An Atheist’s Version of Dante’s Inferno

Nobody.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for raping Indiana Jones.

If hell exists then it deserves only one resident: its creator.

The only people who deserve to burn in hell (fictionally, or not), are those who use the concept of faith to justify immorality.

Sadly, Hemant already mentioned televangelists. I particularly dislike them. But even more, I dislike faith healers, such as Peter Popoff, whom I saw on Vision TV (Christian channel) the other day.

It’s one thing to have your beliefs – that’s fine, and many religious folk I know are good people. Cafeteria Christians, most of ’em, but I’d rather know a good Cafeteria Christian than a Southern Baptist literal interpreting Christian. But hoo boy….when you use the beliefs or ignorance of others to get personally rich?

You deserve the daily reverse-pineapple-in-the-rectum treatment for all eternity. Well, probably not, but you know…

Hell’s a bit harsh, don’t you think? Being for all eternity, and all.

I’m more in line with a hell-like penitentiary, where people can go for a specific period of time.

First in line? Bush and his insane clown posse, where they will be water-boarded.

Arthur Finkelstein.

He’s a gay man who married his long-time partner, when it became legal, in Massachusetts.

Why does he deserve hellfire?

Because he’s also a right-wing nutjob, who’s personally responisble for all manner of anti-gay rhetoric for the Republican party.

In other words, he sold his soul.

And in a perfect, designer-created universe, the bill needs to come due.

Satan…meet Arthur. –

The Catholic Church for covering up the abuse of children in their system. Abuse is one thing, but covering it up and moving around priests like musical chairs is another. They are just as criminal as the same people they get up every mass to preach against.

Anyone who believes – sincerely believes – that others are going to Hell.

People who say anything critical of George Lucas.

[BTW, I think Peregrine winz this one.]

I think maybe God deserves some time in Hell. I checked out that book some people wrote about him and he sounds like a real asshole, what with the mass murder, rape, etc.

If he existed of course 🙂

I always thought “pride” was too general a word for a sin, but “smugness” definitely should get you a few years in a pit somewhere.

This means Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and most other hate-spewing talk radio wastes-of-oxygen.

I’m thinking the best version of hell for them would be a world where no one pays any attention to them at all.

I don’t have their names, but I nominate the parents of Marjoe Gortner. In the name of holiness, they set their child on an immoral, unrighteous path as a young Pentacostal minister, evangelist, and revivalist.

Televangelists who fleece the faithful are one thing. But to take a child and lead him down that path is a special kind of evil.

Parents who allow their children to die instead of seeking medical help because they [pretend to] believe that faith healing will cure them – and when the law comes after them, they quickly hire a lawyer to defend their actions. These ppl belong in Hell (if it existed).

Peace and prosperity seemed tiring,
for lord and creator of this plane.
So thought he of the plan so cunning:

From now on, he would make a place,
of fire, torture, pain and suffering.
Now each and every shall be afraid, for sure.

And so it was, the chaos stunning,
irony the greatest of the history.
Wars were waged, over fear of dying.

Generations came and gone, but told same story:
Worship him or we shall make sure you be gone.
And so it was for long, the same grim story.

But there came this writer humble,
told he unto you, to be relieved.
The only worthy of this place is those who send you there.

Finally again for once we celebrated,
peace and prosperity came back,
to be here among us forever and never again to be rejected.

P.S. This was the first time I’ve ever rhymed anything and I am really bad at this, so this all trouble better be worth it 😀

Robert Mugabe, that ugly bitch.
His version of hell would be a Zimbabwe where nobody gives a flying rat’s ass about him, where he is only a ghost.

People who talk in movie theaters, door-to-door salesmen, people who drive below the speed limit in the express lane, people who ride Segways, couples who sit on the same side of the booth when there’s nobody on the other side, and people who don’t know how to use self-checkout lanes.

Exploiters, anyone that attempts to control others, and anyone who forces their beliefs/ideas/morals onto others

@Pepe Silvia

I miss him. Did he ever get my fruit basket?

Anyone who has sincerely wished that someone else should go to hell. (and for full disclosure I don’t sincerely wish that they do…)

Mark Twain will explain that hell is a temporary “dream state” of consciousness that the brain goes through just before you die. It is different for everybody. Each person brings their own baggage into this “dream state”. He will take you on a guide of some of the more interesting “dream states”.

Are there any fantasy creatures (centaurs,harpies,etc) in this version of hell like there weere in Dante’s book?

People who pray for your eternal soul.

If pressed, I would say that the Christian god deserves most to go to hell, simply for “creating the universe in such a way that it should be subjugated under him for eternity.”

If he were real, I mean. That’s total bull****.

