Bart Erdman is a Biblical scholar who is prolific and clear. He says that his job is not to say whether religious beliefs are true or not but to examine how the ideas and emotions associated with them develop. He does, however, offer hypotheses or explanations for why they develop, and so I can wander in as a mere sociologist of religion to offer alternative explanations. Erdman claims that the reason people venture into ideas of Heaven and Hell is because people are just about universally afraid of death, the afterlife portrayed, at best, as a dismal thing. Erdman thinks that people elaborate on Heaven and Hell so as to posit an afterlife. There has to be a just reward for the pains of life while one is living and so there has to be a way to mete out that justice by having both options. A lifetime is long enough by which a person can establish whether one is worthy of the better of the two alternatives-- or provide for a third possibility, which is to work off one’s liabilities after death through Purgatory.
I don’t think Erdman is correct because, among other things, it is necessary to contemplate why so much pain is involved in Hell and why people for most of Christian history have had relish of how awful are the conditions that prevail in Hell. Why does God require so much suffering? A modern Christian might say that there are no occupants in Hell, but certainly most of Christian history thought otherwise. Why the gore along with the glory? I want to offer two standard explanations for the punishment of the dead and then offer two fresh ones, one psychological and one sociological.
The abiding explanation of the anguish and the glory of the afterlife is offered by Friedrich Nietzche’s “The Genealogy of Morals”. The basic motive is revenge. The meek, who have been treated badly in life turn the world upside down when they enter the afterlife. They become triumphant and lead most pleasurable lives, though not sensuous ones, while those who had done well in mortal life, and are necessarily wicked, do and deserve eternal punishment. They deserve what they get. This is a very rudimentary sense of justice in that the roles are reversed rather than the terms of justice are transformed, as Jesus might have it, whereby love replaces hate, compassion replacing conflict, but there you are. It is, in Nietzche’s view, a low level morality that is understood as just by limited and hateful people, those who had been so ground down by their lot so that only hate is left and so imagine a future world where the no longer meek could get their just deserts by having their once enemies suffer. Christianity was the religion of slaves and ex-slaves who had been liberated but not transformed. And so Hell is full of cruelty and sadism, that later concept also identified with the ideas of Nietzsche in the late Nineteenth Century, not that it didn’t exist before it had been named. The way to get rid of this hateful sense of the afterlife is to rid the world entirely of Christianity and replace it instead with what Nietzche thought was the more serene climate of Mediterranean folk, replacing the Germanic peoples, though it is not at all clear how to sort out the geographical claims in that Catholic Christianity had plenty of cruelty inflicted in the name of justice. Remember the Albegensians in Southern France. But Nietzche hated what he knew most well, the Protestant Reformation that never gave an inch, even asserting that people who are blameless are to be chosen as the unsaved just because God can.
Nietzche had offered a reason why people should condemn people in Hell and reward people with Heaven. The reason for rage and reward was the immoral social structure of the actual world. It was a matter of self interest that the meek would want to inherit the world, even if the judgment on who should benefit and who should suffer from the revolution was not always fair. Such things happen in revolutions and so some people might get placed in the wrong category, or more accurately, God would decide in His ultimate wisdom of who got thumbs up and who got thumbs down, Another problem is that there has to be a clear continuity of those who are the bad and those who are the good, as also happens in revolutions, Marx solving the process by focussing on family capitalism, so that the children of the wealthy remain wealthy and therefore to be expropriated, while Jesus solves the problem by saying that God can look into every individual soul and not just groups of people, and so decide who was naughty and who was nice, the central tie between morality and judgment when a secularist could argue that good fortune whether in life or the afterlife is a matter of happenstance or fate, like who will survive a tornado or a concentration camp rather than because of the morality of the individual or the collective soul.
Freud also thought there had to be a reason, some self interest, that led people to have their anger against others, even against the people they love within their families, and so he hypothesized that there must be outrages a childhood endures that leads a child to loath or fear a parent and so want to do the parent a wrong so as to rectify their childhood situations by people now adult even if the person, the now grown up person who descends from the child and so tied to it, wants to evade the burden of anguish that obtains with all those once children. Freud thought that the Oedipus Complex led boy-men to fear revenge of their male parents for their most inner desire and the Electra complex was as an adult to be shunned for its desire for the father’s sexuality, though the two, the male and the female child, are not comparable in that the girl child does not have a penis to lose, which is the threat for the male child. Something has to drive fear; something has to encourage anger or recompense; invent what you will. Dreams hide the stories of what happens or are what is to be feared in real life.
