Is there any evidence for that?
Do we need empirical evidence to warrant thinking that telling children that people suffer torment in hell forever is harmful and bad? I don’t think so. There are things that we know without evidence. For instance we know that telling people they are stupid or ugly or boring or generally repulsive is bad. We also know that bad news is bad, so we know that it’s bad to tell people bad news if it’s not true – we know it’s bad to tell someone: ‘your cat/dog/best friend/mother/child is injured and in terrible pain’ if that’s not true.
We don’t need evidence for that. It’s part of how the world is. Imagine telling a child: ‘Your cat is caught in a trap, it’s crushing her leg in its jaws, she’s howling in pain, we can’t get her out’ when it’s not true. There’s no way to look at that and think it’s good or not too bad or neutral. Even if we knew for a fact that it would do no lasting psychic damage at all (and how would we know that?), it would still be bad. Even temporary mental anguish is bad.
We don’t demand research before we refrain from doing things like that. We don’t, and don’t need to, and shouldn’t. We extrapolate – from experience, imagination, sympathy, empathy. We know what that would feel like, and we flinch, and we don’t do it to people.
That’s how a lot of morality works, at the simplest level. That’s why one familiar parental sqawk is ‘How would you like it if she did that to you?’ It’s the most direct way to explain why something is wrong and not permitted. The child being squawked at doesn’t get to demand a look at the research before accepting the lesson.
So – adults who tell children there is a hell where some people are tortured forever are doing a bad thing, even if the children do simply ignore the claim, or shrug it off, or deny it. If the children believe it but think it is only other people who are tortured forever and are happy with that thought – that is a very bad thing, because those are some callous children, if not outright sadistic.
Yes, it’s definitely a terrible thing and that’s obvious with some basic empathy.
I actually think a decent-sized number of children have an easy time accepting that Bad People should suffer horrible punishments. But when they actually meet one of the Bad People and see them as human, well, that’s when it gets painful for kids with any empathy.
As Jenavir says, we tell children that Hell is for Bad People; but it isn’t just a question of punishment (like jail, for that matter). There are other things going on too.
Remember when Grandma was really sick? That was bad; and then she died. That’s sad; but then, while it’s sad that she’s not with us anymore, now she’s in Heaven, with Grandpa, and it’s nice there, and she’s not sick anymore (having left her body behind, you see) and when you die you’ll get to see her again. Won’t that be nice?
No, not everyone goes to Heaven when they die; Bad People go to Hell [which makes sense because if Heaven is so great, then there can’t any Bad People there, can there?].
So far, so good, for the most part. I think the problems only start when the concept of Bad People, which starts out, reasonably enough, as people who have done (really) bad things and should be punished, expands to include Jews and Muslims and Papists and homos and liberals, including that (otherwise) nice little girl next door (with Catholic parents), who died suddenly in a car crash. Or, of course, the case you consider, when the idea of Hell serves as a standing threat of punishment (i.e. rather than “if you don’t stop that right now, you’ll be sent to bed without any supper” or other contextually proportionate punishment) – it just becomes “be good or you’ll go to Hell”. And then, again, it becomes “believe in Jesus [i.e. believe what you’re told w/r/t religion] or you’ll go to Hell”, which is indeterminate between a causal story and one about just punishment, and which leads immediately to the O’Flanagan girl being tortured eternally, *nice though she was*, because her parents were Papists.
I’m not sure what my point is here, but I suppose it must be that it’s easy to start to tell things to children which seem perfectly natural, without really considering that eventually they might get in each other’s way when we have to tell a consistent overall story. So, working backward from an unacceptable overall story, we might arrive at what started as perfectly natural things to say (e.g. about when Grandma died).
“Do we need empirical evidence to warrant thinking that telling children that people suffer torment in hell forever is harmful and bad? I don’t think so. There are things that we know without evidence. For instance we know that telling people they are stupid or ugly or boring or generally repulsive is bad. We also know that bad news is bad, so we know that it’s bad to tell people bad news if it’s not true – we know it’s bad to tell someone: ‘your cat/dog/best friend/mother/child is injured and in terrible pain’ if that’s not true.”
OB, I think that on the contrary that ‘evidence’ of one kind or another is behind all our knowledge. A child who has never had his/her feelings hurt is less likely to empathise than one who has. Hence the common parental question: “How would you feel if that was done to you?”
The obverse: teasing and worse forms of abuse are inflicted precisely because the inflictor knows their effectiveness through direct personal experience. If that personal experience was that it was mostly ineffective, the whole practice would die out.
O.B If the parent believes in hell themself how can they be doing a bad thing by telling their kid that they could go to hell for their mis deads. The parent is surely just misguided rather than bad even though the effect on the child is bad?
Richard: If the man believes the woman really said yes how can he be doing a bad thing by having sex with her? The man is surely just misguided rather than a rapist even though the effect on the woman is bad.
