This Is *Exactly* What I Imagine Hell To Be Like… October 1, 2011

This Is *Exactly* What I Imagine Hell To Be Like…

By Hemant Mehta
October 1, 2011

I guess I’m supposed to be scared watching these Christians reenact life in Hell, so explain to me why I’m laughing…

(You might want to lower the volume over the last 15 seconds. Goddamn, that’s annoying.)

(via Christian Nightmares)

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  • Anonymous

    Sartre was right. Hell is other people. Some people more than others.

  • Tinker

    I found it sad. These kids are being brainwashed and frightened into being ‘good Christians’ and when they can’t live up to the ideal they will have unresolvable  guilt. Some will be unable to function for fear that they have invoked God’s wrath.

    On the other hand, some may realize that they can do whatever they want as long as they ‘accept Jeebus in their hearts’ before they die.

  • Mrs. B.

    I only made it to 1:44 and decided that was enough hell for me.

  • Being a Christian, I found this quite disturbing. In fact, there is a lot of americanisation of the views and portrayals of hell here. Hmm, a very narrow form of fundamental Christianity I believe.

    http://deanroberts.net

  • Being a Christian, I found this quite disturbing. In fact, there is a lot of americanisation of the views and portrayals of hell here. Hmm, a very narrow form of fundamental Christianity I believe.

    http://deanroberts.net

  • The Llama

    Nice forgiving God they have there.  An infinite and eternal amount of the worst imaginable torment for the finite transgression of merely not believing in something intangible.  Sound just to anyone to else?

  • Mr Ed

    So hell is endless morality plays?

  • Annoyed

    nice job. I couldn’t get past 30 seconds.

  • I guess I just don’t understand why one would wish to follow a god that they believe does this to people.

  • Annie

    So what does your version of hell look like?  And how do you know which one of you is right? 

  • Anonymous

    Hell is full of melodramatic teenagers?

  • Cincinatheist

    I laughed too.  Then I watched some of the other related “Crossfire Drama Team” videos on YouTube.  Then I get sad and depressed.  Especially the ones with really little kids in them.  Ugh.

  • Anonymous

    Could you give us your view of heaven? I really don’t see much difference between heaven and hell, at least the Christianity take on it. Living on to infinity doesn’t sound too appealing after you REALLY think about it. It also reminds me of that Twilight Zone Episode “A Nice Place to Visit”  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734544/

  • Former Thumper

    There’s a reason that I post underf the name Former Thumper. I used to be a bible thumper like these kids. I’ve been in one of these plays before. It was the horror and injustice of the whol hell thing that caused me to leave in the end. As a side note, did anyoneelse chuckle when she said “billions and billions” near the end?

  • Kobayashi Maru

    This is why I no longer overestimate the intelligence of people.

  • Cincinatheist

    Doing some research reveals that Crossfire Drama Team is an outreach of the youth ministries of the Church of God. According to their website (http://www.chog.org/faq) they have 2,000+ congregations and about  250,000 members in the US alone.  So if your version of “very narrow form of fundamental Christianity” is one that about a quarter of a million people subscribe to, then yeah, this is narrow and fundamental.  *eye roll*  I love it when I see a case of one Christian pulling out the “They’re-Not-Real-Christians” argument.  “Their version of the imaginary place of eternal pain and suffering is wwwwaaaayyy more messed up than our version of the imaginary place of eternal pain and suffering.”  I love it.

  • Sounds about right to me.

  • JustSayin’

    That’s known as a “Get Out of Hell Free” card!

  • Remy

    That Adolf Eichmann demeanored narrator gal scares the….well, you know….out of me!

  • Anonymous

    This may have been a dramatization of what hell is like, and whether correct or incorrect, Christ himself speaks of an outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. In light of this fact please tell us what the “correct” view of hell is.

  • Anonymous

    How about: 

    “Aaaah!!! My earthly life had meaning and purpose after all!!! The agony!!!”

  • They apparently just need more engineers, none of those problems couldn’t be overcome with a large dose of calm and a bit of logic.

  • The main message here is horrifying of course, but the little things are what really get me.

