In a post-Easter column, Ross Douthat tries to defend the need for hell as well as in heaven in the Christian canon of beliefs. (He theoretically talks about religion in general, but it's clear he's talking about monotheism with a one-shot afterlife, which, for all practical purposes with a conservative columnists in the US, really means Christianity. And, of course, even if he's right about hell's need in monotheisms, he could at least be honest that it's limited to there, and not Hinduism, etc. But, when has intellectual honesty ever stopped Douthat before?)
That said, he goes from dishonesty to worse dishonesty quickly enough.
(A) doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.
I had no idea "scientific materialism" was so deterministic.
He then goes on to say hell gives meaning to life. No really!
As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning.”
In a weird sense, he's right. The belief in hell does give meaning to life for many Christians, including Dante. The Inferno is exciting, bloody and vengeance-filled. The Purgatorio is kind of bland and the Paradiso is positively insipid.
In short, for conservative Christians, hell is the ultimate revenge fantasy.
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