Well, first, Richard, we do have a moral responsibility regarding the judgements that we make and the beliefs we teach our children. And those who theorise about, and use, the concept of hell, should be aware of what that concept means and is doing, and how it affects people. Even if they believe in it, parents are using the concept for a reason. It behoves them to consider what reason that is.
But, putting hell aside, the same kind of thing is being done when someone says (as someone recently did when a number of snowmobilers were killed in an avalanche, though two, I think, were saved) about someone who survived an accident: “Now I know there is a God.” There’s the implicit ‘some are saved and some are lost’ in that, obviously, and it’s just as unlovely, if not so psychically damaging, as supposing that some are rewarded with eternal life whereas others are punished with eternal death.
What I think this shows, by the way, is that the attempt to give meaning to life by way of religious (or other supernatural) belief is bound to fail, for the meaninglessness of life (aside, of course, from the local meaning that we supply for ourselves in our decisions and life projects) is just pushed off to the never-never world of the after-life. But the human costs of doing this are pretty obvious for all to see, including the way that we indoctrinate children with our stop-gap beliefs which reflect nothing more than our fear of living without meaning, instead of living, and allowing them to live, fully right here, where we have at least a reasonable chance of believing things that are true.
Ian, true, and that is what I meant. I should perhaps have said ‘evidence in the form of surveys, statistics, and the like.’ Or objective evidence – because what we know about psychic pain is subjective, which is why we have to extrapolate. That kind of knowledge is not reliable for knowledge about the world outside our heads – but it is (used properly) useful for knowledge about the world inside our heads.
In short it relies on having a Theory of Mind, which is presumably why nearly all animals are crap at it.
Richard – I meant the parents are doing a bad thing in the objective sense. Not that they are (necessarily) knowingly doing a bad thing, but that the thing they are doing is bad.
But I also think that this means that belief is not really a defense (morally – I’m not talking legally here). I think (ideally) people shouldn’t believe things for no good reason and that that’s ten times more true for things that motivate items like this one (telling children that people are tortured forever in hell).
Parents who really believe in Hell are not bad for warning their children about it; they are bad for believing God is a sadistic monster, and yet worshipping him anyway.
Ah – well said.
Hi Folks:
As far as I can tell, the preaching of any sort of hell, let alone one of unspeakable eternal torment, has gone out of style — except for an occassional reminder from the Pope.
In my youth, however, the despicable practice of controlling and traumatizing children through tales of the torments of hell or apocalyptic terror was accepted without question. As a way of instilling fear, it worked pretty well.
I don’t know how widesrpead the practice is nowadays. Perhaps children do shrug these things off. Although I fear that’s not the case.
“As far as I can tell, the preaching of any sort of hell, let alone one of unspeakable eternal torment, has gone out of style — except for an occassional reminder from the Pope.”
Antonio,
You should try sampling some of the modern evangelical movement (especially of an American, Baptist flavour) sometime…
:-)
NB: Yes indeed, well said. Except that a read through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation shows that God is either a curate’s egg or a combination sweet and sour. A sanitised Moloch if you will, with just a pinch of serenity.
People sing His praise because He is The Infinite Egotist. He likes it. He is also whimsical, so they pray to Him in order to change His mind. (I read of a priest once who was asked by a farmer to pray for rain, and said he would do so, but doubted anything would come of it as the Weather Bureau predicted continuing fine.)
One aspect of all these prayers particularly interests me. Christians (and perhaps all monotheists) never pray for supernatural outcomes. Someone dies; they pray for their departed soul. Never that they be resurrected and returned to life, despite God having form for being able to do this. They pray for natural things like rain, or that they might be guided to bring about the physical defeat of the enemies; never that their enemies might be transformed into something useful like pigs and turkeys and delivered unto them in time for Christmas.
Yet God can do anything He chooses to. Can’t He?
My two cents worth:
I went to Catholic school and was taught about hell both there and at home. I don’t believe in God, hell or anything supernatural today.
Nevertheless, there’s a seven-year-old deep down inside me that’s still scared as, well…hell. No joke. The damage done was real and lasting.
It’s still haunts me that the alleged vision of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal told the three visionary children that their 12 year-old neighbour would be in Purgatory “until the end of time”! I’ll never forget my reaction to that: What could a 12 year-old have done to warrant such punishment? What have “I” done?
Oh, and by the way, it really is FIRE – eternal burning without burning-up. I know because I asked Father W. about it when I was in the second grade. Again, I’m not kidding.
Hi Antonio,
Yeh I second what Andy said – hell is far from out of fashion with US evangelicals and born agains. I’ve been meaning to check Rick Warren – I’m pretty sure I saw hell in there on the FAQ page.
Thanks Brian. No, I know, it really is FIRE – that’s why it makes me so angry. It really is fire, and it goes on forever. Bastards. Sick bastards.
