Kristine
Posts: 3061 Joined: Sep. 2006
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*Possible spoiler alert*
I am sure that Kevin's film concludes that Hell is separation from God, a state of being, not a literal place - which is what I was taught, after all. Not everyone learns "Dante's hell." (Although I think they used it on us kids when my age was in the single digits.)
It's interesting that believers do not also refer to the Apocalypse as a state of being, then. Or creation - is not everything being destroyed and created all the time in a cosmos of change?
I think the concept of change is key - liberal Christians who accept evolution do so because they accept a universe of death and change, which IMHO really is much closer to animism/pantheism than the Lawgiver idea (who is unchanging because death and change are punishments).
One could also argue that any dungeon (hell) utilized even by the most benevolent deity represents that deity's unconscious, peopled with desires, urges, and actions that the deity denies (judges). I have always argued that Edgar Allan Poe came up with the idea of the unconscious before Freud, but one could also credit more ancient writers of this. Hell represents our unconscious and our dark side, which we fear. Unfortunately, cultivating this fear via religion does little to deter one from acting immorally, if one is so inclined, and uselessly and destructively torments those whose default setting is not be so inclined.
-------------- Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip?
AtBC Poet Laureate
"I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive
"Damn you. This means a trip to the library. Again." -- fnxtr
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