Religion
Related: About this forumReligious OCD: 'I'm going to hell'
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/31/health/ocd-scrupulosity-religion/By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
updated 7:33 AM EDT, Sat May 31, 2014
People with scrupulosity fear retribution for potentially doing the wrong thing.
(CNN) -- When she was 12, Jennifer Traig's hands were red and raw from washing them so much. She'd start scrubbing a half an hour before dinner; when she was done, she'd hold her hands up like a surgeon until her family sat down to eat.
Her handwashing compulsions began at the time she was studying for her Bat Mitzvah. She was so worried about being exposed to pork fumes that she cleaned her shoes and barrettes in a washing machine.
"Like a lot of people with OCD, I tended to obsess about cleanliness," said Traig, now 42. "But because I was reading various Torah portions, I was obsessed with a biblical definition of cleanliness."
Family dinners were awkward for Tina Fariss Barbour, too, as an adolescent. She would concentrate so hard on praying for forgiveness that if anyone tried to interrupt her thoughts, she wouldn't respond.
more at link
rug
(82,333 posts)daleo
(21,317 posts)I hope I spelled the name right. He is a retired philosophy prof. The book was called Who Knows, and dealt with religious questions. I was honestly surprised by how much time he spent exploring the ethics of hell and eternal punishment. I could never take the notion seriously, though as a kid I got a sort of horror movie buzz from listening to fire and brimstone stuff. I guess I am just surprised how deeply this idea can be implanted in people's minds, even otherwise intelligent people.
rug
(82,333 posts)Thanks for the tip on Smullyan. I'll look him up.
Jim__
(14,075 posts)James Joyce describes hell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Just a short excerpt - his description does go on:
They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?
The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.
But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.
...
It'd be kind of hard to ignore that.
And then there's the Church Father Origen, who answered a question about hell by saying that yes, Christians should believe that it exists because the Church teaches it. But the mercy of God is so great that no one is required to believe that anyone is actually in hell.
AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)or outside Planned Parenthood about 5 blocks from my work.
They believe hard core, and they want you to believe too. They want you afraid. Many of them no better than the WBC clowns.
Not representative of all Christians by any means, but still, what they lack in numbers they make up for in obnoxious volume.
Last one that tried to tell my kid about the eternal torment that awaits him just about paid the price for it. My kid is 5. What kind of fucking savage wants to put nightmares like that in a child's head?
Act_of_Reparation
(9,116 posts)- Mark 3:28-30
- Matthew 12:31-32
Does he simply assume no one has blasphemed against the Holy Spirit?
okasha
(11,573 posts)keep-no-prisoners universal salvationist. No one was capable of commiting a sin beyond the scope of God's forgiveness. He speculated that even the devil and the fallen angels would be welcomed into heaven at the last judgement.
The church obviously didn't adopt his teaching at the time. But it's been a quiet undercurrent in theology ever since. It's certainly very much overt in contemporary liberal theology.
Act_of_Reparation
(9,116 posts)But, putting myself in the shoes of an Early Christian, I suppose I could see why they did it. Universal Salvation directly contradicts the direct, attributed words of Christ in two Gospels. Preserving the inerrancy of scripture -- and thereby their divine authority -- was higher on their list of priorities than was making sure their theology was internally consistent (i.e., how could an omnibenevolent deity dole out eternal punishment for temporal crimes, etc.).
daleo
(21,317 posts)Just to torture sentient creatures for mostly trivial behaviours.
DreamGypsy
(2,252 posts)...who offered to show me around, so I could make my choice between Heaven and Hell.
Being an atheist I was very surprised - first that Heaven and Hell apparently existed and second that one was offered a choice. But willing to play along, I said to my host "Sure. Let's check out Hell, and then Heaven".
As we approached the door marked HELL, I was overwhelmed by the complex, delicious fragrances of food that seemed to flow from around the door. Sure enough, stepping through the door to HELL, I saw a gigantic banquet hall, stretching seemingly forever, with rows and rows of tables in every direction, each covered with an incredible variety of platters heaped with wonderfully prepared and presented delicacies. Around each table sat a hundred or more dead souls partaking of this amazing feast. What a glorious scene!! Then I noticed a problem: every person at a table had one hand, left or right, tied behind their back; to the other hand was strapped a spoon or fork about three feet long. Everyone was rapidly moving their utensil among the dishes gathering samples of the clearly delicious food, then struggling because they could not reach their mouth with their bent arm and the long appliance. Only occasionally did I notice a lucky soul fling at bit of food onto their face or shoulder and manage to lick up a morsel of sustenance.
Somewhat disillusioned, I asked my host to take me to Heaven.
Once again as we approached the door to HEAVEN, the wonderful fragrances surrounded me. Inside I saw the same enormous banquet hall, the tables, the platters of marvelous food, and ... the diners with one arm forever secured and the other with the same kind of impossible utensil for eating. Then I saw the difference between HELL and HEAVEN - people were feeding each other.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)for an entire subset of OCD: scrupulosity. This seems to evoke a related topic regarding delusional behavior.
rug
(82,333 posts)AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)cbayer
(146,218 posts)Fortunately, there is now a fairly successful treatment protocol that helps lots of people.