    I like how the narrator mentions “millions of millions of lost souls” in what is obviously an attempt to impress people with large numbers of the damned, but one of the crimes deserving damnation is nonbelief, and there have been 40 billion nonbelievers in the past two millennia alone (80 billion if you go back 200,000 years).

    The exact numbers may be obscure, but it shouldn’t be hard to figure out there would at least be billions and not millions roasting in hell… unless you just aren’t familiar with big numbers or the fact that your local community does not represent the whole world accurately. This leads one to believe that the Christians in this video are woefully uninformed about extremely basic math and history.

    And people wonder why anti-theists think theists are stupid.

  • Llama’s are awesome. That is all.

  • Jesus. Watching that IS hell. Gah! The horror! And they’re trying to convince us to spend eternity with THEM?

  • Bluebury

    Yikes.  Thanks for the heads up about the last 15 seconds- I had to rip the earbuds out of my head.
    Soooo dramaaaaatic.

  • Bluebury

    Yikes.  Thanks for the heads up about the last 15 seconds- I had to rip the earbuds out of my head.
    Soooo dramaaaaatic.

  • edgyllama

    Llamas rule

  • Brian Macker

    Nobody knows what you are talking about because we couldn’t stomach more than 30 seconds of that nonsense.   Please, don’t explain either. :b

  • Rich Wilson

    Ya, having family who still thinks this shit decreases the humor factor substantially.

  • Brian Macker

     They flip a coin and get alternate Sundays?

  • Rich Wilson

    As I recall from “The Power of Myth”, some of the non-Cannon books speak of Satan’s sin being refusal to love man above God, and the worst part of hell being Satan’s cries at separation from God.

  • Aaron Scoggin

    This is how they get people to believe – by scaring them Christian. All you ever hear about from Christians is about “God’s love”, but when that doesn’t work, they try to scare you to death. Unfortunately, sometimes it works. And if there were a soul, those would be the truly lost.

  • And this is the next generation of influential people…damn scary.

  • Schmidtcaters

    The problem with this video is that teenagers (as well as atheists or anti-theists)  can’t possibly conceive of being truly “without God”.  The first lies in that kids have a far too simplistic view of eternity, heaven and hell and godlessness.  As for the atheists and anti-theists, well they fall into the same trap.  I am by no means calling you children, just miss-informed, as are far too many so called Christians.  Beating up on the uneducated is like kicking a puppy, he may shit on the carpet but he didn’t know better.

  • Drumlab

    Wow, that narrator really seems to have an “I told you so” attitude!

  • Anonymous

    The idea that hell just means separation from god is a clear holdover from Jewish beliefs. Most of the modern ideas about hell were really only developed in the middle ages

  • Annie

    I’m not going to even respond to this, but I wanted to be linked to the comment, so I can sit back and enjoy.  You just kicked a hornet’s nest. 😉

  • Anonymous

    Just think how many billions of souls will wind up in hell after the Christian religion goes extinct.

  • Cincinatheist

    This is a fine specimen of a post here.  You managed to cram a few usual apologist ramblings into one post.  First we have the “my religion has the right view and yours is wrong” argument (I refer you to my reply to Dean Roberts elsewhere in this thread for another instance of that one.) Yet another religious person stating that another group of religious people are mis-informed and are believing in the wrong bit of imaginary stuff.   You also throw in the ol’ “God is too big and complex to truly be understood” argument. Which is a convenient way for apologists to shirk off providing evidence for their beliefs because when backed into a corner, they just say “It doesn’t have to make sense or have evidence, because God exists outside of our universe” (i.e. the cosmological argument).  But you’re not willing to stop there.  You have to get the last dig in with a few ad hominem digs.

    So teach me why it’s not ok for me to shit on the carpet, oh all-knowing one.  I’m interested in hearing the truth about this imaginary being whom I’ve apparently spent my entire adult life over-simplifying.  

  • Indoctrination of children is child abuse.

  • Brian Macker

    I always liked that one.  Just watched in again on Amazon prime for free.  Thanks for reminding me.

  • Huh? I didn’t even have a god-concept in my head until I was 7 or 8 years old, so I think I can conceive of being “without God” perfectly well. The truth is that people are not believing in your deity, and there are lots of atheists who were not raised in Christian families or cultures. Your deity is no different to me than any of the others. I grew up assuming that they were all fictional.

