Woodstock School, Mussoorie, in the Garhwal Himalayas, Uttarakhand State (still Uttar Pradesh when I was a child)
One of my most vivid memories of school — a religious boarding school in the North of India (still going strong) by the name of Woodstock — is of the repeated expression of, and warning against, the sin against the Holy Spirit. The warning appears with slight variations in each of the three synoptic gospels. In Mark (chapter 3) it takes this form – Jesus is speaking:
28 “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”
In Mark this warning comes in close proximity to the rejection of his family, an ironic commentary on later sentimental conceptions of the Holy Family (which reminds me of something, to which I will return towards the end — but see the photo at the beginning):
31 Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” 33 And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
So those Christians who idealise the Christian family as, in some sense, the cement of society, get scant support from the Lord they adore.
However, to return to the sin against the Holy Spirit, the sin for which there is no forgiveness, an eternal sin, as Jesus says, which was, to a greater extent than might seem reasonable, the bane of my childhood. It was so vividly inculcated, and the warnings were so grave and of such ponderous import, that I wondered, for years, especially when my hormones were raging during adolescence, whether I had not, in fact, long ago committed the unforgivable sin, and was bound, ineluctably, for hell, something else that was taught so effectively that, to this day, the word ‘hell’ is enough to make me break out into a sweat of anxiety.
I recall that, in his TV documentary, Root of all Evil? (a title, I hasten to add, which Dawkins did not himself choose), Richard Dawkins interviews a woman, brought up in a fundamentalist sect of Christianity, which indoctrinated the fear of hell from very early ages. Here is the interview:
Or, if you want to listen to the uncut interview:
It’s a wickedly effective means of control, and still, sixty years later, as I have said, just the bare thought of hell still has the power to evoke fear. Jill Mytton is not the only one for whom only the mention of hell is full of menace. The locus classicus of this kind of fear-inducing use of hell is perhaps to be found in the movie version of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, where John Gielgud, playing the part of Father Arnall, describes for his young charges the torments that await them.
The power of this threat should not be trivialised. Even when it becomes impossible to believe in it, really, it still seems to plumb the depths of guilt and unworthiness, and the threat of hell has blighted more lives than most people imagine. Reading through the Qu’ran, one cannot miss the emphasis on the horrors that await the evildoer or the unfaithful one. But add to that, that there is nothing you can do, and that whatever you do, whatever reparation you try to make, will never be sufficient to blot out the sin that covers you like a pall, and the sense of being trapped in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s fantasies of hell seems quite overpowering, suffocating even.
I am reminded of Don Cupitt’s words in The Old Creed and the New, where he speaks of hell as “the worst idea that we poor humans have ever had,” and then, more fulsomely, as follows:
At the core of monotheistic faith is an experience of black all-consuming terror, the terror of a damned soul that knows it cannot die. [12]
And he goes on immediately to remark that
that is why we have been so frightened of breaking the rules, and so fascinated with the spiritual power wielded by those who administer the rules. [13]
And this leads him to suggest that
we must [now] strive to free ourselves from all ideas of an objectively existing infinite concentration of sacred authority and power — a sort of sacred black hole — and of that Power’s self-delegation to the leadership in the Church. [13]
That is too culture-specific. Islam, if anything, has a more destructive conception of objectively existing infinite concentrations of sacred authority and power, under the cover of which human beings are capable of doing the most horrible things to each other. After all, if there are sins that cannot be forgiven, if one’s grasp on the rewards of the afterlife is so tenuous, then almost any evil can be justified were it to save only a few from the conflagration to come.
