies at the heart of the scientific method. As a matter of investigative routine, we usually start with more complex phenomena, and, to understand and explain them, break them down into simpler bits. For example, to understand how some mental or nervous process occurs, physically, we need to understand how the nervous system is formed, which means understanding neurons and their electrochemistry, which requires cellular biology, which leads us to organic chemistry, which leads us to molecules, and atoms, and electrons and quarks. To approach it any other way would be impractical. But, having used this method to unravel how the parts fit together, it hardly follows that “that is all there is” -  because the universe doesn’t necessarily function in a top-down, the-whole-is-the-sum-of-its-parts way, but more probably in a bottom-up mode, where emergent complex behavior can and does arise. It is a Fallacy of Composition to assert that because the subatomic components of brains follow certain rules (or exhibit certain random behaviors) that complex structures built from them are merely agglomerations of them with no additional properties or meaning.

Everything that happens is a chance-driven rattle-jattle jumble in the great concourse of atoms that we call time. Time and chance acting on matter have brought about, in equally aimless fashion, the 1927 New York Yankees, yesterday’s foam on a New Jersey beach, Princess Di, [etc...]

What does he mean by “chance-driven rattle-jattle jumble”, do you suppose? I’m a physicist by education, and an atheist by choice, and I certainly do not regard “everything that happens” in the facile terms that Wilson patronizingly uses here. The tacit implication is the simpleminded one, that if the Universe was not planned by the kind of god he has in mind, then everything is happenstance randomness. This is a false either-or dichotomy.

What I do know is that we have luckily become smart enough to develop a pretty effective method to study the world around us, and to understand that nature consists of a number of different kinds of particles that behave in consistent ways, with a certain degree of randomness sprinkled in. The result is a tremendous amount of both order and diversity, seeming chaos amidst rigorous structure. And given enough time and space, it isn’t surprising, really, that from such a bedground could arise self-replicating molecules and self-replicating cells acting under external pressures that force them to continually improve and diversify, with the end result of the highly goal-directed, emergent activity of life.

The problem is that this atheistic assumption does the very same thing to the atheist’s case for atheism. The atheist gives us an account of all things which makes it impossible for us to believe that any account of all things could possibly be true.

But atheism, of course, is not an attempt to “give an account of all things.” Moreover, the lack of positive belief in an untestable conjecture in no way invalidates our ability to make meaningful observations and draw conclusions about the world that have predictive and explanatory merit.

Educated persons generally understand that there are fundamental limits to our knowledge, at least at this time, and probably forever. We know from both physics and mathematics that the world is far more complex than would allow us to account for everything. There are forbidden questions in quantum mechanics. We understand that there are no mathematical systems that are both complete and consistent. There are metaphysical question that lie outside the purview of our tools, that certainly seem valid enough, but which answers likely do not exist for (e.g., “why is there a Universe at all, instead of just nothing?”)

I do not know any atheists that actually think that any worldview delivers “an account of all things.” Most of us are well aware of the difficulties of finite minds that make mistakes grappling with a complex world, and would not be so brash as to think we have it all figured out, or ever will. But the one idea that all atheists share is that facile, wishful-thinking-based explanations that appeal to our vanities, fears, and emotions, and which do not have any kind of empirical support but are rather correlated with whichever ancient myth our particular ancestors might have invented, don’t deserve serious consideration as being factually true.

Nor does atheism allow us to have any fixed ethical standard, or the possibility of beauty.

These are the kinds of comments from certain kinds of theists that truly are offensive. They’d deny a sense of morality and aesthetics to all manner of good people that lived rich lives without theism. (And it is the atheist they they turn around and label “arrogant”!)

What most atheists (but not all – go talk to any Ayn Rand fan or Objectivist and you’ll see) would probably agree with is the idea that there is no universal standard of ethics or beauty that is somehow established as empirical law, in the way that gravitation, for example, is. This isn’t a terribly difficult idea to grasp, given the centuries of human history that would tend to confirm it. But with the either-or fallacious thinking of Wilson and his ilk, we are presented with an implicit choice of “either you have fixed, eternal standards of ethics/aesthetics, or you have absolutely nothing.” There is no entertaining the notion that these concepts could indeed come from human minds, yet be no less valuable or profound for it. In fact, they might even be moreso.

