By Steve Rabson, GUEST COLUMNIST
I first learned about hell at age five. I was playing on the swing in our backyard with Tommy, one of my neighbors. My hands slipped when I tried to climb onto the seat and I yelled “Damn it,” which was what I’d heard my father say when something went wrong. Tommy got a horrified look on his face and put his hand up over his mouth. “Don’t you know,” he said, “every time you say a bad word, a mark goes on your chest and when you die, God counts the marks. If there are too many, you go to hell.” He then proceeded to describe hell.
In those days I was frightened hearing people talk about death, though one of our family friends had tried to convince me that it was just like going to sleep. But the idea that there was something even worse after death sent me into a panic. I bolted out of the backyard, rushed into the house, and scrambled upstairs to my father’s study where he sat at his desk smoking his pipe as usual. Without even saying hello, I pressed him right away to tell me if it was true about hell. My father, a mathematician who preferred to let me figure out the answers to questions myself, said “Well, some people believe….”
I interrupted him immediately. “No, I want to know if it’s true.”
He got up to fill his pipe.
“Tell me if it’s true,” I demanded again.
His continuing silence made me even more desperate for an answer.
“Tell me if it’s true. You have to tell me now!” I repeated this several more times squeezing his arm as hard as I could.
Finally, raising his voice in obvious exasperation, he answered. “No, it’s not true.” Later, I realized he was just trying to get rid of me.
Although no one in our family considers themselves religious, we enjoy a Jewish ethnicity. We had bagels and lox for breakfast in the late 1940’s long before most Americans knew about them. My father taught us some Yiddish and studied Hebrew growing up, albeit under pressure from his father. He quoted Bible verses occasionally to make points he was arguing, and likened people we knew to Biblical personages to illustrate his opinion of them, favorable or unfavorable. Some years he led our family Passover Seder celebrating the Jews escape from slavery, and we joined Jewish families among his colleagues for observance in other years. In 2024 I joined Jewish Voice for Peace in expressing opposition to U.S. transfers of weapons to the Netanyahu government.
From childhood I have learned to admire what religion has contributed to culture with narratives that inspire great works of literature, art, and music, including the works of Bach that I played on the piano.
Yet I will never join any of the world’s organized religions. How could I possibly devote myself to religions with scriptures that threaten non-believers with “death by stoning” (Deuteronomy 17:2-5), “to be put to the sword and their city burned down completely” (Deuteronomy 13:12-15), “thrown into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:15), “eternal fire prepared by the devil.” (Mathew 25:41) or “the Fire of Hell eternally” in the afterlife (The Quran, Surah At-Tawbah 9:68)?
Most followers of these religions disavow such passages or dismiss them as figurative or metaphorical. Yet there have also been followers who embrace them as commandments, sacred duties to carry out persecutions and mass murder as in the crusades, the inquisition, and the pogroms.
That is one reason I participate in the Sunday services of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fredericksburg. The fact that they hold services on Sundays might be one of the few things they have in common with the two most widely practiced religions in this country, Catholicism and Protestantism. They espouse no religious doctrine or obeisance to religious symbols or personages, historical or mythical. Instead of sermons by a head cleric, the Fellowship offers presentations by members with special expertise on timely topics.
Recently, Dr. Patrick Neustatter, a physician from the U.K. and long-time Fredericksburg resident, spoke at the UUFF and explained that what’s wrong with our healthcare system is the pervasive corruption of “greed” (number two of what Western religious texts call The Seven Deadly Sins). This is enabled in the U.S. by largely unregulated lobbying in Congress and state legislatures on behalf of hospital conglomerates, pharmaceutical corporations, and insurance companies. Dr. Neustatter’s presentation was followed by testimonials from individuals in the congregation who have struggled in desperation and futility with a system that prioritizes wealth care over health care.
Such a community might be called “ecumenical,” except that it reaches out beyond religion, extending to those who value the ethical over the liturgical. It advocates reforms in today’s world rather than threatening punishment in this world or the next.
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Steve Rabson is a jazz pianist, retired professor from Brown University, and current adjunct Instructor at the University of Mary Washington.
