[The photograph was sent to me by my friend Ina, the first in a set captioned: "When God paints, He uses all His colors." The photo appears to have been retouched by Thomas Kincaid to add a patina of wispy spirituality.]
Tomorrow will only be the autumnal equinox, but already today copious leaf fall heralds that this will be, or is, an early Fall. Fall has long been my favorite season, despite its literal fall into death and decay. I asked my wife on our walk if she thought the season was named because of leaf fall. She thought so. "And Spring for vegetation springing up out of the ground."
I shall have my own leaf fall one day...I started to say that it seems more matter-of-fact to me now that I have made up my mind about afterlife, but that felt false. I made up my mind about afterlife years ago, perhaps at the very beginning. Hell has always seemed too macabre an invention to credit. Perhaps I have never feared either heaven or hell, believing in neither.
Heaven might be where, if there were such a place, I would be set up as reward for having written, talked, and voted for justice and the common good, for valuing goats equally with sheep.
Hell might be where, if there were such a place, I could be cast as punishment for sympathizing as much with creatures of the bush as with high-and-mighty man, for thinking Yahweh's pal Moses imagined that the burning bush spoke to him, for ridiculing the flaming Bush of contemporary political infamy, for disrespecting bush1-eschewing Bible-thumpers, for judging the golden tablets of the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to have been a hoax motivated in part by his desire for polygamous bush2.
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- As in a man's or a woman's triangle of pubic hair.
- As in several women's triangles of pubic hair.
Hell is really kinda mean, isn't it? To punish someone forever when he's only been bad for a few decades? No wonder it's such a turnoff.
ReplyDeleteA beaut from Issac Asimov: He describes hell as "the drooling dream of a sadist," crudely affixed to an all-merciful God.
CT Russell, in his lifetime, was known as "the man who turned the hose on hell and put out the fire." Not a bad reputation for one to have.
Tom, what is the official JW view of hell? Pretty ferocious, isn't it? I take it that your comments here are just sort of for having fun, right? (I hope that you did have fun, but it's hard for your reader to have fun when he's not properly construing you....)
ReplyDeleteBy "CT Russell," whom do you mean? I can think only of Bertrand Russell who might fit your description.
Again, your comment on this Russell's reputation ("not a bad [one] to have") would seem to indicate that you share his/her debunking of hell. But is that really your position?
Sometimes I wonder whether your "real position" in life is just to beard people and get their hackles up for your own entertainment <smile>. Sort of a bad-boy religious poseur, not really taking anything seriously?