The Christian Hell is painful punishment that will never end. Today's Christian Hell seems to serve two purposes: for the general populace, Hell provides the comforting faith that the injustices of this life will be dealt with definitively in the next for the powerful in the world, Hell (and Heaven) are the stick and the carrot that keep the public from misbehaving. The stories are told with a lightness proper to an author who doesn't believe in Hell. This is a survey of the different conceptions of Hell across religions and through the ages.

Both books are written with scholarly interest, although both authors display a sense of humour towards their subjects. The descriptions of life and activities in Heaven are quite lacklustre verging on downright boring.Īn interesting partner to a book that I recently read, Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead, about saintly relics. Strangely, humans don’t seem to have much imagination when it comes to Heaven, as witnessed by the final chapter of the book. Most of the details which have come to be accepted by fundamentalists seem to come from literature external to the Bible, which I am willing to bet that not many of them realize. The history of Hell and the Devil are also fascinating, as scholars sort out how many of those details are cribbed from the Ancient Greeks & Romans, not to mention the Caananites who rivaled the early Jews. Christianity and Islam don’t much trust sinner to administer their own penalties and have awarded that role to Satan otherwise known as the Devil. The Buddhists have lots of different hells for lots of different sins, but they are pretty much self-service establishments-no one is overseeing your punishment. It is remarkable how several religions have come up with the same kinds of ideas about the afterlife. Nevertheless, it was an interesting read (especially since I’m reading Terry Goodkind’s Stone of Tears at the same time and it seems that he was reading the section on the tortures of Hell to provide the plot for his novel.)

Some subjects don’t lend themselves to summertime reading and Hell and damnation are two of those subjects. My enjoyment of this book probably suffered from the fact that I finally got it through my library during the summer months.

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