You must understand that belief in hell and its torments, especially for those who are taught to fear it when very young, can be a belief of enormous power, sufficient, in itself, to cast a young mind into a pit of despair — though even minds not so young may never quite free themselves of the terror of it. As Baird Tipton says in his article, “The Dark Side of Seventeenth-Century English Protestantism: The Sin against the Holy Spirit” (Harvard Theological Review, 1984):
Again and again, the historian of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Protestantism encounters the testimony of terrified men and women who suspected that they themselves had sinned against the Holy Spirit and were beyond forgiveness. Instead of a gospel of salvation, many would-be Christians found a religion of damnation, prepared to consign them to everlasting alienation and despair. [301]
The biggest problem lay in the vagueness and ambiguity of Jesus’ saying about the sin against the Holy Spirit. While it has been interpreted in various ways in Christian history, there is no definitive understanding of what constitutes the unforgivable sin. Whether it is blasphemy or apostacy, or whether it refers to a stepwise decline into obduracy and impenitence, the sense that there is a state of sinfulness so great that, in the words of the English divine, Thomas Bedford, in a homily preached at Paul’s Cross in 1621,
[t]here is no recovery, it is like the Jawes of hell, if once a man be slipt down thither, there is a mega chasma a great gulfe to hinder all passages of return. Wherefore it is the wisdome of a Christian to take hede how he traceth in these steps, for the paths thereof are the paths of death. [317]
Such warnings can overpower even the strongest defences of the young, or even the defences of those who, for whatever reason, are morally sensitive and unsure, who have been indoctrinated with a sense of the exalted authority of their pastors or priests or popes.
In this connexion, Nicholas Humphrey’s Amnesty Lecture, “What Shall We Tell the Children?“, is of special interest. It’s a lecture that has received scant attention. Indeed, there seems to be a sense that, in some sense, Humphrey had said the unsayable, and the less said about it the better. For, in that lecture, Humphrey addresses himself to religious indoctrination, which so many regard as an untouchable subject. Families are so often thought of as mini-republics, or, in some cases, more accurately, as mini-kingdoms — every man’s home his castle, as it were — that it is thought wrong to interfere with the passing on of family traditions, however horrible these may be — and stories of damnation and of torment that will never end are as horrible as it gets (which, incidentally, is one reason why, despite some apparently enlightened morality expressed in his parables, I am convinced that the figure of Jesus can never be morally rehabilitated). According to Humphrey,
children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it.
Later, commenting on the US Supreme Court judgement in Wisconsin v. Yoder which found in favour of the Amish right to limit the education of children, Humphry remarks that “[t]he Amish … survive only by kidnapping little children before they can protest.” According the Syllabus to the judgement in Yoder:
The evidence showed that the Amish provide continuing informal vocational education to their children designed to prepare them for life in the rural Amish community. The evidence also showed that respondents sincerely believed that high school attendance was contrary to the Amish religion and way of life, and that they would endanger their own salvation and that of their children by complying with the law.
Notice that higher education was not only contrary to the Amish way of life, but would, in the opinion of the Amish, endanger their own salvation and that of their children, and that, on this basis, the court found in favour of Yoder, which was to find in favour of withholding higher education from Amish children, a decision which has seriously destructive implications for American children generally.
And this, of course, brings us to the point to which I promised to return: namely, the place of the family in Christianity. Unlike the Amish, who think they are reflecting, in their way of life, something of the quality of life commended by Jesus, Jesus himself had little respect for the family at all. He said that he had come to set men against their fathers, and daughters against their mothers — not peace, but a sword, he said:
[Matthew 10:] 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 36 and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. 37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
The idea that parents have proprietary rights over their children does not derive from Jesus, nor should courts be deciding in favour of parents teaching their children whatever seems right to them, restricting their education, or relying on crackpot prayers and anointings when they are sick. Despite the claims regularly made that religion provides the moral cement of society, it is clear that whoever dreamed up the Jesus of the gospels — and it is by no means certain that many of the sayings attributed to Jesus, even if there were an historical figure at the centre of the Christian myth, were actually said by the person whom so many are prepared to worship as Lord — “his” message is deeply ambiguous and troubling. If you search a digital version of the Christian Bible, you will find that hell appears on the scene at the same time as Jesus. And while it is entirely possible to have versions of Christianity in which hell is not mentioned at all, this bears little resemblance to the Christianity of the ages. When Christians sing, at Easter, the well-known hymn, “The strife is o’er, the battle done,” they are rejoicing that “the gates from heav’n's high portal fell,” and that, through the torment and death of Christ, and, of course, his glorious resurrection, ”the yawning gates of hell” are closed:
He closed the yawning gates of hell;
The bars from heaven’s high portals fell;
Let hymns of praise His triumphs tell! Alleluia!