And not content to let sleeping dogs lie, reason also brings us the inexorable consequences of atheism, which includes the unpalatable but necessary conclusion that random neuron firings do not amount to any “truth” that corresponds to anything outside our heads.

There is nothing in the rejection of an unsupported conjecture about a Superbeing that in turn entails that the human mind cannot ascertain knowledge of what is going on outside it, through a meticulous, self-correcting process of observation, test, corroboration, and repetition. Wilson’s suggestion is absolutely absurd. And yes, our statements of truth in science come with error bars, because the relentless complexity of the world necessitates that we quantify and account for the ways in which our work can go wrong. Not only are the patterns of neuron firings not random, the results of clear and structured thinking do indeed correspond to the world about us. Sometimes what it ends up telling us isn’t exactly what we’d like to hear, in our vanity – for science has removed us from the center of the universe and has, in some sense, made us another twig on a vast phylogenic tree of life. I’d guess that the accompanying humility does not sit well with the likes of the Pastor Wilson, who divides the possibilities into two cases: “God’s special creature” or “meaningless automata” with no other possibilities.

Now obviously, [Christianity] is a message that can be believed or disbelieved. But the reason for mentioning it here includes the important point that such a set of convictions makes it possible for us to believe that reason can be trusted, that goodness does not change with the evolutionary times, and that beauty is grounded in the very heart of God. Someone who believes these things doesn’t believe that we are just fizzing.

Translation: Since it is all too difficult and demeaning to think that we (and our emotions) have a natural origin, let’s have a “God” to explain why and how we are just so damn special. So we can feel better about ourselves. If our imaginations are not up to the task of seeing how a naturalistic cosmos might produce self-aware beings with cognition that can in turn act upon the canvas that they slowly sprang up from, then we’ll just call the process “divine” and be done with it. It is the Argument From Personal Incredulity again, and here it is no more persuasive than when it is more commonly used by biology-ignoramuses when they think they have made an argument by stating “but I can’t see how we could have evolved!”

You can deny that this God exists, of course, and you can throw the whole cosmos into that pan of reduction sauce. And you can keep the heat on by publishing one atheist missive after another. But what you should not be allowed to do is cook the whole thing bone dry and call the crust on the bottom an example of the numinous or transcendent. Calling it that provides us with no reason to believe it — and numerous reasons not to.

The “numinous and transcendent” can describe emotional responses to the world around one. That anyone can react positively and with genuine feeling to the ineffable sublimity of nature without thinking there is some Magical Being Behind It All, is apparently offensive to Wilson. Well, his views are even more offensive to those of us about the globe, stretching far back in time, that have lived and loved and wondered every bit as much as this pompous pastor may have, but without the Sky-Father explanation to fall back on.

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates speaks movingly about the prospects of his imminent death. He finds no reason for alarm over his upcoming demise, as he sees two possibilities beyond the grave: the first is blissful unawareness and the utter destruction of consciousness, Hamlet’s consummation devoutly to be wished; the second is an afterlife in which all souls of the dead would be able to socialize, converse, and generally pal around together. (Shame on Socrates for thinking that only these two possibilities might obtain. For someone of his intellect, he should have recognized that when speculating on matters that cannot be investigated, there are literally an infinity of possibilities). Socrates says:

What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? … What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too?

According to The Divine Comedy, it is the second scenario that is the fate for Socrates, for there he is, in the First Circle of Hell, with other great minds and heroes from the classical world – the likes of Homer, Ovid, Aristotle, Democritus, Aeneas and Hector. And just as he anticipated, it isn’t a bad life (or afterlife), but it isn’t heaven, either. The residents here are in Limbo: they are not tortured, burned, maimed, or harassed by demons. They are left to share each other’s company and certainly must have a number of stimulating discourses. (It always seemed that, given how the treatment in the Vestibule is so much worse than that in Limbo, that they should be reversed.) But these souls are yet denied the pleasures of Paradise, and this is something that these ancient worthies are aware of, and which they no doubt commiserate over.

Why were these Virtuous Pagans sent to a benign part of Hell instead of being rewarded for their virtues in Heaven? Through no fault of their own, they were born at the wrong time, before that glorious age when God finally had His Plan all worked out and sent His Son to earth to suffer that famous, staged death. And only those people that had the opportunity to accept Christ would be given the chance to get to Paradise. Regardless of how moral anyone born before that time might have been, regardless of any brave or selfless acts they may have committed, or what mysteries they may have solved, they were, in the modern vernacular, Shit-Outta-Luck.

