Doesn't the fear of hell keep us behaving right?
Dear John: I just have one simple question for you: Do you even believe in heaven and hell? As a Christian, I deeply and passionately believe in both. And I can tell you that I greatly fear for a world increasingly like ours, where nobody believes in either.
Because once we jettison our belief in hell, what is left to keep us from acting any way we want to? Why wouldn’t I do every kind of evil, if I know that I would never suffer any kind of enduring punished for it?
I think I’ll just leave my question at that.
Answer: But you didn’t ask me just one question (let alone a simple one). You’ve asked me two questions: 1. What do I personally believe about heaven and hell? And 2. Without the threat of hell, what’s to stop people from doing “every kind of evil”?
To your first question: My personal beliefs about heaven and hell are that I don’t know if either exists.
Which, obviously, isn't a statement of belief. It’s just a fact.
I have no idea know what, if anything, awaits us after we die. Neither do you. Neither does anyone else.
Why? Because the afterlife is like Vegas: What happens there, stays there.
What I do know is that I personally don’t enjoy speculating about questions that can't be answered. To my mind, wondering whether or not heaven or hell exists is like wondering whether or not unicorns can knit, or if leprechauns enjoy cross-country skiing.
Don’t know those things. Can’t know those things. Ergo, am bored thinking about those things. (Except now I can’t stop thinking about leprechauns cross-country skiing. With their little ski poles!)
That said, I very much appreciate that a whole lot of people are extremely sure of what happens in the afterlife. And of course that can be a beautiful thing. It’s good, and comforting, to believe, for instance, that after we die we are reunited with loved ones who passed before us.
I wouldn’t think to question anyone on the validity of that belief.
But no amount of religious conviction can alter the fact that all beliefs about God and the afterlife are, and must remain, entirely subjective.
Which is fine. To say that subjectivity has its place is like saying air is certainly beneficial. Our lives are primarily one long subjective experience.
But objective and subjective knowledge are two very different animals. And the world would be a much, much better place if more people kept aware of, and respected, that difference.
“I believe that heaven and hell are real” is a benign statement. “I know that heaven and hell are real” is the beginning of a dangerous proposition.
To your second question: The notion that people need the Christian concept of hell — or any religious belief system at all — in order to behave morally is absurd. If the Christian hell were a necessary predicate for moral behavior, then no person before Christ could have been moral. And everyone who is a Christian would always—or at least more often than not— behave morally. And I think we can all agree that ain’t happenin’.
This is an example of Ask John, the advice column that I wrote for The Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper from 2016-2019. It’s here because I linked to it (from my post On the Edge of the Great Divide) as an example of the work I was doing at that time. That said, if you have a question you’d like me to answer here on my Substack site, you’re more than welcome to send it to me at john@johnshore.com