  • It’s a little depressing to realize that all the current deities would go extinct within one generation, if only people would stop teaching them to their children.

  • Ludovico

    Wow! Powerful stuff–scared me straight! Seriously, I’m not gay anymore!

  • Anonymous

    He only hurts you because He loves you.  If you promise to be good and do everything He says, He promises not to hurt you anymore.

  • marcelsmom

    yeah but wasn’t it just the striped shirt with plaid shorts that did it?

  • Anonymous

    A hundred years later someone would find some Bible a create a neo-Christian cult

  • Rich Wilson

    Our Lord Harry who art in Hogwarts…

  • Maybe not. There are thousands of dead deities that haven’t been resurrected, even though they were extremely popular in their original cultures. People might create new deities, or they might not. Everything we know today originated in ancient times. We really have no idea if people raised in modern times would choose to create a supernatural realm, particularly since they would know so much more about the physical world than ancient people did. 

  • Alchemist

    Good grief, that’s some messed up shit right there ladies and gentlemen. What kind if society allows children to be emotionally scarred like that?
    Do fundies undergo frontal lobotomy as infants? That’s the only way I can make sense of any of that nonsense.

  • Ingdamnit

    I feel like Bender.

    Bwahahahahahaha

  • Anonymous

    Disgusting. But I was exposed to plenty of this growing up. I never really bought it this way, nor did my Catholic schools ever teach anything in this way (no focus on hell, ever really) but in high school I had some church youth leaders who, while Catholic, used a whole bunch of evangelical style material and scare tactics and rhetoric. I do remember more than once having hell nightmares. Pisses me the fuck off at the people who peddle this.

  • Nattybug

    I couldn’t agree more. I hope these kids will one day see that too.

  • Anonymous

    Generations of christians worshiped the virgin Mary and the saints, and even attributed miracles to them, until the Reformation. Then starting about 500 years ago, the Protestants decided to become “atheistic” towards these biblical or early christian figures and stopped praying to them, even if Protestants still believed that people with those names existed historically, led exemplary lives and went to heaven after they died. Since then generations of christians in the Protestant tradition have ignored these allegedly supernatural entities, and they haven’t suffered as a result of their unbelief towards them; nor do Protestants seem inclined to resume the worship of Mary and the saints, even though their Catholic neighbors have maintained the practice.

    In other words, under the right conditions, people can give up deeply entrenched religious beliefs very quickly, literally within one generation.

  • Anonymous

    I haven’t heard of an effort to restore the worship of Sumerian deities, even though archaeologists have reconstructed the mythology of that cult starting in the late 19th Century. You can even buy translations of the parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh that scholars have pieced together. Many gods really have worn out their welcome, even if propaganda for the beliefs about them still exists. 

     

  • Anonymous

    Jesus knew about Azathoth?

    that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity – the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes

  • Anonymous

    At least in hell you can find people to help you with your math and science homework.

  • Lindsay Smith

    For a couple of my teen years I was in a youth group called “Cross Power” and we had a drama team.  We traveled around to churches ( and once a grocery store parking lot) performing a play called “The Fence.” 
    It wasn’t quite about Hell for the most part, but it did end with a maniacal devil laugh.  This after the God-like narrator reads the verse about being “neither hot nor cold, so I spit you out.” 
    I don’t think I believed much of it then, but I never gave it any thought.  I just loved theatre.  The main character was played by my now-husband.  He did believe, if only because he was raised to think there was no other option. 

    I haven’t watched this video yet.  Not sure if I will.

  • Ben

    But not Dalai Lamas.

  • Ben

    1) I can conceive of being without a god. I’m doing it right now and I don’t even have to try. You might find it difficult but the rest of us do it quite easily.

    2) Oh wise one, please educate us on how eternity does not equal infinitely in the future. The others don’t exist though, and views on things that don’t exist are pointless. Unless you have proof that either of them exists there’s no education needed for them.

    3) The word is “misinformed”. I’m not calling uneducated*, but I guess I just did In future ditch the Merely Formal Exculpatory Device (MFED—the “I’m not calling you children, just …” part) because we all know that’s exactly what you’re doing.

