"Go to Hell"

Go to Hell

Science News is that a planet has been detected orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a star nearest us. It’s about the size of earth, so the question stirs of colonizing it, but apparently it’s only four million miles from its sun, so would be too hot for comfort. Might in time be a good place for a penal colony though, just as Australia was first colonized as a hellish place to banish British criminals. At the sentencing hearing the judge will say, “Mr. Smith-Jones, go to Hell,” whereupon the convicted felon will be taken to the transporter room and zapped to an inferno four light years from earth. In due course S-J will find a suitable help meet; or he will fall into a deep sleep and when he awakens the judge will have sent him one. They will be fruitful and multiply, and the rest will be future.

All the steaks will be cooked well done in Hell, but will there be religion in Hell? If there are people, there will be religion. At EfM last night discussion was about Friedrich Schleiermacher, who during the Enlightenment defended Christianity from its scorners. In 1799 he wrote and published a series of essays, “On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers,” in which he asserted that there is implanted in each of us a sense of the infinite. God is not something we make up because we need a higher power or an explanation for what we see around us, our being already has a sense of the Divine, ready and waiting to be argued about. So, in time there will be bishops, priests, deacons and laypersons in Hell, and churches.

In Hell, the bishops and theologians will devise a creed to prescribe what people must say they believe. Seeing that Schleiermacher thought that the notions of God settled as orthodoxy in the Nicene Creed are beyond human knowing, perhaps the new creed will be more reasonable and, in response to the Quinque Vult, the Divinity more comprehensible.

No doubt, there will be religious wars.

TW+