Damn It All: The Penguin Book of Hell
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I thought the name Tartarus seemed familiar, so I looked up Wikipedia, and it describes Tartarus as "the deep abyss that is used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked".
Tartarus was also the name of the student email server at my university when I was studying computer science.
I believe that's wrong. Hades was the greek name for the underworld, Tararus was the place within it for the punishment of the wicked, Asphodel Meadows was the indifferent place for indifferent people, and Elysium was the rewarding place for the especially glorious and distinguished.
I’m reminded that I find it odd that Moloch is still referenced by the American elite in passing: U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2016-07895 Doc No. C06131616
Joseph Vogl asked this same question about why "efficient" markets allow inefficient ouctomes in his book Oikodicy.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
https://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2015/08/the-end-of-an...
[spoiler]
One of the characters in the book is an alien female who has hacked into her society's hell to expose its horrors to doubters in 'the Real'. She becomes trapped and (long story short) becomes an angel of death whose special gift / eternal punishment is to be able to release from hell one trapped soul per day. Unfortunately, every time she does this, she takes some of their pain upon herself.
I'm not sure why humans have to dream up a Hell or Heaven after death. It appears to be obstinate refusal of observing what's right in front of them.. On what we call earth. You can either observe someone in Hell or Heaven and it's not like anyone has any real control over the matter. My whole life was pointed in one direction and there has never been any choice for me. /determinist
I think it's a bad thing to believe in afterlife and when what's in front of you is all that should be considered. Reason being, maybe it prolongs people having to be in Hell and not just Heaven.
Weird way to exclude yourself, but ok.
The article to me explained that the idea of heaven and hell is a manifestation of justice. That even if YOU can’t do anything to them, bad people will eventually suffer and good people will eventually be rewarded. Nicer to believe than the alternative. Did you read the article?
Also, wishing for the unending torture for someone who's slighted you is a very non-christian, non-most-religeons way of thinking.
You know it’s pretty much a key tenant of Christianity to pray for the souls of those that have harmed you or others right?
Imagining a torment for someone who has wronged you is a rather effective method of ablating away the desire to enact revenge physically. It also leaves more room for ironic and humorous punishments.
"Dear theological construct, please take mercy on this guy who cut me off in traffic after driving on the hard shoulder to pass a bunch of stopped cars, and do not send him to a punishment in Hell wherein other cars are freely zooming around on the highway, while his is perpetually boxed in by semis and garbage trucks. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Amen."
No, it mostly just some subset of Protestants that reject it (the practice is common, as well as in Roman Catholicism and some Protestant communities, in the Eastern and Oriental [despite etymological similarity, these are not synonyms] Orthodox Churches, and, apparently, the Assyrian Church of the East.)
> and, only for those in purgatory.
It's true that in the Catholic tradition, there is a special connection between prayers for the dead and purgatory (arguably, purgatory as a doctrine is a Catholic explanation for the ancient Christian practice of prayers for the dead.)
The origin of hell is probably pagan.
“Christian”; on the other hand, mainstream Christians don't consider Jehovah's Witnesses or LDS to be Christians, because (long before either of those existed), mainstream Christianity settled on a common boundary around the Nicene (or Nicene-Constantinopolitan, as the Orthodox refer to it) Creed. Even across the two Great Schisms, this has held across the main communities.
> but don’t believe in hell because as the article also states, it isn’t mentioned in either the Hebrew or Greek scriptures.
“Hell” is a name applied to a doctrine that those holding to it hold as an interpretation of several passages in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, primarily references to Gehenna and tartarō.