Going to Hell

On Damnation

Author Tip Jar

Beliefs on Paper

Some time ago I was working with a recent immigrant from India. Nice man. Middle aged. He had an unspecified role in the hospital, seeming to be neither a doctor nor a nurse but some other sort of entity who nonetheless still wore scrubs. We were in the break room watching T.V. and the local news was covering a recent suicide. It was Miami. The contrast between the gruesomeness of the crime scene and the tropical blue sky was stark. Lotta blood.

“You know,” the man said suddenly with a thick accent, never taking his eyes off the screen. “This is what I appreciate for America. In my country, my cousin, he kill himself. Yes? He have to jump in front of train! Like animal! In America? Freedom to kill yourself like a man. With a gun.”

Outsider perspectives are important.

I say this because in college I had a friend named Bradley. We weren’t overly close. We belonged to the same fraternity though and had rooms adjacent to one another in the frat house so we were, if nothing else, strong acquaintances. One day, around junior year, Bradley drove to a lake in the woods and killed himself. Sleeping pills of all things. Not a gun. At the time, I must admit, upset as his death had made me, there was a little bit of me that felt like that Indian man. That’s how middle aged women kill themselves, I thought.

It hardly seemed dignified.

The upshot of his chosen method though was that, in theory anyway, he had had time after taking the pills to reconsider his actions. See, the fraternity I belonged to was a Christian one. Of course, like so many other things bearing that name, it has since ceased to exist, but while I was there it was still strong enough to care about things like dogma and theology and doctrine. You know… stuff we were, on paper, supposed to believe. One of those things was, generally speaking, that suicides go to hell.

I know, I know… what an unpleasant thing to say.

The Wood of Self-Murderers. Dante’s Inferno.

It’s very logical though. If you kill yourself then the last action you commit on earth is the willful murder of a human being. Someone created in God’s image. The fact that that human being is yourself really makes little difference. You’re still killing somebody… right? And, nature of suicide being what it is, you usually don’t have time to repent. Being dead and all. So again, on paper, a suicide dies in a state of unrepentant sin, having just committed the most heinous of all crimes. They just killed a person. And they never asked forgiveness.

Like I said. It’s logical. It is very logical that suicides should go to hell.

But, as they say in war, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

And no theology does either.

On paper Christians believe a lot of things about Hell. As I said, on paper suicides go to hell. On paper sodomy is a damnable sin. Likewise adultery too and, in some sects, even divorce. Hoarding wealth can send you to hell, holding hatred for another can send you to hell, gluttony (who believes that anymore??) can send you to hell. Pride, envy, abortion, blasphemy, willfully missing Mass (if you’re Catholic)… the list of things that can damn you is quite long.

You know… on paper.

In practice though I have found that almost nobody believes anybody has gone to hell. Ever. To the modern mind Hell, if it exists, and it probably doesn’t, is empty. Save perhaps for Hitler. As an aside you know, I’m not entirely convinced he actually shot himself. As the war was ending Stalin claimed outright that he had not and that he’d instead escaped to Argentina or Spain. Moreover, the charred body that everyone claimed was him was years later forensically examined and found to be that of a woman and…

… and I’m getting sidetracked.

Hitler conspiracies. They tend to do that. Easy rabbit holes to fall down.

Anyway.

Like I was saying. No theology survives contact with the enemy. You think you believe that LGBT people go to hell… until your brother comes out. You think you believe that all suicides are damned until your son hangs himself in the closet. You imagine that somewhere, in the back of your mind, is a stubbornly strong belief that racists will never see God, until maybe you remember some things your grandmother said. As mentioned, Christianity believed that gluttony would send you to hell too, until it was confronted with the modern miracle of high-fructose corn syrup.

People think they believe a lot of things… until they’re tested. As I mentioned in my last article, “Everybody got a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”

I remember in the aftermath of Bradley’s death we had a lot of… what would you call them, hardly counseling sessions… mmmm… coping sessions, I guess, around the fraternity house. We had to clean out his room. Deal with a bunch of paperwork. Guys who were a lot closer to him than I was cried a lot. Circles were sat in. Prayers were said.

I can actually be strangely callous. I don’t know, such things just never seemed to do anything for me. It wasn’t going to bring him back and so… what was the point of all the fuss? In any event I did end up sitting in on one or two of these circles and I remember one of the guys saying, “Well, we can take comfort in the fact that he’s in a better place now”, and a lot of people nodding.

I didn’t nod.

Maybe I’ve mentioned it before but I might be somewhere on the spectrum. Asperger’s or something. People have told me as much before. Logical consistency really matters to me. I had the social wherewithal to not say anything about it at the time but I remember thinking, pretty clearly, I dunno, he’s probably in Hell.

Like I said. Strangely callous.

That might be because I kinda sorta think that maybe not even Hell lasts forever, but, even so… I think I should have experienced more emotion around such a thought. I didn’t though.

As I hinted at, I think the loophole in the “suicides are damned” argument being exploited was the fact that Bradley had died by pills and, therefore, had had an interval of time long enough between taking them and falling asleep that he could have repented of his actions. Said he was sorry. Asked forgiveness. If he’d went out “the manly way” by gunshot that wouldn’t have been possible. But fortunately for those sitting in the circle he hadn’t had a gun, and so they had a reasonable hope that fit within their theological framework that their friend was not at that moment roasting in eternal fire.

There was of course no evidence that such a moment of repentance between swallowing and sleeping had occurred. There didn’t need to be. And, as I learned some weeks later, it would be considered rude to bring that fact up. On paper, on paper, sure, sure, of course, suicide sends you to hell but in this case…

Ah… There’s the rub isn’t it?

Because to God isn’t every case a “this case”?

In that sense then I am very sympathetic to the liberal mind, the one that finds it hard to imagine that God could ever send anyone to Hell. I am, in fact, quite a good deal more forgiving than even they are, for I don’t have any bogeymen in my mind for whom this would not apply. Hitler. Pol Pot. Southern Racists from slavery times. Rapists. Murderers… God’s mercy is big, and the same “but in this case” that arises in your mind when the person in question is someone you know and love must surely also arise in God’s who knows and loves them more.

Nonetheless Hell is a very biblical concept, and nobody spoke of it more than Jesus. (I think this is even technically correct btw… I think Jesus mentions Hell or “the outer darkness” or some such thing more than anyone else in Scripture.) So I think we have to wrestle with it.

He actually mentioned Hell a lot.

Okay…

So how do you go to Hell?