To Hell with Hell!

It should have been the story of the month… or of the year… or of the century… or of all time!  But if you were asleep or otherwise occupied for that 48-hour period just before Easter you would have missed Pope Francis’ supposed announcement -- albeit to a highly prejudiced interviewer -- that Hell does not exist.  Which, by implication, means not that it once existed but is no longer open for business, but that it never existed.  This was a world-wide news story for 24 hours, and then the response and the Vatican’s “clarification” was a world news story for the next 24 hours, and then the story vanished -- poof! -- just like that, although it is alive and well on the Internet and in various traditional Catholic outlets, both Internet and “traditional media”.

The mainstream media, for their part, jumped on the story like a pack of starving wolves.  Aha!  The Pope -- “our” pope, to the extent that the totally secular media can be said to have favorites among popes -- has let the cat out of the bag!  He’s decided it’s time to quit pretending, and to quit telling fairy tales… and to wake the Church up to what should always have been it’s true mission (if any), namely to quit prattling about a non-existent “afterlife” and start being a social service organization and start supporting diversity and niceness.  

And the response of the, let’s say, materialist, or non-churched -- not to necessarily say anti-Catholic -- community was notable.  One facet of it was, basically, “Well, thank goodness, the Catholic Church isn’t teaching/preaching ‘that stuff’ any more“… and, by implication, that, well, who knows what’s next?  Maybe all the other “stuff” they’ve been teaching/preaching all these years (centuries, millennia) is no longer operative.  Bottom line, the Catholic Church is just another organization with no special merit or moral authority and so now it can quit bothering everybody and let us get on with the business of making the world a better place on a purely materialist/secular basis.  Let the New World Order commence without harassment!    

The long-term agenda -- not much change here from what has been the case for centuries -- is that if the Catholic Church cannot be put out of business entirely, to turn it into nothing more than a harmless social club, on the model of many Protestant denominations in our time.  But the distinguishing mark of any church ought to be not political activism, but moral authority -- that which applies at all times and in all places (unlike politics, which is ephemeral).  And there is more to moral authority than “scare stories”, which is what secularists accuse the Catholic Church of peddling whenever it speaks of Hell.  Another way of putting it is if fear of Hell is the only thing keeping people in church, then there is something seriously wrong with their moral upbringing.     

In spite of that, another facet of the reaction to Pope Francis’ alleged statement -- especially relished and promoted by CINOs (Catholics In Name Only) -- had to be one of relief.  Because if you grow up in the Church and find that you can’t handle the Ten Commandments, and find it all just too judgmental, rigid, and moralistic -- well, maybe you can remain a CINO or a “cultural Catholic” without having to worry about the consequences of your behavior.  And yet there are those lingering doubts -- “What if?”  What if all that the Gospels, Epistles, and Church Fathers have said is true?  What if actions have consequences, not only in this life but beyond?  But these doubts are too readily smoothed over by the temptations and reassurances of popular culture, which the Church is forever being urged to “keep up with” and adapt to… or, at the very least, resign itself to.    

And then we have traditional Catholics, many of whom were up in arms about all this.  I think they may have been overreacting --- but in a way they were primed to overreact.  It’s not as if Pope Francis has been a bland, unthreatening figure up until now; quite the contrary.  And to that we should add his personal style, which includes a good deal of spontaneity.  He may say what’s on his mind from time to time, without subjecting it to vetting or “peer review” (and a pope has no “peers” anyway, for that matter).

(Hmm… kind of reminds me of another world leader.  And please note, they both have to “walk back“  things that they say on a fairly frequent basis.  And yet, one might ask why a pope should need a “handler” the way most presidents seem to.  Shouldn’t they, by virtue of their office, be given the grace to not drop verbal bombs on a regular basis, even if we are not required to take everything they say as holy writ?) 

Now, we can debate all day long and into the night as to what Pope Francis actually said, and what he meant, and how it was interpreted by his friend Eugenio Scalfari -- and the point has been made many times that it was not a direct quote, but an “interpretation” in the impressionistic sense… and besides, it would have gone directly against many other statements Pope Francis has made, not to mention the unchanging teaching of the Church of which Pope Francis is head. 

