What is Hell?

This is a blog about a metaphysical frustration. It is a typical blog; unorganized, directionless and a little pompus.


Originally posted Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Follow up to "Its hard to take a picture of a cat's belly" blog: So, Momma Vodka said to put Tabasco sauce on Montecore and it stopped him from all the compulsive licking! That Momma Vodka always knows what to do. Random annoyance: I'm tired of meeting so many people, it is drastically reducing the amount of names I have to choose from for my future babies. (please refer to me for an explanation, I'd like to rant.) Less random annoyance: Anyway, to the point of this blog. (Ha! that is an oxymoron; a point to a blog!) But really to my point: Death. No, I've not gone emo or retro goth (retro goth? yes retro goth, because the goth movement is dead. Although they were all so comfortable with that situation anyway they probably don't mind. Or were they the least comfortable with death. I never understood it. As with every social movement, it was destroyed by middle class white kids that wanted to scare their mom and dad. So then, where do the real activists for social movements go to die? Oregon and Northern California.) So back to Death. I am watching The Seventh Seal (its an old film about a Knight who returns home from the Crusades where he encounters the embodiment of death. Upon meeting Death he does what most people would do: challenge Death to a board game. Chess to be exact.) So toward the end, when it becomes apparent that Death will win the game, the Knight says: Well okay I guess that's all right since when I die you can tell me the answers to everything about life. Then Death says, but I don't know anything, "I am Unknowing." I was pretty struck by that. "I am Unknowing." That's scary. Is death indeed the End end? I used to think I knew, but it turns out that was just hope (and a little gas.) So lets stipulate that there are two alternate realities in the afterlife, lets just call them Heaven and Hell (these names are arbitrary, of course.) Heaven is where the "good" people go and Hell is where the "bad" people go. Let also stipulate that we mean "good and bad" in the conventional sense (ie. feeds the poor=good, kicks puppies=bad.) So, what would these afterlives be like? And what would be different between Heaven and Hell? It doesn't seem that it could be anything physical or material because the body is left in the pre-afterlife, physical reality, namely the World (for those radical skeptics, we are also stipulating that the physical world is reality.) So, Hell couldn't be fiery physical torture, nor could Heaven be the endless buffet to which I am looking so forward. Hell must be Unknowing, and Heaven is complete knowledge. Something I learned from Catholic teaching that resonates with this theory is that Hell is the absence of God. (I'll do a whole different blog on that last statement, but for now lets get back to Heaven and Hell.) Certainly unknowing is Hell for me. I spend all of my time trying to decipher reality and move toward some truth. (Seriously, all of my time, its the only thing besides existing that I really do all the time.) Well, now I wonder if I am being coherent. The pursuit of knowledge is the only thing that keeps me going. I want to know more, so I want to live more. Now there are two scary consequences to the theory I have set up. Scary consequence #1: Wouldn’t absolute knowledge of all reality mean I would lose all hope and ambition? That’s not even considering all the horrible truths to which I may be privy. If there is indeed some method to this reality-madness, then being all-knowing would be extremely comforting and indeed Heavenly. Scary consequence #2: If my purpose in life is knowledge, and Heaven is complete knowledge, then wouldn’t it make sense for me to just off myself so I can get to Heaven faster? Who knows? I don’t think suicide is a reliable way to knowledge because no one really knows if Heaven is real (no one living, at least) and who is to say I won’t end up in Hell, thus ending my pursuit altogether. So, Heaven might be comforting and satisfying, but what would Hell be like? What kind of un-knowledge is Hell? Would you know that you don’t know anything? If not, it may be blissful (but that can’t be right.) If you do know you don’t know anything, would you know that you couldn’t know anything? If you do not know that you couldn’t know everything, then Hell wouldn’t be much different from life. So it goes.