The Pope Saying There’s No Hell Is Clearly A Trap
by Boobie
The Pope said hell doesn’t exist. That’s a thing that happened. Well, the Vatican says it’s not actually a thing that happened and that the guy whom the Pope allegedly said this to is an unreliable interviewer, but who are you going to believe, the Pope or the Vatican? I’m going with the Pope, personally.
Good souls still go to heaven, but rather than going to hell, where an enternity of torture and despair awaits, bad souls apparently just disappear. That seems like a great way of working things, honestly. Bad souls still don’t get into heaven, which is fine, but they also don’t get punished for AN ETERNITY for lives that were only 80 or so years long, which seems like a bit of an overreaction. I like to crank my hog and sometimes forget that it’s Lent an eat meat on a Friday and yeah, I killed a guy in the mountains of Pennsylvania once and then killed a witness to that killing in a moment of weakness, and for those minor trangressions I’m toast for an infinite amount of time? It just seems unfair.
The thing is, I don’t trust this proclamation, and not just because it’s been roundly refuted. The Catholic Church is a sneaky bastard. I’m pretty sure they invented the “life starts at conception” thing as a way to keep people from having sex and ruin the lives of as many people who still did as possible — and without getting into the well-known and sordid recent history of the Church, they also have a history of, um, fudging the truth when it comes to stuff about heaven. I think this is pretty clearly a trap.
In Xenocide (SPOILER COMING), the third book of the Ender’s Game series, there’s a group of people called the Godspoken who are considered holy because of their impulse to perform mundane tasks like tracing lines and washing their hands until the bleed, which people think are the gods voices speaking to them rather than the OCD that is clearly actually is. When the group is cured of their OCD, one devotee continues performing her OCD rituals, and is considered especially holy for doing so. I think that’s what’s going on here. The Church wants to see who still follows them when there’s really no downside to not doing so.
Rather than assuring people that God isn’t as insanely vengeful a piece of shit as many humans are, the Church is trying to weed out the people whose only instinct to follow their dictates is to avoid punishment. If the Church still says that you can’t take the Lord’s name in vain or have sex before you get married, but the only downside is that your soul will just kind of go away, then people are liable to start straying from what the Church says is good and right to do, because why not? Then when they die, boom, Hell is actually real and guess who’s going there forever? It’s you.
I personally don’t adhere to much Catholic stuff anymore, outside of mass on Christmas and maybe Easter and an occasional attempt at sacrificing stuff during Lent, but from the outside it seems like a good strategy. Maybe people give the Church a little more leeway before just saying “screw it” and becoming an atheist, they swell their ranks a little, maybe rope a few back in when things go badly in their lives, and then those people still don’t get any of those artifically scarce heaven spots anyway. Meanwhile, they weed out some more people from the running, allowing the True Good Catholics a little more real estate to stretch their legs. A win-win for the Church, really. If you’re still anything of a believer, though, I wouldn’t trust them, or you’ll probably end up roasting with Pol Pot and listening to Imagine Dragons/21 Pilots mashups for the rest of eternity.