It hardly seems fair to run a world that way, but let’s give Dante the benefit of the doubt. Let’s take the tack that those born before Christ’s time didn’t know the full rules of the game, so to speak, so they couldn’t earn the rewards of accepting Him- but at least they would not incur the harsh penalties reserved for those that violated Christian laws, either.

Except that isn’t quite the way it plays out. Recall Socrates mentioned Odysseus (that is, Ulysses), as one of the persons he looked forward to meeting after death. But that intrepid wanderer isn’t there in Dante’s First Circle. Socrates must have been disappointed. It turns out that Socrates will not be speaking with him at all. Odysseus is in Hell, to be sure, but he isn’t in Limbo with so many other Greeks. Because he was regarded as an “Evil Counselor” he has been sent to the Eight Circle, where his afterlife isn’t very pleasant; it involves a bit of roasting.

So, for Dante, the punishments of Hell are enforced retroactively, while the rewards of Heaven are not. Regardless of your virtues, if you lived before a certain date, you cannot get the full rewards offered to others. But you can still incur the penalties of sin. It is also an admission that the standards of good and evil existed before God set them out explicitly in the Christian version, although the consequences and rewards are not meted out consistently.

Then, there is also the matter of the souls that were removed from the First Circle during ‘the harrowing of Hell.’ These include Adam, Abel, Abraham, Rachel, David, Moses, and Noah, all born before Christ as well, but given Get Out Of Hell Free cards because they were mentioned in the Old Testament, apparently. The likes of Abraham, he who was prepared to murder his own son at the behest of the voices in his head, and Moses, the leader that slaughtered countless innocents and condemned countless young women to slavery and rape, go to Heaven. Socrates, brilliant philosopher and advocate of reason, stays in Hell.

I imagine Socrates would not be impressed with this scheme. Nor Odysseus, for that matter. And I’m reminded of how various fundamentalists decry the values of secularists and humanists as involving “situational ethics.” As if Christianity is some kind of model for the notion of objective rules and punishments. A few hours browsing in the Old Testament should convince anyone that there has never been a more haphazard, inconsistent, and ever-shifting system of morality than the one that the Hebrew God acted by.

This essay is the introductory chapter in The Infernova.

Two unlikely facts collided at the event of my birth, with potentially lethal consequences. The first fact concerned the genes that my parents carried in their cells. The second concerned the memes they carried in their heads.

Genetics first: my father was Rh-positive; my mother was not. They had a son before me who inherited the paternal blood type. His birth was without incident, but it set up potential problems for subsequent children. For during the violent process that is childbirth, some of my brother’s blood was introduced into my mother’s circulation, and her immune system, having never seen this Rh-feature before, developed antibodies against them, and would remain permanently antagonistic toward such cells. This was not an issue until it was my turn to arrive. As again some amount of blood was exchanged during birth, my mother’s antibodies found their way into my bloodstream, and began their destructive work on my cells. This is, and was at the time, a well-understood condition, called Hemolytic Disease of the Newborn. It can result in anemia, seizures, brain damage, and death.

This disease is straightforward to treat: the infant’s blood is simply exchanged. The antibodies from the mother are pumped out, and Rh-positive blood is pumped in.

Now as for my parents’ memes: as they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, they were carriers and victims of a set of wild ideas about Life, God, and How We Are Supposed To Act. Witnesses believe in all manner of nonsense, but critical here is their idiosyncratic interpretation of particular Bible passages, such as Acts 15:28-29:

For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things; that ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well.

They read this as an injunction to abstain from blood entirely: it isn’t just an edict against imbibing it, but against taking it intravenously. Even to save your life. Or your child’s life.

As these two facts came together in early 1967, my father informed the medical staff that the transfusion was not an option. The hospital thought otherwise, thankfully, and obtained a court order from the state to proceed with the transfusion. My father was also given some education involving terms such as manslaughter, in order to help dissuade him of any thoughts about absconding with me or otherwise attempting to prevent the treatment. The blood exchange was performed and I recovered in accordance with the expectations of medical science.

