This is very reminiscent of something my mother (having been raised catholic) used to say about the catholic church!
I'd quite agree. It is interesting that I've come across fundamentalist evangelistic groups which use feelings of guilt to manipulate and cooerce people to "make a decision for Jesus" (strange, as the paradigm in the Old and New Testaments is that of "call" or "being called" - more akin to the idea of "vocation" - than the idea of "decision", which is very modern post-enlightenment individualism). Nigel Mullane (who is at St Brelade's) grew up in Catholicism, and he finds the notion of "Catholic guilt", along with hell-fire and fear mongering very prevalent there. I would say that post-Vatican II, this has largely gone from Catholicism, certainly in England, where the liberal Catholics definitely made major changes, but it is still present in some of the literature / For example, the Catholic Catechism says:
To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called "hell." ....The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, "eternal fire." The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.
I wonder how many Catholics would believe that now. An article in the Tablet in 2001, shows how times have changed. For instance, on "mortal sin" in the sentence above, the writer notes:
Each week, they engaged in a sin cycle – confession, communion, sin, confession, communion, and so on. The Church no longer insists on such regular confession – though it is forbidden for anyone to receive Holy Communion who has committed a mortal sin and not confessed it. Most ordinary Mass-goers would be hard-pressed to define a mortal sin, and I, for one, have never heard the definition explained from the pulpit.
Modern theologians have moved away from that picture of hell, mainly because they do not see it substantiated by the New Testament. NT Wright comments critically that that:
"I think part of our difficulty here is that we are still firmly plugged in to a medieval picture of heaven and hell, such as you find in Michelangelo's painting of the Cistine Chapel, such as you find in Dante's Inferno in Paradiso. We Protestants miss out the middle bit, the purgatory bit, but you've still got a medieval picture which is not a New Testament picture of people after death going either to the one place or to the other."
And Marcus Borg says that:
"A vision of the Christian life that takes Jesus seriously would not be very much concerned with the afterlife. Jesus' message was not about how to get to heaven. The widespread impression that it was grew, to a large extent, out of a misunderstanding of two phrases in the gospels: the Jesus of Matthew's gospel regularly speaks about 'the kingdom of heaven,' and the Jesus of John's gospel often speaks of 'eternal life.'"
Personally, if I came across anyone using guilt or fear to manipulate people, I would be inclined to savage them intellectually, as I am normally mild, but think any kind of practice like that is wholly unethical.
Islam also has a burning fire hell, usually seen very literally, for all the infidels (that's you and me!) and I'd like to discuss how Seb. sees this when he and Kate are next over, especially since Sufi belief is more nuanced than the rest of Islam.
Curiously Hinduism also has a concept of hell, or to be more exact, many hells, but as strange physical worlds, stages in the cycles of rebirth: (http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Hinduismand_Death/id/54141); although all physical worlds are, for the Hindu, illusion.
"Hinduism believes in the existence of not one hell and one heaven but in the existence of many sun filled worlds and many dark and demonic worlds. Apart from these, each of the Trinity of gods has his own world, which is attained by their followers after their death. Vaikunth is the world of Vishnu, Kailash is the world of Siva and Brahmalok is the world of Brahman. Indralok is the standard heaven to which those who please the gods through their activities upon the earth go. The standard hell is Yamalok, which is also ruled by a god called Lord Yama, who is also the ruler of the southern quarter. He is assisted by an attendant who is know as Chitragupt, who is some kind of a chronicler, who keeps an account of the deeds of all human beings on earth and reads them out as the jivas stand infront of Yama in his court and await his verdict. The purpose of heavens and hell: In the ultimate sense, the purpose of these worlds is neither to punish or reward the souls, but to remind them of the true purpose of their existence. In finally analysis, the difference between heaven and hell is immaterial because both are a part of the great illusion that characterizes the whole creation. The difference is very much like the difference between a good dream and a bad dream. In the end it does not matter whether a soul has gone to the heaven or to some hell, because in both cases it learns important lessons and goes back to earth to continue its play. "
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