Jeremy Lott, Osama bin Laden in Hell:
To keep Osama's purported martyrdom from inspiring others, the point needs to be made, loudly and repeatedly, that killing innocent people is not the path to heaven. This will put the US government, and Barack Obama in particular, in an an awkward spot. It is undoubtedly a theological statement and an uncomfortable one at that.
It is uncomfortable because to assert that Osama did not go to heaven is to suggest that he went to hell. That could be a problem, given the current state of America's religious ferment. As the controversy over Rev. Rob Bell's new book has shown us, a great number of religious Americans do not want to believe in eternal damnation.
1. The notion that there is heaven but no hell smacks of the sort of namby-pamby feel-good liberalism that I feel it my duty to combat. Of course there may be none of the following: God, afterlife, post-mortem reward, post-mortem punishment. But if you accept the first three, then you ought to accept them all.
2. One reason to believe in some form of punishment after death is that without it, there is no final justice. There is some justice here below, but not much. One who "thirsts after justice and righteousness" cannot be satisfied with this world. Whatever utopia the future may bring, this world's past suffices to condemn it as a vale of injustice. (This is why leftist activism is no solution at all to the ultimate problems.) Nothing that happens in the future can redeem the billions who have been raped and crucified and wronged in a thousand ways. Of course, it may be that this world is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Life may just be absurd. But if you do not accept that, if you hold that life has meaning and that moral distinctions have reality, then you may look to God and beyond this life. Suppose you do. Then how can you fail to see that justice demands that the evil be punished? Consider this line of thought:
a. If there is no making-good of the injustices of this life, it is absurd.
b. There is no making-good of the injustices of this life in this life.
c. Only if there is God and afterlife is there a making-good of the injustices of this life
d. This life is not absurd.
Therefore
e. There is a making-good of the injustices of this life in the afterlife, and this requires the punishment/purification of those who committed evil in this life and did not pay for their crimes in this life.
This is not a compelling argument by any means. But if you are a theist and accept (a)-(d), then you ought to accept the conclusion.
3. A second reason to believe in some sort of hellish state after death for some is because of free will. God created man in his image and likeness, and part of what that means is that he created him an autonomous being possessing free will and sensitive to moral distinctions. In so doing, God limits his own power: he cannot violate the autonomy of man. So if Sartre or some other rebellious nature freely decides that he would rather exist in separation from God, then God must allow it. But this separation is what hell is. So God must allow hell.
4. Is hell eternal separation from God? Well, if Sartre, say, or any other idolater of his own ego wants to be eternally separated from God, then God must allow it, right? Like I said, man is free and autonomous, and God can't do anything about that. But if Stalin, say, repents, how could a good God punish him eternally? The punishment must fit the crime, and no crime that any human is capable of, even the murdering of millions, deserves eternal punishment. How do I know that? By consulting my moral sense, the same moral sense that tells me a god that commands me to murder my innocent son cannot be God. See Kant on Abraham and Isaac.
There is a response to this of course, and what I just asserted is by no means obvious; but this is a topic for a separate post.
I suppose I am a bit of a theological liberal. Theology must be rationally constrained and constrained by our God-given moral sense. Irrationalism is out. Fideism is out. No fundamentalism. No Bibliolatry. No inerrantism. None of the excesses of Protestantism, if excesses they are. No sola scriptura or sola fide or, for that matter, extra ecclesiam salus non est. The latter is also a Roman Catholic principle.
5. As I see it, then, justice does not demand an eternal or everlasting hell. (In this popular post I blur the distinction between eternity and everlastingness.) But free will may. Again, if Russell or Sartre or Hitchens refuse to submit any authority superior to their own egos, then their own free decision condemns them everlastingly. Justice does demand, however, some sort of post-mortem purification/punishment.
6. Will I go directly to heaven when I die? Of course not (and the same goes for almost all of us.) Almost all of us need more or less purgation, to even be in a state where we would unequivocally want to be with God. If your life has been mainly devoted to piling up pleasure and loot, how can you expect that death will reverse your priorities? In fact, if you have solely devoted yourself to the pursuit and acquisition of the trinkets and baubles of this world, then punishment for you may well consist in getting them in spades, to your disgust. If the female ass and the whiskey glass is your summum bonum here below, you may get your heart's desire on the far side. I develop this idea in A Vision of Hell.
7. Is Osama bin Laden in hell? Anyone who claims to know the answer to this is a 'damned' fool. But not even he (Osama or the fool) deserves eternal separation from God -- unless he wants it. But it is good that the al-Qaeda head is dead.
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