Scalfari’s agenda is not too hard to discern.  I’m not saying he set a trap for the Pope, but you have to admit that when a pope and an atheist get together for a casual conversation that is subsequently reported out by the atheist, there is likely to be a certain amount of “drift” in what was said and what its significance is.  (The Pope would be well advised to avoid any more tête-à-têtes with this guy, friend or not.  Or if they do get together it should be in a public place surrounded by video cameras.)

The major monotheistic religions, so-called, have many things in common (despite all of the struggles and hostility over the years), and one of them is the simple premise that actions have consequences, and that actions in this life, which is bounded by time and space, have consequences in the next life, i.e. the eternal life.  This idea is not exclusively Christian, Jewish, or Islamic, but it has to be counted as a major point of emphasis.  Buddhism and Hinduism have the concept of karma, which is also a way of saying that actions have consequences, but the connection seems to be a bit fuzzier, and there is a collective element there as well.  The actions of not only individuals but of groups have consequences, and those consequences can impact other individuals and groups for many generations.  But I have yet to hear of Eastern religions presenting anything like the Four Last Things of Catholic teaching -- Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.  This is a stark reality which the Catholic Church has, traditionally, recommended that people meditate on on a regular basis.  It is sobering, and attention-getting, and seems to allow for very little “wiggle room”.  (One recalls the anecdote about W. C. Fields, who was found reading a Bible on his deathbed.  When asked what he was up to, he replied “looking for loopholes”.) 

This doctrine is, in other words, not at all relativistic; nor is it merely symbolic or metaphorical, and it’s certainly not “nuanced”.  It’s black and white -- or absolute.  But it has always seemed to me that anything with eternal consequences has to be absolute, in that one cannot eternally be in more than one state at a time… and if one is in a certain state eternally, that would seem to rule out being in some other state also eternally.  This plane of existence -- in time and space -- is the place for relativism, nuance, and shades of gray; in eternity it’s either total light or total darkness.  At least that’s my impression.   

The whole issue, of course, is predicated on the notion that our material lives are not the whole story.  On this plane of existence, we have free will and are responsible for our choices, but those choices are “leveraged”, if you will, into the eternal.  It’s not as if someone just turns out the lights, or that we just sort of evaporate or slide into some kind of void, as some Eastern religions would contend.  Because if we do just sort of evaporate or slide into some kind of void, that calls into question morality -- which is from God -- if not “ethics” -- which is from man.  Yes, it is possible to lead an ethical -- one might say righteous -- existence while alive on the Earth, with no reference to what, if anything, is beyond… and many people seem to be doing this, or at least trying to (just as Christians try to live in the right way, frequently fall and fail, but then get up and try again).  In fact, one almost might say that we are living not only in a post-Christian world (a point made by many) but in the Age of Ethics, which is an outgrowth of the materialist/secular humanist revolution, which in turn was an outgrowth of the Protestant Revolt (a more accurate term than “Reformation”). 

But OK, fine -- and everyone agrees as to what “ethics” entails, right?  Except that they don’t.  One man’s “ethics” may be highly offensive to other people for any number of reasons.  Highly “ethical” people have started wars against other “ethical” people.  I once challenged a friend of mine to prove that the Nazi program was wrong and evil, without reference to God-given morality; they weren‘t able to do it (and this was a lawyer, by the way, for what that’s worth).  The problem right off the bat is that without morality, “evil” turns out to be virtually impossible to define.  Again, one man’s evil is another man’s good.  So after extensive debate over cocktails, it boiled down to opinion, and -- in the collective -- politics.  And politics is man-made, of course -- a regrettable necessity, I would say.  But if politics is the basis for your morality, you’ve got it backwards.  Morality has to come first; it has to be “a priori”… and the only way it can be a priori is for it to come from somewhere other than the endless struggles of mankind… other than from “history”, in other words. 

