Hell

Presumably, like many of my readers, I came to look at ‘religion’ and ‘churches’ as an archaic motif of the past. Going to church was like going through the motions of life: just another activity to meet strangers who strike you as behaving more cordial than they really are; have some food and perhaps indulge in a feeling of slight moral superiority.

As Peterson insists, modern people – especially in the West – do not have a lot of respect for tradition. We kind of laugh off sacrificing a sheep as primitive, barbaric; out-dated and stupid. Yet you’d probably be viscerally traumatized after slitting the throat of an innocent lamb – having its blood spurt over your face, its scarlet life force oozing into the ground – and you’d feel more sombre than you perhaps expected, at the dead, unmoving carcass replacing what was a breathing, baying beast just a moment ago. You might feel the urge to whisper a few words, not knowing from whence the urge comes from, nevertheless it seems only proper to dedicate its death to something… anything. The incident would change you, and would be a memory you wouldn’t forget any time soon.

“Modern men cannot find God because they will not look low enough”

– Carl Jung

At some point I finally made the connection; I’ve been thinking about it all wrong. Metaphysical claims aside, what you should actually do is superimpose the ecclesiastical template onto our lived realities. Heaven and hell aren’t ‘pie-in-the-sky’ or ‘be-a-good-person-so-I-can-have-seventy-two-virgins-after-death’ kind of ideas; they’re real.

Heaven is sharing smiles not covered by masks with strangers on a walk, heaven is having a loving partner you can trust; kids to play with and nurture, grandchildren to visit you and pull at your beard in your old age; it is contributing to your society and receiving genuine appreciation in return, heaven is contentment in the happiness you’ve enjoyed in this fleeting instant we call ‘life’.

Hell is ungrateful children fighting over their inheritance at their dying parents’ bedside; it is drinking yourself to a stupor so that your rational intellect doesn’t cut yourself into pieces; it is having everything but nothing at the same time; it is the Nazi gas chambers; it is ‘friends’ betraying each other for ‘status’, hell is the Povolzhye famine; it is ‘The Cultural Revolution’, hell… is the Beirut explosion.

“On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles – what everyone may choose to call them – we know: the best of us did not return.”

– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I should credit Peterson for articulating this point and reminding us of its Truth:

“Heaven and hell are eternal places because they are always present at the extremes of human existence, for better or for worse. People are constantly choosing between them, although they generally are not conscious of that in an articulated manner”

– Jordan Peterson