{"id":46,"date":"2012-08-23T17:26:33","date_gmt":"2012-08-23T23:26:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/hellbound\/?p=46"},"modified":"2012-09-05T06:51:29","modified_gmt":"2012-09-05T12:51:29","slug":"why-we-need-the-language-of-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/hellbound\/2012\/08\/why-we-need-the-language-of-hell\/","title":{"rendered":"Why we need the language of hell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

James Eagan Holmes allegedly slaughters 12 people at a movie theater in Colorado. Survivor Stephanie Davies describes the event: \u201cWe were laying there, literally in the mouth of hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anders Behring Breivik kills 69 people at a summer camp in Norway. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg seeks to capture his grief: \u201cIt was a paradise of my youth that has now been turned into hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

A tsunami devastates the T\u014dhoku region of Japan, killing thousands. Daily Mail<\/em> reporter Alex Thompson describes the scene as \u201cHell on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two planes hit the World Trade Center in New York City. Brian Williams describes the event 10 years later: \u201cIt was a day when hell rained down on earth from the skies and changed all of our lives forever\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

As these and numerous other examples demonstrate, when seeking to describe a natural disaster or manmade tragedy, hell is often the first word that springs to mind. And we don\u2019t just use \u201chell\u201d to describe the event. We also demand it as punishment when human perpetrators are involved.<\/p>\n

After Wade Michael Page allegedly opened fire in a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee, a commenter expressed his disgust online: \u201cMeet Wade Michael Page, white supremacist and latest entrant to the gates of Hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lynn Johnson, who was in the Chicago theater with her children when Holmes started shooting, expressed her hope that he would \u201cburn in hell\u201d for his crimes.<\/p>\n

And when Seal Team 6 assassinated Osama Bin Laden, Mike Huckabee responded to the news with a glib, \u201cWelcome to hell, bin Laden.\u201d<\/p>\n

How should we interpret this phenomenon? Does it merely reflect the faith position of the observers? In some cases, definitely. But when one considers the increasing secularization and pluralism of Western society, why would people still be so quick to grasp for such hellish imagery?<\/p>\n

In a recent essay \u201cHell In Our Time: Dantean Descent and the Twenty-first Century \u2018War on Terror\u201d (published in \u201cHell and Its Afterlife<\/a>\u201c), Rachel Falconer suggests, \u201cThe first-hand experience of disaster is usually mapped onto pre-existing narratives. And all these different narratives comprise an image-bank, or better, a composite narrative trajectory or story to which many continue to give the name hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

This theory definitely has merit. When confronted by the chaos of a mass murder or a devastating earthquake, it\u2019s only natural that we would try to impose meaning on such an apparently random event. Humans are called \u201chomo sapiens,\u201d which means \u201cthe wise or rational man.\u201d But I wonder if a more apt name would be \u201cthe meaning-seeking man\/woman,\u201d because we are hard-wired to fit everything into a narrative that makes experience both rational and predictable. This gives us the illusion of security \u2014 until the next challenge to our neatly ordered world explodes across the front pages. But for the time being, the narrative of hell is handy, and it seems to satisfy on an emotional level, so it works.<\/p>\n

From an evolutionary perspective, you could also argue that our ability fit such events into a narrative like hell would have also conferred a survival advantage. Those groups who were able to rationalize and then respond to such events sooner would be more likely to survive in the aftermath and perhaps even use the disaster to their advantage. The binary distinction of heaven and hell certainly has a way of simplifying things. So once again, the theory seems to make sense.<\/p>\n

But is that all there is to it? Is the ubiquity of hell language merely a survival mechanism, a cultural artifact leftover from 2,000 years of Christianity?<\/p>\n