I deserve to go to Hell! Seriously! I mean, come on — life is tough. I work long hours. I’ve cracked the 100-hour mark in a single week. I deserve some relaxation and play. Do I really want to go to Heaven and sit around worshiping and adoring God for the rest of eternity alongside all the people who have ever sent me e-mail forwards about angels (and Obama the muslim)? Man, that’ll make me miss the 100-hour work week! No, send me to Hell. Let me party it up and engage in orgies and have a good time. Besides, I know my girlfriend and kitty are going (she’s evil, and cats don’t go to heaven) and I want to be with them. Come on, please? Send me!

One word: Clowns.

Oh, and Dan Simmons had a mightily entertaining concept of this called “Vanni Fucci is Alive and Well and Living in Hell.” It’s in his short-story compilation, “Prayers to Broken Stones.”

Hell is nothing more then revenge on a grand scale and is a worthless endevor.
Execution of a person who has repeatedly shown to ‘incurable’ of acting in a way that causes great harm to others is not revenge but just eliminating the perpetuator of the harm…At worse it is self-defense.
To torture for eternity is no better then the person you are torturing.
So the concept of HELL is a ‘soul stealing’ idea, & I feel sorry for the poor minded people who continue its concept.
Besides I think of HELL as it is shown in ‘Job: A Comedy of Justice’ as a place for people with intelligence to go after death to have a really good time as the holier-then-thou are all in heaven being bored to tears bumping their heads on the clouds. In that context I’m going to HELL!!!

I don’t think anybody deserves to go to hell. And just like that, I’m more compassionate than God.

I haven’t a clue who should be sent other than those that are already listed (pedophiles, rapists, serial killers, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, blah blah blah). I would just like to state that I giggled at this post merely because it brought back memories of my explaining the name we gave our dalmatian (Which happens to be Dante’s Inferno [“Dante”]) to my fundy mother in law who has never read The Divine Comedy.

I nominate Ann Coulter for hell. It’s like this: She’s being interviewed for hellevision. She’s talking really, really fast, and she can’t stop. She begins to slaver like a rabid dog. The interviewer (an angel named Christopher Buckley,) is armed with facts. He calmly counters every lie Ann tells with evidence and states his sources (since this is an otherworldly realm, it’s possible to hear both speakers at the same time. The interviewer isn’t speaking constantly, though).

Ann is furious at being contradicted and mortified that she’s drooling, yet she can’t stop talking. Some inner need drives her; the words pour out of her mouth faster and faster. Her voice gets higher and higher; her contralto has become a screech. The audience is laughing–not at her “jokes”, but at her. She’s getting saliva all over her black mini cocktail dress. Still she talks on, desperately–

And so on.

People who deserve to go to Hell are those who want to go there, mostly those who buy passages to any of the following:
Hell, Arizona, U.S
Hell, California, U.S
Hell, Michigan, U.S.
Hell, Grand Cayman, the Cayman Islands
Hell, Norway

Oh, but if hell does exist, I’d like to go, please. Especially if heaven is filled with Christians.

We don’t believe in hell, this is just for fun. My input: The people that make Cambodian men, women, and children slave in the ruby mines.

First, I’d have define Hell as a place of complete chaos, free of reason and logic, cause and effect. Then, I’d realize that Hell already exists in the minds of believers of gods, demons, witches, and magic. Hell would therefore be making those believers live their beliefs, as they expect others to do, free of logic and reason, effect and cause. They would be forced to live the contradictions and inane dogma, suffering as their tenuous hold on rational thought slowly slips away. Leaving only enough of a residue coherence to realize what they have lost. Welcome to Hell.

Aside from the usual, I’d send anyone who truly believes that anyone else will go to hell just because they have differing beliefs. And I don’t just mean those that don’t think hell will be a place of suffering, or that only believers go to heaven and everyone else just dies, etc. – I’m talking about those who think – and *want* – people to burn in everlasting torment as punishment for their beliefs.

The point is for them to be proven wrong, and to have it shown to them firsthand that their beliefs aren’t immune from scrutiny and aren’t correct just because they’re *their* beliefs. Mind you, I’d really rather prefer no one was tormented or anything, but it’s kind of hard to say “told you so” after you’re dead if there’s no afterlife.

Me!

(Do I win a free copy for saying that?)

Seriously, I think this is a cool idea for a book, up there with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. (BTW, I also think Peregrine wins.)

I deserve hell.

Everyone deserves hell.

This is assuming that heaven is for perfect people and hell for imperfect people…

This is one of the reasons why I love my God who saved me.

This question dances neatly along the line of whether Hell exists or not, and I think many have fallen for the easy answer, declaring alternatively that either Hell does not exist or that we’re ultimately more compassionate than a mythological God if we selflessly declare that no one _ought_ to go to Hell.

