Demon day

Today is 6/6/06, which is close enough to 666 -- the number of the beast -- the beast being the Devil, to have some worried. Religious leaders have called for prayer and bookmakers have posted odds of 10-1 that today will be the apocalypse (try collecting on that.)

Granted that is a little ahead of Al Gore's carbon schedule but it is still something that could be taken seriously if you happen to be mentally deranged. But I'm not actually interested in the apocalypse, or even the the Devil. I'm more concerned with the dominion the Devil rules.

The concept of Hell goes back a while, the ancient Greeks called it Tartarus, which was the level below Hades. Tartus was a place evil-doers were subject to eternal tortures, such as burning on a wheel, for specific egregious deeds they had done. The Roman's picked up on the concept of Tartarus, and extend its reach to sinners in general.

The first monolithic religion's flirted with the modern concept of Hell, but to the Zoastrians damnation is not eternal and the early Jews who believed in Hell thought of it as more of a purgatory.

It wasn't until Christianity that Hell really picked up speed with the damnation of all non-believers and the permanent firewall, if you will, between Heaven and Hell.

What disturbs me today is how willing people are to say things like "Go to Hell," or "I'm going to make your life a living Hell." If they really thought about it they would realize how awful it is to wish Hell upon another person, and how difficult it would be to make someone else's live a "living Hell."

Here is my favorite description of Hell. It comes from Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce;

An eternity of endless agony, of endless bodily and spiritual torment, without one ray of hope, without one moment of cessation, of agony limitless in intensity, of torment infinitely varied, of torture that sustains eternally that which it eternally devours, of aguish that everlasting, preys upon the spirit while it racks the flesh, an eternity, every instant of which is itself an eternity of woe.

Try putting your petulant ten year-old through that routine.

The cheapening of the word "Hell" goes with the cheapening of all swear words. People have been indiscriminately dropping f-bombs in their speech for as long as I can remember, but I have been noticing more and more folks are doing it in their writing (especially in the blogesphere.) Don't they realize they are ruining an effective writing tool by doing this? Now the word means nothing and there is no point in ever using it.

I can just see the Devil gleefully rubbing his hooves together every time he hears the mortals dismiss the horrors of Hell with their idle threats and their bright red construction paper. He's been in the eternity of woe business for a long time now and He won't be going anywhere.

Diss at your own risk.