Some questions about hell - do any religions get specific about what you can and cannot do there?
Hell has a really bad reputation, depending on the religion – anything from “a location in the afterlife in which evil souls are subjected to punitive suffering, most often through torture, as eternal punishment after death” to the more neutral description as “a place of punishment or reward, merely describe an abode of the dead, the grave, a neutral place that is located under the surface of Earth.”
- Do souls communicate in hell? (They sort of have to if people are suffering).
- What language is spoken in hell? Could I be sent to Chinese hell and not be able to understand a word?
- If you’re dead, why does it matter if you suffer? Can a dead soul feel pain? Or for that matter, emotion?
- If so, can dead souls fall in love? (if your body goes to hell as well, can dead hell residents have sex?)
- Who is in charge, in hell? Who gives the orders to make one person suffer, and in what way? Is there a Hell Management Team?
Does any religion deal with this level of detail?
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8 Answers
To answer your final question, of course they don’t deal in specifics. Vagueness is the hallmark of all religions. Vague threats, vague promises.
“Dante’s Inferno” follows the church’s mythology at the time as I understand it. I could be wrong about this though.
I think the best description of hell is that it’s a metaphor for the guilt and harm that tends to come back to us when we harm others.
The Bible (and Torah) are actually VERY light on details about hell. It’s described only vaguely and infrequently, and even the limited descriptions we get are often not necessarily literal descriptions. Alot of what people THINK they know about the Christian hell is just cultural, not actually part of scripture.
All of your questions seem to be the sort of thing a fiction writer working on a story involving hell might worry about. None of those things is formally answered. Indeed, the point is to get you to be good, so describing it as anything other than absolute eternal debilitating suffering kind of undermines the point.
@Entropy Does the Torah say anything about hell? It is my understanding that neither Heaven nor Hell are part of the Jewish religion.
I believe in Pastafarianism you just get boiled inside a beer volcano for all eternity.
Obligatory “religious descriptions of things like hell are not supposed to be taken so literally”.
^Whoah… Pump the breaks @rebbel .If you’re suggesting BBQ is Hell, you’re going to want to keep that to yourself, if you find yourself in the N. American South…Your going home, in a box bro…
That is. If we don’t feed you to the pigs. No guarantee that you wouldn’t be fed to alligators either. Or both…
Either way. Your balls are destined to be hanging on some redneck’s rear view mirror.
However. An excellent point may have been made here. “One man’s Heaven is another man’s Hell.”
There are many different opinions on what constitutes Hell. A hardly known song is “If there ain’t cold beer in Heaven, who the Hell would wanna go?”....
Since I can’t drink cold beer any more alive (I know, it’s a long stretch to think I’d go to Heaven when I die,) I would like a few ice cold kegs in my room in Heaven.
AND I DAMN SURE WOULD HAVE ACCESS TO BBQ. I’d cook it every other day, to keep the smell around. Just for you bro…
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