Chad Halcom
Is Hell Still Relevant?8/28/2021 Sartre wrote that hell is other people. I think maybe hell is yourself.
No one seems to write about hell anymore – unless you’re out on the hard edge of supernatural horror genre fiction. Even there it gets short shrift. I don't go all the way in on an afterlife of sulfur pits and horned men with pitchforks. It may be close to that, but I think there are many other ways hell is still relevant. At the least it needs some fresh ink. I'm partial to the notion that hell is like being a drug addict on the first day of detox – only detox never ends. Or perhaps being a codependent person in a soundproof bubble, with a group of people just outside the glass and no way to feed on their energy. No extricating yourself from the worst of your cravings, but no way to feed it either. No one else acts as your external tormentor – no one needs to. Hell is like that worst problem or darkest edge of your nature that you refused to confront or correct, wholly defining you. And if so, if hell is really yourself, then there’s a certain justice to that. After all, in life, you chose yourself. You chose you over faith, the needs of others, self-improvement, abnegation and the chance at redemption. You chose your tribe or ideology over your humanity, because of what it did for you, and you let it make you cruel. Hell in that way is depraved wish fulfillment. The 'wages of sin,' as it were (Romans 6:23). Maybe God was trying to save you from sulfur and pitchforks – but ultimately I think He is trying to save you from you. Look around, at the headlines. Look within, at your own impulses. Heaven might need to be imagined, but probably you and I have a good bead on what hell is like already.
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February 2023
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