Another acquaintance of mine, when he was still in grade school, used to respond “Prove it!” to pretty much any bit of advice he was given.  And there’s the rub, as they say.  One can’t “prove it” with any reference to, once again, the material or to human history, or even to anthropology (e.g. the supposed universality of the “Golden Rule”, which is blatantly violated at every turn).  If humankind, left to its own devices, is incapable of coming up with a sound and reliable ethical system that enjoys universal agreement, doesn’t that say something about the competence of people to come up with a code of behavior on their own -- one that will withstand all argument, logic, and reason?  Even the greatest tyrant believes he is doing good things.  He sleeps soundly and, yes, can look at himself in the mirror each morning.  Criminals believe they are doing good things -- for themselves, at any rate.  Even the psychopath, since he believes, on some level, that he is all that exists, or at least all that has a meaningful existence, feels he can do whatever he wants in his own interests, since he is the sole standard of value -- and no one else counts, and their opinions don‘t count either.  And what is “medical ethics” other than a  convoluted attempt to come up with rules that apply always and everywhere, but that enjoy no moral foundation?  And that is just a small subset of the larger areas of politics, economics, and law.  People can reason themselves into pretty much any set of convictions, but are those convictions any more valid than those of the guy sitting next to them on the bus?  They may be more elaborate and more “thought out”, but in the end it still boils down to subjectivity for the individual and politics for the collective. 

And yet that seems to be enough for most people.  No one dares say “Prove it!” because there is an implicit understand that nothing can be proven -- that it’s simply about “what works” for most people most of time, according to strictly material criteria.  (This is also known as utilitarianism.)  Our ethical systems cannot stand up to strict reason and logic, and yet they are not only all we have, but are accepted as a perfectly good basis for all other decisions -- by the individual or by the collective.

Ayn Rand -- an avowed atheist, but no slouch when it came to logic -- used to say, with regard to any argument or point of view, “Check your premises”.  OK then, what are the root premises of the secular/materialist world?  Let us consult the men who pretty much created the world as it is today.  Marx said that it was all about economics, which is usually interpreted as “the greatest good for the greatest number” (utilitarianism again).  Darwin said that we are animals who evolved through random mutation and the all-hallowed “survival of the fittest” -- and strict Darwinism has been criticized over time for being “heartless” the way Nature is “heartless”.  It is, in other words, morality-free, and ethics-free as well.  Freud took things a step further, agreeing that we are animals but that sex (sexuality, as opposed to gender) is the primary determinant of our behavior.  It is not so much that we are immoral, but that we’re amoral -- that we simply fancy that there is some sort of creator or “god” who cares one way or the other.  He referred to religion as an “illusion” -- which some materialists have at least termed a necessary illusion -- i.e. what we call “morality”, though fanciful, has its uses -- it is a civilizing force, if you will (utilitarianism again).  (But then the strict Darwinist has to answer the question, how did it evolve, i.e. this drive to define universal rules of conduct?  It is because people who thought this way had a leg up when it came to survival?  And if so, why?  What were the mechanisms that made this work better than the alternative?  We know that in our time it’s the secularists who always seem to wind up on top, whether in politics or economics or social status, so one could just as well contend that it’s the lack of religious belief that is adaptive, not the other way around.)   

So you line up these premises and you get what is basically the world view of, I would say, much of the Western world, if not of the “unenlightened” elsewhere on the globe (or of many of the “deplorables“ here at home).  And, as they say, “How’s that working out for you?”  Do these premises -- this entire package -- make the world a better place?  They certainly promise as much.  “Hope and change”, and all that.  But can anyone argue that the world is a better place since we’ve internalized the collective wisdom of Marx, Darwin, and Freud, as well as many lesser lights?  Some will say that it’s always a good thing when “illusions” are discarded -- but  they would argue that morality is an illusion as well. 

And some will argue that technology is sufficient proof that life without morals can not only be lived successfully, but that it is superior to lives lived under the cloud of “superstition“.  But there is a backlash against technology in our time (as there has been at various other times over the last couple of centuries), as if we’ve all been sold a bill of goods.  The “god that failed” is a non-god… or, more precisely, when man becomes god failure is inevitable.   

There is a marvelous ending to the film “The Score”, where the character played by Robert de Niro asks the character played by Edward Norton -- over the phone -- “What have you got?”  This is in response to the Norton character’s boast that he’s the one who got away with a priceless antique.  But when he checks his bag, he finds nothing but scrap metal, which de Niro cleverly substituted for the antique.  Then he starts to threaten and bargain, but to no avail.  De Niro has the goods, and Norton has the dross.  Too few people in our time even think to question whether they have given up the treasure in favor of the dross.  And even if they suspect they have, they feel that it’s too late, and it doesn’t matter anyway.  And if they now think Pope Francis is on their side they may have another think coming.