Now, imagine dreams differently, in the present, post-Freudian dispensation. It is just the few second spurts, no matter how much duration is sensed by the dreamer, of a confabulation of stray memories, incidents, people, and all the other emotions, even including the sexual desires that were the particular focus of Freud. Within those feelings and ideas, there will be some that are disturbing or even resonate to bad feelings a person has in real life, in that everyone has bad feelings. What the dream displays is the possibility of the psyche and somewhere in it will be feelings that lead to resentment or injustice, and those will be some of the things that can surface and ground a person in that experience rather than sloughing it off as a bad dream. The dreams of a child will become preserved because they were so familiar to you at the time as those that surrounded us, whether the beds they slept in, or the smell of the apartment, or its configuration, or the spot on the ceiling which had a spider like crack. Not all or even mostly full of fear, but some moments of them, and some of those can be turned into a Hell of sorts, not with devils with pitchforks, but an ominous danger in the corner or a person projected onto an adult. If that is the case, then, there is no reason at all for there to be a Hell or Heaven but only these reflections of altered memory from deep under deep that reverberates and includes bad things including inflicted pain as one of its repertoire that are rationalized into being the substance of Hell. Dante thought of very bad things because he could dredge them up however much he organized his fantasies to illustrate Aristotelian appropriateness in the matching of vice with pain, a glutton always being rained on by shit. That some critics claim that Dante had a sense of humor is lame; he was most of the time glum and mean. Dante gives reasons for Hell, but the reader knows better. He just has the effluvia of a bad dream. Reason has nothing to do with it.
Here is how to restore rationality, the reasons for, Heaven and Hell. First consider the psychological motive by thinking about the particular feeling known as anger as part of the collection of related emotions that some genius has not established as the form of a Periodic Table of emotions. There are some root pairs, such as love and hate, each of these having a descending order of intensity, love weakening into affection and then companionability and then cordiality, while hate weakens into anger and then into rage before becoming more placid when the devolution of hate reaches studied indifference. What is true about what might be called the strong emotions is that they are self validating. That means that the emotions offer a kind of proof or certainty that the facts associated with them are true. When you love someone you think you have a deep insight into the nature of the person that not loving a person will not appreciate. Even a sense of affection allows one to give the person the benefit of the doubt. The same is true of hate and some of its weakened versions, these defined by the time during which the feeling is held. Hate can be left a mouldering in the grave, anger has to be sustained so as to keep it alive, as when people say they do not want to give up their anger for they do not want to give up the insight they have of an injustice visited by that person about whom one wants to remain angry, and a rage is an anger short enough that it is to be questioned whether one should remain angry, as happens when the victors and the vanquished in the Second World War decide to forgive if not forget and at least work with one another for the future.
Anger requires the sustaining of antipathy so as to remain within the point of view that the angry person was in the right, that the bad thing should continue to be remembered, even though hatred and its associated feelings can pass. That Achilles was in a rage and so sulked in his tent suggested that it was to be temporary, however much was the consequence, the death of Patrocales, for having lingered. Better to have overcome his anger quickly as being relatively minor, though these warriors risked death for their glory as well as for their obligations. Cain seems to have killed Abel out of pique rather than to an abiding quarrel, because God was surprised that Abel was not there and Cain seemed to want to go past it rather than glorify his successful murder because he had for a moment been jealous or for some other reason which made him feel that an injustice had been done to him.
Another way to make the point that anger is a safe harbor for insight is to think that the circumstances which evince anger are to be understood as the lack of alienation, the lack of separation, between the feeling and what it stands for. What you feel is what is right, whether that concerns an antipathy to an ethnic group or a sense that tattoos are also somehow wrong on women. It was therefore surprising how quickly gay marriage became socially acceptable, given that for millenia gay people were not allowed to wed despite the practice of homosexuality also having endured for centuries. I would have thought that the personal feeling whereby I could not stomach engaging in a same sex relationship would have transferred to finding legitimate same sex relations abhorent, but this theory of the inalienability of sexual relations did not hold up, the idea of privacy, that what people do with one another is up to them, had prevailed over the antipathy. I suggest that such was the exception and that people continue to be angry against what is different or subjugated for whatever reason.
