Ok, so I ended Part One with a discussion of the inappropriateness of the advice "forgive and forget" when applied to child abuse. The idea was that while being able to "forgive and forget" is nice if you are able to do so in a healthy way, the nature and circumstances of child abuse in particular render that ability problematic, to say the least. "Forgive and forget" thus becomes one more mechanism by which abusers can get away with their awful deeds and by which the categories of good and bad, love and hate, get distorted, and with them goes the language we use to talk about them. Benatar provides examples of this with lines like:
"Be daddy's good girl and don't tell mommy a thing
Be a good boy and you'll get a new toy."
To us, the context warps the phrases "daddy's good girl" and "Be a good boy" into something horrifying, and yet to the children, who don't know any different, these meanings are normal. This is literally a warping of what "good" and "bad" mean. This connection between ignorance and the normalization of suffering is, as I said before, part of what makes hell particularly suited to children, i.e., for them.
But this way of looking at the issue also opens the door to the other idea implicit in the phrase "hell is for children," namely, that the very idea of hell (the standard-issue Christian version in particular) is for children in the sense that it is essentially a childish notion insofar as it is enmeshed in the "developmentally-stunted" concepts of love and pain that we see in the song.
Now, without getting into discussions of the difference between "Hell," "Gehenna," "Hades," "Sheol," or "Tartarus" (to name a few), or with the modern attempt to turn hell into some kind of metaphor for "a state of utter alienation from God," what I'm talking about when I say "hell" is the idea of an afterlife in which the dead are punished with eternal torment. The most common version of this is the cartoonish picture of lakes of fire and brimstone populated by red devils wielding pitchforks. This idea didn't come out of nowhere, it has occupied a prominent position in Western Christian consciousness for centuries. While people nowadays may not endorse this version of hell, and some may agree that it is a bit childish, the idea behind it, namely, eternal punishment in the afterlife, is still going strong. And it is this core idea, not simply the fire and pitchforks deployment of it, that I ultimately take issue with.
Why is hell for children? I don't think I'm covering any new ground (I've previously written quite a bit on Byron's particular concern with this idea) when I say that is is because it is tied to the idea of an all-powerful and ever-loving God. As soon as this combination of attributes results in eternal torment, you know that something is messed up. Either God isn't really all-powerful, so he can't prevent their being a hell (resulting in a pretty lame God), or his definition of "love" is just as twisted as the one Benatar sings about. Infinite love and infinite pain should not be one and the same.
To me, these contradictions stem from the fact that the idea of belongs to a childish worldview. For one, I see it as an ideological tool to control people's behavior: threaten people with eternal punishment to keep them from doing what you don't want them to. In this regard hell is for people who are being treated as children, who must be kept in line by force and by fear.
But hell is also for children in the sense that the idea appeals to people who, for whatever reason, are stuck in what could be said to be a position of ethical immaturity. For these people the idea of eternal punishment is appealing because it provides an outlet for resentment. The justice (or revenge) that you cannot seem to get in this world can supposedly be had in the next, and there is supposedly comfort in that. But the idea of hell stems from a much crueler time, and it seems to me that we can no longer say that torture is compatible with justice. We need to have a more grown up concept of love and justice, ones not purely based personal satisfaction ("I hate him and want to see him punished").
Now, in criticizing a topic like hell there is of course plenty of room for objections like "What you are describing is too literal, what we mean is something more metaphorical like 'a state of utter alienation from God.'"
There are a couple things I have to say to such an objection:
First, even if you don't personally believe in that version of hell, there are plenty of people who do, both now and throughout the idea's long history. And even to those who are far more nuanced in their understanding of hell, I would still ask what role the concept plays for them and for God?
Are you just trying to rationalize and sanitize a concept that really has no place any more, and ought to be left behind with many of the other cruel things we have outgrown?
Do you need to think of an afterlife at all? And why does the afterlife have to be divided into winners and losers?
Second, I would also like to take a step back and consider what may lie behind defensive objections like "Well that's not what I believe in." There is undoubtedly a recognition that I judge this idea of hell to be bad, and with that comes the assumption that because I think it is bad I also think that anyone who believes in it is bad. It is true that I think this idea of hell is bad, but with regard to the second assumption, it's complicated.
To a certain extent, I think how we judge such a matter it depends on what you do with that belief. As the whole discussion in part one of the development of our intellectual and emotional capacities suggests, we are not wholly in change of what we think and feel and believe; the circumstances of our development influence us in ways we cannot entirely control. There is some truth to the excuse "They can't help it, that's how they were brought up": I don't think it is true for everyone to the same degree or for all qualities equally, but I think we can recognize that there are ways of growing up that certainly stunt one's possibilities for change and growth and improvement. Couple that with the fact that (as I address in this post) it is not so easy to change one's beliefs, that they are not simply ideas that we have intentionally chosen. So no, I do not think that anyone is a bad person simply because they believe in hell. Or, at least I don't think of them as a bad person in an uncomplicated way--I suspect most of us are bad people in a variety of complicated ways. I know I certainly am.
As I said briefly, it all depends on what you do with it. For those people for whom a belief in hell serves as a goad to live a good life, well, I'd prefer it if you could live a good life without that fear being a factor in your life both for your emotional well-being and for your moral well-being too. I say the latter because (not uncontroversially) I think that doing something good out of fear is less good than doing it for more positive reasons. Without trying to rank these positive reasons, I think I can at least say that it is more "ethically mature" to do something good because you like doing good things than because you are afraid of bad things happening. "Hell is for children," in this sense, means that hell is for people who have not yet developed to the point where they can do good things on their own, for their own sake.