I learned of all this when I was an adult, long after my parents had split up, and my mother told me about it, at last lifting a decades-old burden from her conscience. Although they were both Witnesses at the time of my birth, my mother’s innate maternal senses overruled the religious mandates, though she kept this to herself. Privately she was quite glad that the State of New York stepped in to save her child’s life.

From day one, my life has been profoundly affected by religion. As you might imagine, I’m not sympathetic to the views of the Witnesses in particular, or organized religion in general.

Not every Witness child requiring serious medical attention is saved by the courts. Sometimes the parents prevail–usually with an older child trained well enough to parrot their parents’ views and convince a judge of a certain level of maturity; enabling them to effectively choose suicide, a choice, ironically, that most religions will not extend to terminally ill, suffering adults.

A gruesome series of such accounts can be found in the May 22, 1994 issue of the Witnesses’ Awake! magazine. ”Youths Who Put God First” is the cover story, and it details case histories for a number of children who managed to avoid a blood transfusion and subsequently died. Vignettes of young lives cut short by wasting disease are troubling; far more disturbing is the article’s celebration of their martyrdom. And it seems as if we’ve become numb to this sort of idiocy these days, with the routine suicide bombings in the ”holy lands” that originate from the same irrational mindset.

For, just as with religious terrorists, the motivation behind the stupefying actions of the Witnesses is a hysterical concern with What Happens Beyond The Grave. Open the their literature and the root causes for their behavior are laid bare. They firmly believe in an Armageddon that is imminent, where God will launch a massive assault upon the earth, from which only they will be spared. After that, eternal life in Paradise awaits.

Whereas the Islamic version of heaven seems tailored to appeal to sexually repressed males and their hopes for unending pleasures of the flesh, the Witnesses would seem to target a younger audience. Their ubiquitous, colorful renderings of Paradise On Earth feature pastoral scenes of seaside picnics, exuberant families of young and old, racial harmony, and always the animals. A docile lion that allows children to climb all over him has appeared more than once (right now I’m looking at one of their illustrations where a beach ball lies between the ex-carnivore’s paws). If you want your Youth To Put God First, pandering to their innate affinities can’t hurt.

Obviously, the children discussed in the Awake! story demonstrated great courage, which I don’t mean to disparage, but I do mean to attack the root causes that forced them to act so. To persuade them to honestly believe they’d go to a better place–for eternity–by employing fantasies that would strengthen their resolve to suffer a needless death, is simply evil. These children are to be pitied. The monstrous ideas, institutions, and adults that put them in such situations, that misinformed their decisions with such lethal nonsense, are to be reviled.

The concepts of eternal rewards, and the suffering and trials needed to secure them, seem part of our interior makeup. When used as a template for narrative, when the mythology stays allegorical, when it all lies merely at the heart of a story arc, then they enliven and make resonant much of our literature and lore. But when religions wield them and bully us into taking them literally, all manner of conflict and misery result.

The original work that this book parodies, Dante’s Divine Comedy, blends both the allegorical and literal perspectives of religious myth. Read it like Homer’s Odyssey and see a perilous quest to find a peaceful home at last. Read it literally and see magnificent poetry wasted on the religious nonsense of a backward age. (Imagining what his immense talents might have celebrated had he lived in an age of human progress is what first inspired me to build my own narrative with the structure he used.)

Dante’s trip through Hell, great literature that it is, was motivated by the ethics of punishments and rewards, where God’s wrath is to be avoided and eternal bliss is to be achieved. Dante’s trepidation in Hell is palpable at times, but it’s always quite clear that he’s not really in danger of becoming a permanent resident. He’s a tourist; a student going through a process of striking and effective deterrence, like a seventh grader in shop class, forced to watch a documentary film that might have been named What Happens To Kids Who Don’t Wear Safety Glasses. Even before he completed the entire odyssey, the fate of Dante’s soul was never really in doubt. The visit to Hell was temporary. Paradise would be forever.

Dante’s choice to tour that terrifying abyss may be seen as a brave act by some, but it absolutely pales in comparison to another momentous literary decision involving eternity and Hell. A choice that was made by an astounding character that appeared some six hundred years later; a homeless waif on a different kind of odyssey: Huckleberry Finn, who was definitely not A Youth Who Put God First.