    4) “Not My Religion”. This has been done to death. There are no true Christians. Anybody who calls themselves a Christian, is one. You don’t get to disown them just because they don’t fit your particular brand of idiocy. We don’t care if your concept of heaven and hell are different to that of those kids: unless you can show that they exist debating the finer points of dancing on pinheads is useless.

    5) Nice of you to call us all uneducated dogs shitting on the carpet. You do realise many of us have probably read more of the bible, and listened to more religious apologetics, than you, don’t you? I think you’ll find many of us are very educated about religion in general and Christianity specifically, and are more convinced now that it’s crap than before.

    * I don’t actually believe you’re uneducated, I was just using that as an example of a MFED to show why it’s a self-serving device that fools nobody.

  • Austin

    So hell is a concrete brick room full of yelling teenagers who do what they want only to find out that they shouldn’t of done it in the first place? Sounds an awful like highschool.

  • Ben

    Miles, this is why there is the particular Christian doctrine that says people who haven’t been introduced to Christianity to have been able to reject it get a free pass to heaven (or purgatory or limbo or something, but definitely not hell). Not that it really matters, it’s still bullshit.

    Interestingly, pre-Jesus Abrahamic religion didn’t even really have a concept of heaven to tempt nor hell to scare. The Old Testament has a little talk about “walking with ancestors” after death (one or two passages), but mostly discussion of an afterlife is non-existent until the NT. Death itself was the ultimate punishment through the entire OT.

    I suppose when they made up the whole Jesus story they also needed a little something more to make it sound plausible and catch people into the ritual of it all. So they invented the soul and heaven and hell and an elaborate (but nonsensical) story to explain it, all so they could use Pascal’s Wager on the unindoctrinated.

  • Anonymous

    or later with Dante and Milton.

  • Anonymous

    I haven’t been a teenager for some time and I can honestly say that I’ve never had a functional concept of “god”.  I have been “without God” for my entire life.

    The first lies in that kids have a far too simplistic view of eternity, heaven and hell and godlessness.

    What is this “heaven” and “hell” which you speak of?  They aren’t real places, they are mythological places.  If anyone is unsure of this then they can just check the appropriate myth for clarification.

    As for the atheists and anti-theists, well they fall into the same trap.

    I don’t actually have a concept of heaven or hell or god.  They seem to me to be stupid ideas for primitive people that we should have long since outgrown.  A pathetic holdover from pre-enlightenment days where we valued mysticism over evidence.  

    That they have a brand of woo that you disagree with because you value your brand of woo more is not interesting.  Unless you can demonstrate that your beliefs are true then sceptics like me aren’t going to accept them.  Not even when you politely don’t call us children.

  • Anonymous

    For the sake of argument if we assume that this skit is accurate how does it portray their deity?  To me the actors portray people who have made mistakes in life (according to their dogma) but none who are truly wicked.  Nobody was playing a Hitler or a Manson, they were just ordinary folk.  These ordinary people were being tortured for eternity because they lacked belief in a particular description of God, one that competes with thousands of other descriptions of the same god and competes with hundreds of rival descriptions of other gods.  All with no evidence of who might be right (if any) and severe punishments if you pick the wrong one.

    Yet their god chooses to punish people.  Even if apologists use the old bluff about people choosing to punish themselves if leave God as an indifferent observer to their torture.  All those actors were playing people who were calling out for help and mercy.  What does it say about a god who turns a deaf ear to that?  Such a being is unworthy of worship.  I couldn’t stand by and allow someone to suffer if I had it in my power to  help them.  Why could God?

  • Rich Wilson

    The old ‘Where is Gandhi’ question.  My mother’s response was that at the very end of the movie just as he’s been shot he says “Oh God!” (or Oh my God, not sure).  In English of course.  So she knows God came to him at that last second for yet another DBC (deathbed conversion).  And really, it works for anyone you want.  How do YOU know Madalyn Murray O’Hare didn’t see an angel an instant before she died?

    I suspect that’s the only way she’s able to deal with the fact that I’m an atheist.  I’m a good person, so God will send me an angel.  Or something.

  • There’s severe cognitive dissonance going on here. 

