RE: Can't seem to let go.
April 29, 2010 at 1:46 pm
(This post was last modified: April 29, 2010 at 2:36 pm by EggSpurt.)
Fear is stronger than logic. You can justify things logically to yourself but they'll still be difficult to let go of. Look at phobias. A person can tell themselves a spider or a mouse is harmless a thousand times over and fully know it, and still get chills up their spine at the thought of holding one in their hand. I'm deathly afraid of having my blood drawn and I fully know the pain is minuscule compared to the months of pain I have (and ignore) because my wisdom teeth. It's completely irrational, but that's what human beings are.
The other day i read a story about a man on death row who was pardoned after spending 26 years in prison. He was pardoned because DNA evidence exculpated him. In my mind I thought "wow, that's probably one of the worst things that could possibly happen, to be imprisoned, falsely, for a third of your entire life!" I sometimes read stories of people who were released from prison after 50+ years of incarceration, and this is already unimaginable to me. All we have to do is say 'you will be punished for three millennia" for the severity of the punishment to lose all meaning. Nobody is capable of comprehending three thousand years. So when you consider HELL, and someone's burning in it for an e t e r n i t y, the length of time is completely lost on us. But the more you dwell on trying to comprehend the length of time that an eternity is, (usually by ignoring infinity and substituting it with something that can actually be semi-comprehended), then the extent of the sadism, cruelty and malice becomes more and more inescapable. It becomes SUCH a bad punishment, that no earthly crime can compare to it. Even if Stalin and Hitler were to suffer in Hell, their punishment should be measured by the amount of lives they've ruined (let's say 100 years in hell for each human being they've killed). So at worst, if we blame all the deaths in WWII exclusively to Hitler - about 50 million lives - and multiply that number by 100 years, then even Hitler, the worst mass murderer in human history should be able to leave Hell after 5 billion years. And what's 5 billion years in comparison to eternity? Is it even in the same league? Not even close!
Now let's consider the idea of sunflash ending up in hell because his search to determine what is real and what is fabricated led him to conclude that god doesn't exist. Is it then fair for him to spend more time suffering in hell than Hitler should? Of course not. It's beyond preposterous. But you're still afraid. Because fear is irrational.
So my suggestion, for what it's worth, is if you have to accept Hell as possible, no matter how improbable, then also accept the fact that you going to hell is supremely unfair, to the point of it being utterly ridiculous.
Consider the pardoned inmate that I wrote about earlier, who was imprisoned unjustly. He maintained his innocence the whole time, even though he was certain that he was going to be executed. Would it have ever been right for him to proclaim himself guilty, simply because he was under an authority that had the power to destroy him? The answer is no. If you are innocent, or the punishment does not fit the crime, then you stand up for what you know is right. I know that eternal hell is not right. Not even for fuckin' Hitler. So if you're going to be scared of it, then take comfort in knowing that you don't deserve it! And since you don't deserve it, no matter WHAT you do in life (believe, not believe, believe in the wrong deity, lie, cheat, steal, commit adultery, burn down an orphanage, whatever), eternal hell is too severe a punishment for all of those.
I mean, doesn't it piss you off? Doesn't it make you angry that in the afterlife a murdering child rapist gets the same sentence that you do, and the worst thing you ever did is considered that the universe functions according to natural laws that do not require supernatural tampering? It pisses me off to the point where I'm no longer scared of hell, but angry at the douchebag who would put me there for such a ridiculous reason.
Let me just repeat. If there is a hell, you're gonna suffer more than Hitler should. If that doesn't make you consider how sick and twisted and ridiculous the idea of hell is, maybe nothing will. But like I said, fear is irrational.
As if my last post wasn't long enough, here's something a Christian friend of mine sent me. More food for thought.