In Chapter 31 of his Adventures, struggling to do his duty and return the slave Jim to his owner, Huck is certain that Providence watches his every move with great interest. Will he attempt to purchase the tenuous freedom of a being considered subhuman, at the cost of his own soul? The climax of the book is the moment he finds the courage to ignore the sticks and carrots proffered by the religion of his society, and to make the bravest choice of all–to act true to his own self and his own conscience:

I was a-trembling, because I got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ”All right then, I’ll go to hell.”

He does the right thing, and he does it in spite of a certain conviction that he will suffer endless torment for it. A more breathtakingly moral decision would be a challenge to find in any other works of literature, including those considered to be ”holy” books.

”There has never been an intelligent person of the age of sixty who would consent to live his life over again. His or anyone else’s.” Mark Twain wrote, and given the era, I can’t say I blame him. And as he set out in his little known, satirical Letters from the Earth, heaven did not look to be much more desirable than the other place. I hope he’d forgive me for bringing him back to life in my story. Based on his affinity for contraptions (he invested heavily, and without profit, in an 18,000-part automatic-typesetting machine called the Paige Compositor, about which he wrote, ”All the other inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle…”), I thought it fitting to perform his resurrection by extrapolating forward the information technologies that have proliferated in our time, technologies that connect words and machines in ways that likely would have pleased him greatly.

Two examples of such extrapolation can be gleaned from the writings of professors Nick Bostrom and Frank Tipler. Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher, developed a clever argument for the so-called Simulation Hypothesis, which asserts a nonzero probability that we are all living in a vast computer simulation, while Tipler, in his book The Physics of Immortality, proposes an ”Omega Point” in the future where humans have colonized space, built supercomputers that can support human consciousness, and resurrected everyone who has ever lived. However small the likelihoods of such eventualities, they at least provide semi-plausible examples of purely naturalistic ways in which ”godlike” power could eventually develop and how a kind of eternal life could occur. They are more credible than anything traditional religion ever offered, and afford us an opportunity to look at such admittedly fascinating concepts as immortality, for once, through a lens not smeared with the dirty thumbprints of theism.

Many fine people are believers, of course, and I would be amiss not to acknowledge the important function religion often serves in providing narratives for our lives. Most of us seem to need a structure around which to base our actions. But that scaffolding can be built from better materials than a black rock in the desert or splinters of a cross. Purpose can be found without stupefying dogma and life-threatening irrationality to accompany it. To set out my own narrative, of how we err, and how wishful thinking can lead us so wrong, is why I wrote the parody that follows. Mix in equal parts of love for Dante’s genius and Twain’s spirit. My paradise, a destination seen at the start and end of my New Inferno, isn’t Dante’s, and it certainly isn’t the Witnesses’. It’s the world revealed by science, bit by bit through the meticulous and honest work of men and women speaking a common language, seeking understanding and benefit for all.

The paradise toward which science works is tied down to no particular geographical place, but I can’t help but locate the site of my own Divine Comedy in the state where my story started, where J.D. Salinger’s famous fictional youth descended through his personal inferno to eventually glimpse paradise for a moment with his sister in Central Park. Not far from there is the Waldorf- Astoria, where my parents honeymooned and set the biological dominoes in motion that would so affect me in a few years. Where, on one side of the Brooklyn Bridge (with its odd status as a kind of icon of gullibility), sits the world headquarters of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (which may in fact be the World Headquarters of Gullibility). And where a clear and horrific demonstration of the destructive power of faith-based thinking was made in the form of an elaborately planned mass murder on a September morning.

But mostly I see the city as symbolic capital of the state that saved my life in 1967. ”I Love NY” is, for me, much more than a famous slogan.

You don’t need religion to have holy places.

I’ve long been ambivalent about Dante’s Divine Comedy, because for such a magnificent, imaginative story, it is built on a foundation of utter, malevolent nonsense. I feel similarly about Milton’s Paradise Lost. What a pity that such artists of antiquity had little to work with beyond the superstitions endemic to their age and geographical location. This has long been the case, of course – Homer’s epic poems are underpinned by legions of gods, after all – but the religious themes are far less intrusive on the story itself.

