Tuesday, April 28, 1998 | 10:01 a.m.
"You need a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed, "Busload of Faith"
RELIGION GIVES me the willies. Just pondering its many complexities invites vertigo. Although I've lofted the occasional desperate appeal upward -- it's true, there are no atheists on deadline -- I find I'm still plagued with childish questions, and, like a child, I want answers.
Not just to the trick questions, either -- exactly why did God help Deion Sanders score that touchdown while letting whole villages of African children starve? -- but about the basic stuff. Currently I'm wondering about hell. Specifically: Is it really, really bad -- roast-in-your-own-juices-for-eternity bad -- or just pretty unpleasant, like sitting forever in a waiting room for a God who's always out?
This is on my mind because a Finnish cleric is promoting a third option: Hell doesn't exist at all! "It's an entirely false construct," announced Lutheran minister Antti Kylliainen recently, reviving an ages-old argument. "Fire, brimstone and eternal torment -- they're all part of the same sad myth." He embraces the old universalist notion that we're all going to heaven, ready or not.
Apparently, Kylliainen's notion crosses some vital Finnish line; all Helsinki's broken loose among his countrymen. His church has received thousands of angry letters. In America, he'd likely earn equal skepticism. A 1990 Gallup poll showed that almost 60 percent of us believe there is a hell, although it is, as religion writer Rick Rood notes, the one topic Christians are least comfortable discussing.
Given my scrambled personal theology, I greeted this idea the way you'd expect: Whew! Perhaps my permanent record isn't so permanent after all and those childhood peeks at Dad's Playboys won't doom me the way I'd always thought. Still, I don't need to wait for the very special "Touched by an Angel" to grasp the larger religious stakes here.
By removing the fear of eternal char-broiling, Kylliainen's notion likewise removes the ultimate restraint on terrible behavior. I'm not thinking specifically of criminals running amok -- criminals already run amok; that's what makes them criminals. Clearly they're not concerned about an afterlife sentence without parole. It's the borderline cases -- stressed-out service-industry workers, lifestyle columnists pushed too far by capricious editing -- who, now held in check by a thin membrane of fear for their souls, might say No hell? What the hell! and snap.
So the only good hell is a bad hell? A pretty bad hell, anyway, says my favorite religious sounding board, First Presbyterian Church's thoughtful pastor, Ames Broen. Hell makes one's choices matter. "The logic of hell is the logic of human selfishness and the desire not to answer to God carried to its conclusion."
Jerry L. Walls, author of "Hell: The Logic of Damnation" (University of Notre Dame Press), contends the same thing: "It is a dreadful but credible thought that we might come fully to prefer the deformed sense of satisfaction endemic to sin, and that God will finally give us what we want." Which is to say, hell.
So it's all about choice. Or is it? When you're dealing with the big guy, choice is rarely a simple matter. Remember the conversation between God and Abraham, as recounted in the Gospel of Bob (Dylan), book of "Highway 61": "God said, 'You can do what you want Abe, but the next time you see me coming, you better run."'
Of course, no one would willingly chose an eternity on the grill, so, like Walls, Broen imagines hell as, well, a cooler place, at least in terms of thermal units applied to one's brisket. "It's not necessarily a place run by a guy with two horns and a pitchfork," he says. "I understand it as being separated from the goodness, wonder and joy of God. I find that frightening."
Still, to many people it undoubtedly sounds better than a lake of fire -- not such a bad penalty for the chance to really screw with people in this life -- and I was weighing my options vis-a-vis my editor the other day when someone left on my car a tiny religious tract that promised to remove all the dithering from the issue.
Its story, told in cartoons matched to excerpts from some of the stricter precincts of the Bible, concerns a dead playboy denied entrance to heaven thanks to his libertine ways. Flashbacks show him leering "Ummm, nice" as attractive women pass and telling naughty stories to his friends. "Why didn't someone warn me about this?" he wails as he's kicked downstairs. That's followed by an alternate scenario, in which the playboy changes his ways, stops ogling women and telling dirty jokes, and is saved! The pamphlet comes down pretty decisively on the side of fire and brimstone.
As for where I come down, well, hell if I know. I tend to bog down in the hair-splitting -- if you're being good simply as a hell-avoidance technique, are you truly being good?. I guess I've always suspected it's an entirely false construct, a sad myth, but nonetheless acted as if it were possible. Why else would my editor remain unharmed?
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