"Truly, I believe the idea of a burning, festering place of suffering is preposterous. It’s figurative. Hell or the words it was based upon; Tartaroo, Hades or Sheol depending upon whether it’s Greek or Hebrew, New Testament or Old Testament refers to an actually place (a fucking piece of real estate) where corpses and fecal matter were disposed of by burning. They referred to where you went depending upon how you lived your life. If you were a criminal, dissident or general shitbag…they sent your corpse there when you died."
The other day i read a story about a man on death row who was pardoned after spending 26 years in prison. He was pardoned because DNA evidence exculpated him. In my mind I thought "wow, that's probably one of the worst things that could possibly happen, to be imprisoned, falsely, for a third of your entire life!" I sometimes read stories of people who were released from prison after 50+ years of incarceration, and this is already unimaginable to me. All we have to do is say 'you will be punished for three millennia" for the severity of the punishment to lose all meaning. Nobody is capable of comprehending three thousand years. So when you consider HELL, and someone's burning in it for an e t e r n i t y, the length of time is completely lost on us. But the more you dwell on trying to comprehend the length of time that an eternity is, (usually by ignoring infinity and substituting it with something that can actually be semi-comprehended), then the extent of the sadism, cruelty and malice becomes more and more inescapable. It becomes SUCH a bad punishment, that no earthly crime can compare to it. Even if Stalin and Hitler were to suffer in Hell, their punishment should be measured by the amount of lives they've ruined (let's say 100 years in hell for each human being they've killed). So at worst, if we blame all the deaths in WWII exclusively to Hitler - about 50 million lives - and multiply that number by 100 years, then even Hitler, the worst mass murderer in human history should be able to leave Hell after 5 billion years. And what's 5 billion years in comparison to eternity? Is it even in the same league? Not even close!
Now let's consider the idea of sunflash ending up in hell because his search to determine what is real and what is fabricated led him to conclude that god doesn't exist. Is it then fair for him to spend more time suffering in hell than Hitler should? Of course not. It's beyond preposterous. But you're still afraid. Because fear is irrational.
So my suggestion, for what it's worth, is if you have to accept Hell as possible, no matter how improbable, then also accept the fact that you going to hell is supremely unfair, to the point of it being utterly ridiculous.
Consider the pardoned inmate that I wrote about earlier, who was imprisoned unjustly. He maintained his innocence the whole time, even though he was certain that he was going to be executed. Would it have ever been right for him to proclaim himself guilty, simply because he was under an authority that had the power to destroy him? The answer is no. If you are innocent, or the punishment does not fit the crime, then you stand up for what you know is right. I know that eternal hell is not right. Not even for fuckin' Hitler. So if you're going to be scared of it, then take comfort in knowing that you don't deserve it! And since you don't deserve it, no matter WHAT you do in life (believe, not believe, believe in the wrong deity, lie, cheat, steal, commit adultery, burn down an orphanage, whatever), eternal hell is too severe a punishment for all of those.
I mean, doesn't it piss you off? Doesn't it make you angry that in the afterlife a murdering child rapist gets the same sentence that you do, and the worst thing you ever did is considered that the universe functions according to natural laws that do not require supernatural tampering? It pisses me off to the point where I'm no longer scared of hell, but angry at the douchebag who would put me there for such a ridiculous reason.
Let me just repeat. If there is a hell, you're gonna suffer more than Hitler should. If that doesn't make you consider how sick and twisted and ridiculous the idea of hell is, maybe nothing will. But like I said, fear is irrational.
As if my last post wasn't long enough, here's something a Christian friend of mine sent me. More food for thought.
"Truly, I believe the idea of a burning, festering place of suffering is preposterous. It’s figurative. Hell or the words it was based upon; Tartaroo, Hades or Sheol depending upon whether it’s Greek or Hebrew, New Testament or Old Testament refers to an actually place (a fucking piece of real estate) where corpses and fecal matter were disposed of by burning. They referred to where you went depending upon how you lived your life. If you were a criminal, dissident or general shitbag…they sent your corpse there when you died."
The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself - Carl Sagan