But not, after all, quite closed. Generations of Christians have lived, and many still live, in terror, lest they be found wanting in the last day, or lest they have committed that one sin for which there is no forgiveness, and they be sent to hell, where the fire burns with consummate intensity, and burns forever.
Of course, threatening an atheist with hell — even indirectly — is somewhat akin to threatening them with an invisible pillow fight.
Kinda makes me laugh.
BTW: Hell violates the both the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics. Two out of three ain’t bad.
Well, Kevin, from that point of view it may be laughable, but when you consider the number of children who are still being terrorised by such visions of judgement, it ceases to be laughable, and should be a matter of great concern. Humphrey’s point in “What Shall We Tell the Children?” has nowhere been met with a will to bring about change.
I am often reminded how lucky I was as a child to have been brought only to a lukewarm Methodist church that largely glossed over the idea of hell, emphasizing love and forgiveness instead. Many childhood beliefs seem to be the cornerstones of how the later adults build their worldviews, beliefs that force people to rethink their relationships with their family with great personal difficulty if they are ever to be changed. I marvel that so many can overcome such things in even small measures, let alone come around completely to unbelief, from terrifying fundamentalism drilled into them from the time they began to be able to understand language.
I was struck in the video clip about how god himself was credited with the creation of the horrifying flames of hell designed only to inflict punitive suffering. How monstrous. I am more accustomed to the devil being credited with the nastier parts of creation. Likely my upbringing makes it easier for me to challenge such a thing as horrifyingly immoral, regardless of the authority from which it supposedly comes. I tremble for those who are less able to question such things.
To be honest, I don’t think people literally believe in such nonsense. I’ve stated many times before, that beliefs are rationalizations and justifications for irrationality and delusion. The important part is that it’s other people who are evil and tormented in hell, it’s part of the process of othering other people, and binding the community as special and chosen.
John: (Isaiah 45:7, KJV) – “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” Also Matthew 25:41 – “Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.”
God clearly created hell, originally for Satan and his followers. (Mythologically speaking, of course).
Eric: Of course, the issue of poisoning impressionable minds is important. However, I don’t think it’s as dire as what’s being made out. After all, “no religion” is the fastest growing segment of the US population (according to the Pew research folks), and is growing fastest among the post-Millennial generation. All that information on that darned internet is my guess.
Kids figure out that Santa isn’t real. It’s just one small step from there to figuring out Satan isn’t real, either. Your personal history seems to be marked with an egregiously strict and extended form of brainwashing — and you made it out the other side. Most kids don’t get near that amount of indoctrination. Although, granted, around my neck of the woods, there are probably more kids being home schooled or sent to religious schools than is comfortable for the health of the community.
Plus, I’ll be hard-pressed to figure out how one can intervene in individual families to prevent this indoctrination without creating a dystopia that I certainly wouldn’t want to live in.
We can certainly decry it, and work to mitigate it. But prevent it? Impossible. Not without taking all babies from their mother’s arms and placing them in a strictly controlled communal living environment.
Kevin, I agree, “no religion” is gaining ground in the US, and is even further advanced in parts of Europe; but there is also a reversion, in many religious traditions, towards a kind of primitivism — to which eternal punishment belongs. This is particularly noticeable in Roman Catholicism and Islam, but is also present in the growth and increasing influence (in Israel, for instance) of Hassidism, and other forms of fundamentalism. In Canada this trend is evident in the new Conservative party, which has given up, since its union with the Canadian Alliance, its “progressive” form, and is deeply influenced by evangelical Christians as well as Roman Catholics. And, so far as intervening in families, difficult as this may be, there are some things that can be done to protect children. Home schooling, for instance, can require certain curricula and examinations; and religious schools can be supervised by public officials; and children that are in danger of FGM, or faith healing, forced marriage, etc., can be monitored. Families need not be thought to be completely isolated social units responsible only to themselves. I don’t think this need create a dystopia.
