"Will The Majority Of People Go To Hell?": How This Theological Question Intersects With The Work Of Cal Berkeley Linguist George Lakoff, And C.S. Lewis' "Voyage Of The Dawn Treader"

Conservatives And Liberals: "How We Ended Up In 2 Totally Divided Camps, Both Convinced They're Absolutely Right"

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/08/conservatives-and-liberals-how-we-ended.html  

How You And I And Everyone Can Create REAL Damning Evidence To Justify Any Damn Thing - Divorce; One's Religious Faith As "The One, True Religion"; Donald Trump As A Godsend; The Advisability Of Provoking Armageddon, Hitler's Heinous Extermination Of Jews

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/08/how-you-and-i-and-everyone-can-create.html

Short Form:

How The Values Of "Strict Father" -- Or "Nurturant Parent" -- Control Our Political Views

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/06/how-values-of-strict-father-or.html

Long Form:

"Strict Father" And "Nurturant Parent": The Two World Views That Determine Our Political Values

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/06/strict-father-and-nurturant-parent-two.html

"Fear And Anxiety Drive Conservatives Political Attitudes"

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201612/fear-and-anxiety-drive-conservatives-political-attitudes

"The Greatest Generation: Labor, Capital And Betrayal Of The Social Contract"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-greatest-generation-labor-capital.html

Alan Archibald

19h  · 

Shared with Public

"Will The Majority Of People Go To Hell?"

I cannot -- in good conscience -- worship a creator God who designed the Universe so that a great many people (by most tallies a decisive majority of people!) would be cast into a Lake of Unquenchable Fire to roast - consciously! - for all eternity.

To get some small inkling of such torturousness, imagine focusing a blow torch on a living person's eyeball and continuing to focus the torch ont he eyeball forever. Furthermore, imagine that the pain of is continual as the eye and its nerve receptors are never burned away.

I would say to that God: At least have the decency to arrange for benighted souls who might deserve punishment to eventually pass out of existence. (It seems rudimentary to me that if one can create a being, one can uncreate a being.)

If nothing else, an omnisicient creator god -- at least one worthy of respect -- would anticipate that "his" followers would use the torturous cruelty of Eternal Torment as a template for their own petty small-minded -- and not infrequentlsy, sadistic -- cruelties.

Think Torquemada, and the Spanish Inquisition which perped its last act of capital punishment by hanging a school teacher for teaching his students Deism in 1826. https://medium.com/.../the-final-victim-of-the-spanish...

****

Changing gears... for a moment...

Cal Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff (see first Comment Box below) dedicated much of his life to a momentous study of "the political mind" which -- all across the face of the earth -- is broken down into two types; "strict father" mind, and "nurturant parent mind."

Since Trump Cult enables us to see "strict father" mind with pellucid clarity, I say that, given the dichotomy between masculine rigidity-strictness-punishment-pay-back (n the one hand), and nurturant-forgiving-tolerant feminine "motherliness" on the other, my choice between a rigidly, punitive masculine Hell, and an nurturant, forgiving welcome-back "bosom," would be to snuggle into he bosom --- any time, and straightaway.

No doubt, like "yin and yang," Lakoff's dichotomy comprise the indispensable parts of a unitary whole, whose totality is greater than the sum of its parts.

But insofar as there is a lockstep relationship between rigidity-strictness-punitive-upholding-of-The-Iron-Clad-Law, and pyshopathy -- Trump's cruel psychopathy being typical of "the breed" -- I will argue against any manifestation of rigidity and its frequent offspring in the form of punishment, particularly Eternal Punishment.

Notably Christian images of Eternal Punishment are so dire that we mere mortals cannot even imagine how horrifyingly and transcendentally painful they would be.

And if there is a God who oversees this Lakoff's "dyad," I suspect - and would very much hope (again, if such a God is even minimally worthy of worship) that the overarching God who holds the two yin-yang facets in an "abraxis embrace," would -- in the divine transcendence of that God's unitary wisdom -- want its "creatures" to rebel against the very notion of Hell, no matter how much Eternal Torment may seem to be ordained by God Himself. (I suspect that God "Himself" is precisely the word to be used in this context of neverending punnishment. Such torture could only be devised by a male.)

"Nearer to home," I would point to C.S. Lewis' character in "The Voyage of the Dawntreader," a kind of magician god-like figure named Coriakin who tolerates the stupid beliefs of the dimwitted but endearing dufflepuds who are the only occupants of his island,

At the same time, Coriakin understands that their fear of what they do not - and perhaps cannot - understand causes them to perceive him in a completely mistaken ways, always certain that The Big Man will punish them if they cause "his highness" even the slightest displeasure.

The whole book is splendid, but the interaction between the Magician Coriakin and the endearing Dufflepuds (who simultaneously fear Coriakin but want to please him in silly ways) is of great theological interest.

This theological interest has come to a head now that the "conservative" "Christians" who put Malignant Messiah in the Oval Office have revealed themselves as superficially well-meaning -- but substantively cruel -- people. (To be clear, you cannot be a bedrock, unflinching Trump supporter without signing off on his manifest malice and cruetly.)

Here is a highly readable (free) online PDF of Lewis' entire book. https://www.samizdat.qc.ca/.../VoyageoftheDawnTreader_CSL...

Note that the particular chapter of The Dawn Treader which is most revealing -- in light of George Lakoff's psycho-social "duality," and the catastrophic mistake that entraps approximately one quarter of all Americans ever since Malignant Messiah swept through American politics like the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse -- is Chapter 11, in which the Dufflepuds are beset by the same kind of dimwitted-but-adulatory benightedness that is characteristic of Trump Cult Christians.

The key passage is located in Chapter 11, "The Dufflepuds Made Happy."

Aslan says, "Do you grow weary, Coriakin, of ruling such foolish subjects as I have given you here?"

"No," said the Magician, "they are very stupid but there is no real

harm in them. I begin to grow rather fond of the creatures.

Sometimes, perhaps, I am a little impatient, waiting for the day when they can be governed by wisdom instead of this rough magic."

However, since "the fullness of truth is only revealed in rich contextualization," it is advisable that you read chapters 9, 10 and 11 in sequence to realize just how exquisitely stupid these Narnian proto-believers are.

Waiting for the day when the dimwits can be governed by wisdom instead of "rough magic" that must make things "appear what they are not" in order to "herd the cats" into some semblance of orderliness.

And so it is that the dufflepuds -- serviceable stand-ins for Trump Cult "conservative" "Christians" -- get it all wrong while thinking individually and collectively that they are the most authentic devotees imaginable.

PATHEOS.COM

Will the Majority of People Go To Hell?

It is said that only a few people can enter the narrow gate. Does this mea