But for the religious, Hell serves as a cathartic way to justify that the “wrongs are righted” and that the truly evil are punished. I can see the desire for it, as we’re often left as secularists with no ‘force’ to punish the truly evil. In the absence of an deity, how can we accept the evil? We’re either left dissatisfied with a society that is so steeped in religion that it fails to punish those religious evils or jailed as vigilantes who exacted our own human punishment.

So if I were to imagine a Hell, a place where I could send the most evil of the evil, I’d pick one group.

That group? Educators who deliberately mislead.

The easy answer again would be child molesters and rapists, murderers, etc. But ultimately, I think we all pay a bigger price to those who make the deliberate choice to mis-educate our youth. Molesters and rapists and murderers are one-off crimes. They hurt one or two or a few, but the justice system generally incarcerates them and removes them from society for their obvious crimes. And oftentimes, these are crimes of passion or insanity, done ONCE as a reaction to a trigger, not consciously premeditated.

But the teachers who make a conscious decision every day to teach children, the pride of our future and the building blocks of an intelligent society, absolute lies? They’re the ones who deserve Hell. They’re the ones in Madrassas teaching children that it’s okay to strap bombs to themselves, as Mohammmed or Allah will vindicate them in the afterlife. They’re the ones deciding EVERY day to teach that the year is only 6000 years old, forever undermining a student’s perception of geology, astronomy, physics, the environment, anthropology, evolution, and our fundamental role on this planet.

They’re the ones who make a determined effort to paint contraception as evil and ineffective in an effort to advance an indefensible moral code about chastity and devotion to the Lord.

Every single day, every single time they teach things they know to not be true, whether to advance a moral or philosophical code, they’re creating evil. They’re creating people who will die for their cause, derail millions of dollars of federal aid to Africa because it might teach the efficacy of contraception. They’re pushing day after day to get absolutely sound science like Evolution removed from our schools, in an effort to MISEDUCATE the children of our society.

Education is the building block of everything we do, and those who deliberately miseducate create monsters and evils far greater than those perpetrated by simple murderers and thieves.

They’re the ones who deserve Hell, if such a place even exists.

The biblical description of hell (which inspires Dante’s version) comes from the bible, “dictated by God”. This is also where He tells us what a swell guy he is. The bible itself, however, contradicts that conclusion. God gives us free will, only to rain hellfire down on us if we choose anything other than what he wants. His own account of things show Him as envious (kicking Adam & Eve out of the garden), prideful (forcing pharaoh to refuse Moses’s requests so that Moses can try out his new powers), and bigotted (Sodom).

God is not as good as he claims, and I submit that hell is probably not as bad as he claims either. We never hear Satan’s side of it. Remember he’s in hell because he wanted the adoration God received, he wanted to be His equal.

So what can we definitively say about hell?

1)Satan has no reason to do God’s will he is, afterall, already in Hell;
2) His interests are better served by catering to his minions rather than torturing them, thereby securing the adolation he desires; and
3) God has sent to hell every rockstar, pornstar, actor, scientist, free thinker, revolutionary, celebrity, drug addict, alcoholic, etc, etc. You get my point, all the cool people are there.

Heaven, on the other hand, is full of bible thumpers, prudes, and morons.

I know this was a long ass post, but the point is: Who deserves to go to Hell? Anyone with a brain!

(Hopefully this comment earned me a VIP table in Club Inferno)

Satan has no reason to do God’s will he is, after all, already in Hell

To get around this “free-will of Satan” problem, I can think of the following:

1. Deny that Satan has free will. But then he becomes God’s puppet.

2. Claim that Satan is really an aspect of God similar to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

3. Claim that Satan has free will but for some reason, ALWAYS chooses to maintain the torture chamber.

Of course not believing in God or Satan is the most simple solution. The problem simply goes away.

The current pope arrives in hell, light in his stupid red loafers. (P.S. I am bisexual, so that is not a slam on gay people. I just think his shoes are dumb. Rod Stewart could not have gotten away with them in the ’70’s.) He is placed there for arguing against sending condoms to Africa to help stop the spread of AIDS and saying that condoms make the plague of AIDS worse instead of better.

He is forced to wear a condom for all eternity in hell whilst being forced to have gay sex with men who died in Africa of AIDS. However, the condom actually does NOT protect him against AIDS since he lied in life and said that they do not. He catches AIDS and gets sicker and sicker but never dies in this hell, all the while still wearing a condom continuously.

What’s ironic about all this is that Dante’s text IS an atheist text, so cleverly and subversively written in the classical traditions that scholars and even the church itself didn’t figure it out. (which he’d hoped for since he’d be KILLED for that)

He is writing ironically after losing his faith. He repeatedly points to the earth being circular, and it’s path AROUND the sun, in defiance of the church.

Read it very carefully, as a backwards allegory condemning the church. He is listing the names he feels should survive, not burn.