There are several reasons for this. First, Homer’s gods bear little resemblance to what the term God has come to mean today – after all they are as human as the human characters themselves, albeit more powerful. This is different with Dante. Perhaps because the religion that informs his work is still alive today – that there are so many millions that actually take it all seriously and go about causing problems because of it. Worshippers of Athena or Ares are quite rare, and they don’t endanger the world with silly ideas about condom use.

Second, and more importantly, the worldview at the core of The Inferno is integral to the story, and it is a worldview that is immoral and rotten. That isn’t true for The Iliad or The Odyssey.

I make my case for the evil heart that beats at the center of Dante’s universe in my book, and I’ll augment it here over the course of various essays related to different portions of The Infernova and The Inferno. To that end, it is instructive to begin at the beginning, with the famous inscription on the gates of Hell (all of my Dante quotes are from the fantastic John Ciardi translation of The Divine Comedy).

I Am The Way Into The City Of Woe.
I Am The Way To A Forsaken People.
I Am The Way Into Eternal Sorrow.

Sacred Justice Moved My Architect.
I Was Raised Here By Divine Omnipotence,
Primordial Love And Ultimate Intellect.

Only Those Elements Time Cannot Wear
Were Made Before Me, And Beyond Time I Stand.
Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.

Justice? Love? Intellect? These are the driving forces behind the creation of eternal torment for sundry crimes all finite in nature? Even in the Fourteenth century, it must have made little sense. To think that the earth sat as the center of the universe, attended by the orbiting sun and moon and planets, is understandable. To think that living beings were the handiwork of some master being, is understandable too, since they did not have the explanation of natural selection readily at hand. But the notion that the apogee of Divine Justice included such an unbalanced, disproportionate weighting of crime and punishment is impossible to grasp. So apologists are left only with the classic “Who Are You To Question God’s Plan” defense. His ways are mysterious and not comprehensible to the little minds of men.

When I decided to have a go at rewriting Dante’s vision of Hell, I planned to make one point clearly, loudly and often – that even within the context of the dream in which my story occurs, it isn’t meant to be real. It’s a simulation, an amusement park ride, a visit to the Holodeck. The ‘souls’ that suffer in my hell are no more sentient than animatronics. Yes, the illusion is that they suffer, and the emotional impact is the same, just as the emotional impact from a film isn’t blunted by the fact that it isn’t real. And yes, it is tempting to put the likes of a pedophile-priest or a terrorist into an everlasting torture chamber, but it isn’t just. No matter how heinous their crimes, they were finite in scope. To prescribe an infinite punishment is to scoff at the concept of justice.

The details of hellish afterlives in Christianity and Islam, including their unlimited time scales, are what they are because they comprise the worst possible punishments anyone could dream up. Organized religion evolved under the pressure of many external forces, but certainly the notion of eternal damnation must have quickly gained in utility because it served as the ultimate consequence, the biggest possible stick to go with the biggest possible carrot. If you wish to dissuade people from a particular action, why bother threatening them with a finite consequence when you could offer up something far worse, since it cannot be verified or disputed? Just go all the way, peg the needle, turn the knob to eleven, and assure them that they’ll be tormented forever. There isn’t anything worse. No other religion is going to come along and one-up you with a more efficacious threat of damnation.

There is still a vertigo I feel when I contemplate that otherwise normal people here in the 21st century actually believe in Hell being literally true. I used to live in the Bible Belt, and had neighbors with signs in their yards about hellfire. I never spoke to them, as I tried to avoid them (just as I avoid a coworker here in Minnesota whose bumper sticker reads “Eternity: Smoking or Nonsmoking?”) but I doubt these people would have found fault with the Irish Catholic vision of Hell that James Joyce relates in A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man:

Ever to be in hell, never to be in heaven; ever to be shut off from the presence of God, never to enjoy the beatific vision; ever to be eaten with flames, gnawed by vermin, goaded with burning spikes, never to be free from those pains; ever to have the conscience upbraid one, the memory enrage, the mind filled with darkness and despair, never to escape; ever to curse and revile the foul demons who gloat fiendishly over the misery of their dupes, never to behold the shining raiment of the blessed spirits; ever to cry out of the abyss of fire to God for an instant, a single instant, of respite from such awful agony, never to receive, even for an instant, God’s pardon; ever to suffer, never to enjoy; ever to be damned, never to be saved; ever, never; ever, never.

This is the product of Love? Justice? Intellect?