O.B and Eric good answers, of course you are right ignorance realy is no defence I wouldnt excuse the bigoted parent passing on their bad ideas.
Now I know that the revolting control mechanism you describe does happen. But out of curiosity, what proportion of Christian families teach their children ‘inhumane’ beliefs about the afterlife? And how many have found over time that such claims were not worth a pinch of sht, and thus were part of ‘growing up’ and rejecting nonsense?
Most children experience an existential shock on learning what death +- suffering means. Is that maturing experience, when unknowingly mishandled by a parent, any less traumatic?
ChrisPer,
I can’t know for sure, but yes, I think the existential shock of death may well be less traumatic in the long-run for the child without religion.
The childhood realization of death is a fact that must be reckoned with by all. The “unknowing mishandling” by parents and other adults contributes to a deeper trauma for the following reasons:
1. It presents death as a transitory event which undercuts the fact itself and blunts the first and necessary maturation experience you mention.
2. Consequently, the child is given to understand that death is not the end and that there is a way out where Mommy, Daddy, etc. can still all be together if we’re all very good and/or accept Jesus as our Saviour. To the child’s mind, heaven is merely earth life and love transferred to the clouds.
3. It thus gives opening to all other religious nonsense and further traumatizes when human nature asserts itself in contradiction to religious tenets (vis-a-vis sexuality or the subjugation of women, for example).
Yes, many of us discard all of the b.s. by the time we are adults, but the damage is already done.
The godless education acknowledges the fact of death and the early trauma its realization induces. It also forces one to come to terms with it realistically. The religious way denies the individual the maturation experience and compounds the issue with an even greater trauma: hell. What is more traumatizing to the imagination: oblivion or eternal hellfire?
“But out of curiosity, what proportion of Christian families teach their children ‘inhumane’ beliefs about the afterlife?”
What a silly and typically insinuating question. Is it not obvious that I don’t know and don’t claim to know and have said that I don’t know? And did you miss the part where I said that numbers aren’t all that matters, that if only one child is agonized about a friend in hell, that is a bad thing?
What’s your point, chrisper? That not all Christians believe in hell therefore no one should say that belief in hell is a bad thing? That you’re the self-appointed defender of Christianity-in-general here and therefore it’s your job to say something, anything, whenever I get too uppity about religious beliefs? Or what?
Indoctrinating children about the tortures of hell was common practice in the days when I was in grade school. I had made the mistake of believing it was no longer fashionable. I guess abandoning such a powerful tool for terrorizing children as a means of control (without inflicting outright physical abuse) would have been too much to expect.
As to the lasting effect, I agree that Brian has it exactly right.
Helping young children through the discovery of death without further traumatizing them is essential. Children are terrified of abandonment. So they want and need a sense of certainty that their parents will always be there to love and protect them.
Speaking of abandonment, Gary Wills wrote of comforting his son after he awoke from a nightmare of being in Hell. “If you go there”, said Wills, “I will be there with you.” In the cold light of day, perhaps not a comforting response but one that addresses the child’s fears on a number of levels.
Incidentally, the film “The Devil’s Playground” has a fine scene showing the way the doctrine was taught.
I did check, and Warren does say yes hell is real, though of the separation from God variety rather than the lake of fire variety.
Which raises a question…if God thinks it’s reasonable to punish people eternally for something they did temporally, then separation from God is not so much punishment as reward. So God’s not so bad after all, so separation is punishment, so God is so bad…oh dear.
Separation from God? I can deal with that. I’m pretty much already there. Like others here, I want nothing to do with the monster and don’t miss him now, why would I later?
But eternal hellfire? Now that’s a big ouchie. At any rate, we don’t generally love, miss or desire to be united with someone who has just set us alight.
Kind of off-topic but have you noticed how nobody you’ve known is ever considered to be in hell? The only exception I’ve encountered to this has been among some Christian fundamentalists: “Yes, mother died unsaved so she’s no doubt in hell now”. I’ve actually heard that before though such remarks are so removed from any non-nutter utterance that it’s merely like overhearing a kaffe-klatch in “Stepford”.
B.
Before addressing the issue of hell or any other mode of existence in an afterlife, religion must explain how any sort of *personhood* at all can survive death.
As Searle contends, all our cogntive faculties and, in fact, our very sense of who we are, are a all product of the brain. Death obliterates memory, cognition and everything else that comprises the construct of the brain we refer to as personhood. In view of that, believing that personality survives death requires an enormous leap of faith. In fact, the very notion of personhood without the brain functions to sustain it is inconceivable.
Dante is not going to see Beatrice in the form of some diaphanous apparition.
Plus there’s the whole eternity thing. Ten billion years down the road…you’re still being punished for something you seem a tad unlikely even to remember? Can’t god move on?