(July 21, 2025 at 5:18 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: It's not depressing because very few believers in eternal damnation believe that they themselves will be one of the eternally damned.
Sartre said, 'Hell is other people.' The devout tend to think 'Hell is for other people.'
Boru
They do fear hell; I mean, just look at the lengths they'll go to endure those boring masses. And they also fear hell for others.
Watch this Catholic priest comfort believers that it is OK that their child burns in hell while they're in heaven and that it'll all make sense once they meet god. That their parents and/or children will be so grotesquely deformed by their sins they'll look like monsters, and that is why they won't feel pity for them and will be happy to see them burn.
I mean, how comforting is this? Obviously not very much.
When it comes to Sartre, he literally thought that hell was other people. And you could easily argue that being alone in a room for long periods of time is much better than being with someone irritating. Anyway, he explored this idea more in his play/movie "No Exit" (1962). I would warmly recommend that movie; it is one of my favorites. I remember when I first watched it as a kid and was blown away by how someone can use something like hell as a metaphor.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