Egbert, I think you are wrong. Certainly you were (well, would have been) wrong in my case. The school that I went to did, at least in those days, teach hell is a very literal sense, and it was a form of terror, and was felt to be. I did, as a child, feel the terror that it was meant that I should feel.
Eric, both you and I are different to the majority, as we both take life seriously. I think I was the only one out of my group, that converted (briefly) to Christianity, even though everyone went to Church, prayed and sang hymns.
There was a period, not so long ago, when young people, mostly Americans, would post a YouTube video of themselves denying the holy spirit.
I thought they were very strong minded to do so. I wondered about doing the same myself but decided that to officially ‘deny’ something was to give it too much attention. And just a little bit of ‘don’t tempt fate’ feeling which shows just how deeply the religious hook was set, even though I no longer believe in that god stuff.
@Kevin
Good citations. Likely I was surprised mostly due to the milquetoast version of Christianity fed to me as a child. The all loving god that also creates and then punishes evil seems like a very big consistency problem to me, but many seem to find a way around it.
I certainly got the hippy version of Christianity as a child. The one thing that baited me in as a young child was a van that went around the streets loudly proclaiming that the winner of a lottery would win a ticket to the moon! I was certainly hooked into joining the church, but was rather disappointed that there was no such actual trip. So even then, I knew religion was not based in truths.
Hell is still part of the offical creed of the Catholic church, even if priests no longer preach sermons on it. It is certainly still part of evangelicalism and pentecostalism. The doctrine of substitutionary atonement is meaningless without it. Liberal Christianity may well have rejected the notion, but when it comes down to it, what does Jesus death save us from exactly, if not hell? Christianity is meaningless without hell it seems to me.
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During a bout with insomnia I was flipping around the channels when I alighted on something in grainy black and white.
The curtain opens and out strides Bishop Fulton J Sheen. I almost wet myself. After a half century those eyes could still do it to me.
Eric is right, the emotional abuse that is done to us former little kids follows us all our lives.
I deconverted around age 11, so my memories of my childish faith are rather vague, but I don’t remember ever thinking much about heaven and hell. I do remember that the first time I rode “Mister Toad’s Wild Ride” at Disneyland I felt somewhat uncomfortable when it passed through Hell, full of laughing demons. That was as far as it went for me. Being the child of agnostics definitely had its benefits.
Greetings,
Eric, you’re right about the visceralness of such reactions that are evoked when we’re reminded of such emotional childhood experiences.
One has only to watch the following YouTube video, featuring highlights from a “Jesus Camp” series, to understand the psycho-physiological damage being done by these – self-styled – “Christian” preachers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACyLTsH4ac
I recall a interview on tv of a former Amish man who said that, when he first said his prayers in English, he’d been convinced that he’d by struck down by a flash of lightning by God – for not saying his prayers in German.
Although not at the same level, I still remember the feeling of guilt, betrayal, and disappointment (in my parents) – having been brought up on stories of “Larry the Lamb” – when I was old enough to understand that, in eating meat, I’d just eaten (“Larry the”) lamb.
My father’s response, on seeing my reaction, was to say, “Don’t be silly! ^Everyone^ has to eat meat!”.
As Matthew’s quote shows, there cannot be darkness without light.
Yet part of the problem is that the original words were either “Sheol” or “Gehenna”, rather than “Hell”, which only came into use in the Middle Ages. (There’s also one occurrence of the Greek word, “Tartaros”, being translated thus in the bible.) “Hell” was used for all three, despite the two Hebrew words (Sheol/Gehenna) having different meanings.
Not to mention the later conflating of Lucifer (the Morning/Evening Star – Venus) with Shaitan (Satan).