One way to sustain that anger or even just that rage is to organize it so that it is objectified or institutionalized so that a person can continue to cultivate that feeling and the associated insights that go with it. I once had a student in a course about race relations and he was puzzled about my view of dissolving various racial stereotypes with arguments and facts that I should let go of my covers and excuses and fall back into what he seemed to be the natural condition of engaging in racial prejudice. What he felt about Black people that justified his hatred of them was simply true and having bad feelings was the natural course of things. Don’t give it up. It was a kind of natural strength that happy talk could only appear to abolish. So too is the case with Hell. It is the place where the object of vindictive feelings resides both in those put into Hell and with those people who spur their consciousnesses so as to hate those who deserve to be hated, gloating as well as glorifying their pain and torment. Everyone is either jaled or a jailor, always aware of how they see the torments continue. That makes them free to be among the tormented and perhaps as well those among the blessed though mainly experiencing the bad stuff rather than the glory, which is a kind of prison in itself, even while ordinary jailors can go back to their home lives and pat their sleeping children for having protected them from the bad guys however many are the hours of the day they remain as jailors. That people gravitate on what is wrong with life so as to suppress it is part of human nature, and so we will not be lost of the sight and existence of Hell until there is no need to remain with anger.
There is also a sociological explanation as for the persistence of Heaven and Hell even if the concepts are secularized so as to refer to a heaven made up of celebrities and a Hell that includes already disparaged groups, those castigated for and subject to awful pains for being what they are. This has to do with social policy. The basic rule is that governments and societies blame people for events or circumstances they can’t control, like plagues or poverty. Jews were blamed for the plague and Black people for being poor, the cause rather than their own poverty the consequence, and transgender people and gays for having messed up the sanctity of the family unit.The anti-vaxxers turned the table and blame the government for what they think is the suspicious nature of vaccination even though they shot up their children against polio and measles, old vaccines acceptable but new ones not, and Biden carefully tries not to blame the non-vaccinators for having not done what was the clear thing to do, which is get vaccinated. It might seem thaat it is very difficult to place blame on populations because it is necessary to mobilize a population to feel hatred for the scapegoated population, but it is easy enough because there are groups, like Jews and Blacks and Transgender people who are available to be stigmatized and that it is easy enough to place blame, like turning on a switch, and always has been so, even before Kant, some two hundred years ago, said that people are to be blamed for not following their obligations, and most people would qualify as having been unkind to a friend or not being conscientious at a work job.
That done, it is not difficult to create a reservoir of the damned for those who should be blamed, their weakness an excuse for doing the wrong thing, a possibility made more visible (in the sense of being visually imagined) because the flip side of Christianity having individualized its religion so that God cares about every one of his creatures, is that individual suffering is also individuated and subject to some abstract law of what bad deed deserves what kind of punishment so as to create an entire order of things that are just, the dead as well as the living. It sometimes seems that Heaven is an afterthought of Hell rather than the original impetus so as to allow people to live forever because Hell is so vivid and dramatic and detailed while Heaven, as many people say, is rather boring what with its harps and wings and togas, people resting on the endless clouds. But heaven sufficiently abstracted from its settings is just a white emptiness while Hell boils down to endless pain. The damned are a surplus labor pool in that the people on Earth would not work so hard if they did not know that they might join those of the damned.
A good though extreme example of shifting from circumstances to people and so putting the blameworthy, those legitimately regarded with anger and hate, in some kind of Hell, portioned out for individuals rather than as a collective, happens with capital punishment. Executions are clearly not a way to rehabilitate people, and it is unlikely to be a deterrent except for highly rational bank robbers who calculate what kind of punishment might happen if they were caught and so would not apply to crimes of passion or to spies, who understand worse risks than execution, such as sustained torture. Execution is not even a punishment which means to calibrate the pain to the violation so that ten lashes will do for some infractions but not enough for other infractions. Rather, executions are done to humiliate and inflict pain on those to be executed. Penologists may claim that using more scientific forms of execution will be more humane, but that is the opposite case. Electrocutions, gas chambers and lethal injections are known to be quite painful. They are much worse than the guillotine or the firing squad or even the executioner’s sword. The idea is to make the one to be executed squirm in abasement and suffer. That makes a person in their last moments a living Hell, which is precisely the idea of actual hell itself, prolonged through numerous stays and anticipations, and then, by Dante, for forever and ever. Hell. by definition is inhumane, even if Dante makes the people in Hell to have a lot of dignity, which I presume would be left in a real Hell. Hell is an ugly place and it should be and humanity would be best rid of it however much it appeals to our least fine feelings.