Thoughts on Hell...

• Posted by Dr. Anthony ADRIAN July 28, 2009 - 1,209 views

  Food for thought...

  In a mathematical sense, eternity is a long way off.  We may approach it, but we will never arrive.  In reading and commenting on a blog I read called "Whatever happened to Hell", I have to wonder if the spiritual version of eternity is also infinite in nature.  From descriptions, and that is all we have, descriptions, we really don't know.  The physics of hell are a bit convoluted.  Different writers describe it a different way, Dante Alighieri's Inferno gives us a most vivid picture, as if he had visited Hell then come back to write about it.  I have just finished reading an excellent book by Lary Niven and Jerry Pournelle, also titled Inferno, which borrows heavily from Dante.

  There are other imaginitive stories regarding visits to Hell, Only Begotten Daughter, by James Morrow,and The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis.  A great line in Screwtape letters is in a letter from one demon to his subordinate on Earth, "If you want to keep people separated from God, involve them in religion."

  Good books, all, and highly recommended, mere figments of great writers' imaginations.  Yet, we build our societal views of an imaginary place and have faith that it is an actual place.  Is this what psychologists call transference?  I don't know.  I do know that such a place is not a physical possibility, and a spiritual possibility is another matter of faith, but, as for my personal opinion, not in this universe.

  I leave you all so that I can get to work with a quote from a thermodynamics professor at University of Louisville's J. B. Speed Scientific School of Engineering:  "The devil will never take an engineer to hell.  If they find one spot cooler than any other (Delta T), they will cool it down."

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  My creed:  It's easy to criticize for a group/person for being "closed-minded".  Are you open-minded enough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?

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