| Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil Sunday 21 December 2008 It is a common refrain: that all religions are the same. All teach the philosophy of doing good. But that is really a meaningless statement. Nobody, not even criminals, set out to teach evil. Only the insane might consider themselves teachers of evil. Everyone tries to communicate values that they consider good, especially when it comes to value systems. Revenge is taught in belief systems that consider it a positive value and denigrated in places where it is considered negative. Likewise the morality of various sexualities. What is corruption and nepotism in one system is relationship management or networking in another. Morality, in other words, is not a universal absolute but dependent on an underlying belief system. That is why intellectuals and laity alike keep failing in their efforts to almagate religions. Each religion has a very specific underlying belief system that is immiscible and often contradictory with the others. Buddhism rejects the world and seeks to leave it; Islam seeks to submit to a divine law that orders the here and now; Christianity seeks the path to a different universe; Laozi sought a ideal harmony. Javert in Les Mis is a good example - a legalist, he comes to realise that a Christian universe holds no place for him: Damned if I'll live in the debt of a thief! That actually explains to me how a good God can send people to Hell: because they cannot bear to live in Heaven - their very essence would shatter in a unniverse completely in contradiction to them. God doesn't send them to Hell, they just can't enter Heaven. Incidentally, the actual word used for Hell is Gehenna (which actually translates as 'rubbish dump'). The popular Christian idea of Hell is actually from the lake of fire described in the final book in the Bible, Relevations. Hell itself is dumped into the lake of fire at the very end - this is the 'second death'. |