I will be grateful forever to the UU Fellowship for introducing me to your mother. Alice was one of my favorite people and I will always remember her. She really got me one day when she stood on her tiptoes looking pretty much at my chin and told me she didn’t like my first name. I told her I was sorry she didn’but that I had had nothing to do with it. We both smiled. She was an unforgettable character, and I mean that only in the nicest way.
Sara Toye
Thank you for a thought-provoking essay. Been chewing on it all weekend and debating whether or not I could (or should) formulate some sort of response.
What challenges me here are three things: (1) the idea of an afterlife, (2) whether or not it should or does hold any relevance to our actions as we shuffle within this mortal coil of ours, and (3) what -- if any -- duties we might owe either to ourselves or the other.
I don't have a whole lot of truck with the idea that humans need the idea of divine punishment either in this world or the next to make us "good" persons or even attune ourselves to the idea of the good. In this, the Athenians are correct and the Spartans with their strict laws and devotion to those laws were wrong. Thucydides himself remarked how the Spartans -- once outside of Sparta -- were absolute rakes while the Athenians, whose culture was permissive in some senses, cultivated character and virtue wherever they went.
So much for the Greeks.
What interests me here is that even if we abandon the idea of an afterlife, even if we abandon the idea of divine punishment or reward, that we as humans still attune ourselves to the idea of the good, beautiful, and true. We prefer excellence over mediocrity. We prefer order to chaos. We prefer harmony to discord -- at least as a rule.
What concerns me is the introduction of appetites. Pleasure is better than pain. Yet in order to grow, we most certainly undergo the pains and tribulations of all sorts of things: childbirth, growing pains, vaccinations, playground scrapes, learning algebra, interacting with opinions that are not quite our own, learning how to disagree -- these aren't comfortable pursuits. Yet they do build character, virtue, and excellence both in ourselves and in others.
Fast forward to the idea of an afterlife. I come from the Catholic tradition, where the presence of a Heaven and Hell are realities. Our minds can weaken, our bodies destroyed, but the soul once created can never be destroyed (lest on think this is some sort of Kantian categorical imperative, there are good arguments for and not-so-good arguments against this idea -- for another time) and it is that which we hand back to a God who surrenders of His omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence a tiny fraction of his potency (as free will) on loan to us. After 80 years, we will all get the question:
"I made all of this creation and decided it would not be perfect without YOU, so what did you do with this tremendous gift of life?"
Whether one's character is molded to accept the totality of a sentient existence is entirely dependent upon us. Again, in the Catholic tradition, hell is a rejection of this vision, and those who go there *want* to go there because their will refuses to assent. The same is true of Heaven; our reaction will either by like Job (his hand covering his mouth) or it will be like Judas. The good thief or the bad thief.
Regardless as to whether or not one believes in an afterlife or not, the question of "Shall I be a good person today?" isn't removed. Nor do we require a great deal of "spooky" to get us to the idea as to why people pursue the good, beautiful, and true. Yet there is an insistence that there is a metaphysics surrounding the postmodern understanding of the world that cannot be pure materialism nor can it be reduced to Foucault-style apparatus. Nor is it reducible to the idea of excavating mere meaning in a hyper-technological world. The greater question is twofold: (1) what is the source of that meaning and (2) what duties do we owe?
If indeed we owe this state of being -- in fact, divine being? -- nothing at all, or at least, if we believe as such, then is there no small wonder why we dwell on the question "what if we get it wrong?" in a legalistic sense? I take more comfort from Matthew 25:31-46 on questions such as these, where the division isn't upon faith or tribe or race or political party, but on a very simple and innocuous test: so long as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.
The word "did" is carrying an awful lot of water, but I do not believe this to be a merely performative act, but rather doing-as-being. The whole secret to theodicy in Job isn't to answer the question "Where is God?" but rather to answer the question "Where is humanity?" as the miracle isn't God on a cloud, but rather Job's family coming to restore him -- again, our free will chosen and directed towards the good.
Either way, thank you for giving me the prompt to reflect on these things. Hope some of this might be helpful to you or others.