    I don’t think however that willingness to worship is really that relevant. The obvious response is that they think that their God exists. Whether or not they want it to exist. Just as an atheist would say that wanting a deity to exist doesn’t make that deity exist. They are actually being more rational than a lot of religious individuals in that they are choosing a deity not based on what they’d prefer a deity to do. I actually give these sorts of evangelicals a lot of credit: They are also more moral than their deity. They try desperately to prevent others from going to hell even as their deity is fine with it. Their deity relishes in sending people to suffer for eternity, and yet they take every step to prevent that action. 

    When people ask if how one can be good without God the people to point to are not the good atheists, they are the evangelicals who are good despite their sadistic deity. It really does show how much humans have a core of goodness. 

  • Maybe I’ve read too much bad horror writing and seen too many bad horror movies, but the narrator really sounded like she was doing some sort of ritual to sacrifice souls with specific properties to some horrific entity. I wonder what happens if one of these plays accidentally summons Nyarlathotep or Cthulhu. 

  • Strongly disagree. Living for eternity sounds to me like it could be a lot of fun. There’s always more to discover. More science to learn, and there’s always more math. 

    In order for this sort of thing to be appealing of  course one needs to have every increasing intelligence and memory. But given that, living for eternity sounds fun. 

    Now, living for eternity to just waste time praising a narcissistic deity. That does sound really unpleasant. 

  • Anonymous

    Someone once told me “God punishes his followers because we deserve it. He punishes because he cares.” 

    I was speechless. 

  • I’d like to think that most evangelicals are basically good, but I have encountered several who say the most shocking and frightening things. There are an awful lot who seem to respond with glee at the notion of nonbelievers being tortured for all eternity, and there are others who only proselytize because it’s what their god commands them to do. It doesn’t matter what they want. To them, the only thing that matters is what their deity wants. If their god told them to sacrifice their children, they would do it. Biblical genocide and slavery were not immoral because their god was okay with it, and their god is always right.

    I really do hope that most of them are better than this belief system, but my faith in them is shaken by their constant assertions that we all (even babies) deserve hell and that humanity is inherently evil, wicked, and depraved. They seem to sincerely believe that they are lowlier than the lowest worm without Jesus. But even then, I guess there’s a lot of compartmentalizing.

  • Yeah, this is a fair point. A lot of them aren’t thinking the way I portrayed them at all. There’s definitely a substantial subset that has terrible joy in the suffering of others. Just look at the Left Behind books. Ugh. And I agree that for many of them there’s a lot of compartmentalization, probably even more than there is for most humans. 

  • Dancer123

    As a Christian myself, I was very displeased with this portrayal. I come to these kind of sites a lot, and I can see all the harm that Christians do with hypocrisy, judging, condemning, and ‘holier than thou’ attitudes. I completely respect everyones beliefs on this page, and I know you have reasons for hating Christianity. I just wanted to let you know that we are not all like this. There are still those who are genuinely practicing Christian beliefs and love everyone no matter who they are. I know I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and that I will make many more misakes. Some of my closest friends are atheists, and I have never spoken condemningly to them. I’m not trying to say, “Look at me, I’m a good Christian.” I just wanted to let you know that we still exist, and are not all like the fire and brimstone screaming preachers.

  • There are many kind Christians in the world, and I’m glad that you’re one of them. For me, the issue is Christian theology, particularly as it’s interpreted by evangelicals and the more conservative sects. It’s not their behavior that’s the problem. It’s the underlying foundation. Thus you get evangelicals (like on this thread) saying things like:

    The truth is that every one of us should die for the crap we constantly do … My type of person is one of the worst.

     

    You actually think something you do is GOOD enough?? It’s not good enough! We are all filthy, nasty sinners! Nothing you could EVER do would make you good enough for anyone! you like to think that we’re all just good, decent people because it makes you feel happy and ok with yourself and your sin. No one is a good, decent person.

    Let’s say the people who wrote the above comments are sweet, kind, genuine people. They may indeed be sweet, kind and genuine. But they also believe the most disgusting and abhorrent things. I’m against this type of theology on basic principle. It’s abusive and gives people terrible self esteem. I don’t want innocent little children taught to feel this way about themselves.

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