Hot enough for you?

It's been an extremely hot and dry summer here in Georgia, as it has elsewhere around the country.

I've noticed several of the local Protestant churches around here have taken advantage of the heat wave to try to scare up, literally, old and new members who have probably been spending their Sundays at the lake or pool.

One local church's marquee has read for several weeks: "Hot enough for you? Try Son Block." Truly a stupid attempt at a pun.

Another church's sign shouts out: "You just THINK it's hot here!" Obviously, a reference to that pesky, humid, dry-roasted feeling you'll get when you go to Hell.

Last night, driving home along the Interstate, a truck pulling a trailer carrying a race car passed me. Emblazoned across the back of the race car was this loving Christian message: "JESUS: BELIEVE OR BURN!"

What the hell (pardon my language) is wrong with these fundamentalist types, that the only way they can find to express their Christian love is by trying to scare you with a mythological place of eternal torture? Where's the love their Savior exhibited? Where's the compassion for the weak and the downtrodden, the sense of community, the grace of God?

Religion should make you feel warm and fuzzy, or at least noble and spiritual, not fearful. It should help bring out the best in a person. Don't you have a better reason to believe in your Jesus than that it supposedly gives you a Get Out of Hell Free card?

Update, Wed. Sept. 12: Most of the references to "hell" by Jesus used the Greek word "gehennah," which actually referred to the burning trash pit outside the city. One poor fellow recently experienced the "fiery pit" in Jeddah, a Saudi Arabian city on the Red Sea. While walking in an area formerly used as an animal market, he sank into "soil" that left him with second and third degree burns. Toxic waste was ruled out; what he sank into was animal waste, which as it decays produces scalding temperatures and diphosphane gas that can spontaneously combust.

Image: Though this graphic was made using ChurchSignGenerator.com, it is representative of the type of messages seen on local church marquees around the country this summer

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Pope Benedict warns that Hell is real, eternal and hot

I read somewhere recently that if you bring up the Holy Inquisition or Hitler in any online discussion, you automatically lose.

If you agree with that, you can stop reading now.

Pope Benedict XVI, who was as a youngster a member of the Hitler Youth and later was Prefect of the Catholic Church's Congregation for the Doctrine and Faith (which until 1908 was known as Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, or the Holy Inquisition), recently warned the world that Hell was a real, eternal, and hot place, so you better behave.

One of Benedict's myrmidons, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a Church historian, said that the Pope was "right to remind us that Hell is not something to be put on one side" as an inconvenient or embarrassing aspect of belief, and admitted that the concept of Hell had been misused in the Middle Ages to scare the impressionable with "horrific visions" of damnation, as described in Dante’s Inferno.

And now Pope Benedict is trying to do it again... trying to scare the willies out of the Catholic faithful by reminding them they'll all go to the fiery pits if they don't toe the line.

What I find most interesting is this: Benedict's predecessor, the beloved Pope John Paul II, said less than a decade ago that Hell as a physical place does not exist.

In 1999 Pope John Paul II declared that Heaven was "neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but that fullness of communion with God which is the goal of human life."

Hell, by contrast, was "the ultimate consequence of sin itself.... Rather than a place, Hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy." [Emphasis mine.]

So, at the risk of offending the 1.1 billion Roman Catholics and the other billion Christians of other denominations, I must ask: How the hell do you take any of it seriously when back-to-back Pontiffs, whose words are supposed to be infallible, disagree on such a major point in your Doctrine?

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