God, to a patriarchal tribal society, would be perceived as a Supernatural Patriarch – with all the powers of life-and-death over those under him that that entails.
As, I’m sure, Eric doesn’t need anyone – let alone, me – pointing out.
Nowadays, “progressive” Christians have a different view of things; if God *is* omniscient and omni-benevolent – ie, “Perfect” – then he wouldn’t create souls knowing that they’re going to “burn in Hell for all eternity”.
In other words, ALL souls will go to Heaven.
Even those who commit atrocities.
As an aside, Eric, my father and paternal uncles grew up in India – they were all “Old Sanawarians”.
Kindest regards,
James
Greetings,
I forgot to add, regarding Hell, that my mother (who had been a nurse during WWII) told me that, when she was younger, she still remembers priests telling young mothers, whose babies had died without being baptised, that their baby was now burning in Hell(!)
Needless to say, they stopped saying this when they realised the effect it was having – on the Church’s image in Ireland.
Kindest regards,
James
Dragan, that video is truly troubling. Just imagine being put through this kind of brain washing!!! This is so very wrong, to think that it is appropriate to put children through the wringer like this. This is an obvious violation of the rights of these kids. I couldn’t watch the whole thing. When the man with the hammer speaks of breaking the government, and that God wants only godly people in government, and then the smashing and the obviously heightened emotion. It’s distressing to think that parents thing it a good thing for their children to go through this kind of thing.
Greetings,
I know, Eric. When it was first drawn to my attention, I couldn’t watch all of it, and still haven’t done so. And as for the full series…!
It makes one realise the benefits of growing-up/living in Denmark and Sweden:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Society-without-God-Phil-Zuckerman/9780814797235
Stephen Law makes a good case for bringing up children in a liberal education/environment:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/War-for-Childrens-Minds-Stephen-Law/9780415427685
Kindest regards,
James
There’s a sub-plot running through George Borrow’s semi-autobiographical book Lavengro about a blameless mentally disturbed man who believes he has committed the sin against the Holy Spirit –at the age of seven, no less — and is thereby condemned to burn in Hell forever. And because nobody can tell him what the sin actually IS, nobody can help him. You can read the resolution (and the rest of the book) here.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/borrow/george/lavengro/chapter77.html
It impressed me with how insidious the mechanisms of religious compliance can be.
I perused the Wikipedia entry on unforgivable sin and was struck by the first entry: despair. Apparently it’s an unforgivable sin to think that the sins you’ve committed are unforgivable.
Eric, Jason Dulle # Theo-sophical Ruminations now has an essay proudly defending the notion of original sin!
Please recommend at leastone of these blogs as I am going to recommend this excellent one!
http://ignosticmorgansblog.wordpress.com See the explosive article of May twenty-fourth about God and Yahweh!
http://fathergriggs.wordpress.com
Googling lamberth’s naturalists blogs will bring forth my many other blogs. My blogspot ones suffer from I know not what at times.
And Google skeptic griggsy will also bring forth more detail on why theism = reduced animism- that superstition.
Inquiring Lynn. I’m not altogether sure what you are asking in your last comment. As to Dulle’s view of hell as a kind of place where ultimate justice is meted out, Dulle seems to forget that the suffering that people and other sentient beings endure has nothing at all to do with moral fault, but is due entirely to the failure of the supposed just god to produce the conditions for justice in the first place. As for our plenary responsibility for our actions, which hell seems to presuppose, there is always the problem of limited knowledge, limited empathy, limited scope for choice, the occurrence of luck, misfortune, differential development of moral concepts and ability to make moral choices, differnetial development of affective parts of the brain, and a whole slew of other problems associated with ulitmate responsibility. As Omar Khayam says (roughly remembered): “You would not surround my path with pitfall and with gin (traps), and then impute my fault to sin.” A place of retributive punishment scarcely deals with the circumstances in which people are placed, and serves no obvious moral purpose. Amazing that anyone like Dulle or Prager, for that matter, should not see this.