To Hell with Hell: Bye-Bye Board Game Metaphysics, Hello Fearless Christianity

Several weeks ago, my priest began his homily with the statement that there are four things that every Christian believes: death, heaven, hell, and judgment.

What happened to taxes? I thought. Oh well, one-and-a-half out of four ain't bad.

I turned and beheld my daughter, who is now six.

She was fumbling with her sweater sleeves, and I couldn't quite tell whether she was paying attention to the message. On the ride home, I realized she had absorbed every word. But the message hadn't terrified her, as perhaps it might have some children—although she was curious what "judgment" meant. We had already had "the afterlife talk."

I try to refrain from judging the childrearing methods of others, but I really cringe when parents use sloppy metaphysical metaphors with their children, such as: "Grandma went to heaven in an airplane." (By the way, no parent ever says, "Uncle Drew went to hell in an AMC Pacer.")

My daughter first "encountered" death at the age of two. We discussed the fact that the wasp in the windowsill was in fact not taking a nap. It had "died," its life force removed. Life is a system of puzzle pieces that fit together, I explained, and when one of the puzzle pieces fails, the puzzle ceases to be .

She cried. I don't blame her. I cried too. Death is a whopper to face for the first time. But we braved it together. Honestly.

Not long thereafter, my daughter's great-grandmother died. But rather than paint a Hallmark card of pearly gates and gold-paved boulevards with Malibu mansions as Great-Grandma's next stop on the Mobius Metro, I determined to set a proper foundation for my daughter's lifelong belief in the afterlife. I'm glad I did, as someday I will have to explain to her that the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny were myths (lies) I perpetuated, but I will not have to apologize about how I first cast the Great Beyond.

I told her everything there is to say about life after death: "When a person dies, he or she returns to God. We cannot know what that experience is like, but I would like to imagine that it is a kind of peace and joy that is so wonderful it is beyond words. And so, we don't have to feel sad for the person who is gone—though we may feel sad because we miss him or her so, for a time."

"Does everybody go there?" she asked.

"Where else is there to go?" I replied.

Granted, my philosophy of the afterlife is abstract. But my daughter was able to grasp the notion that things beyond human experience cannot be described with human words. (I think of this as a branch of apophatic theology.) Children are smarter than we think.

Our father-daughter conversations about death and the afterlife have established a foundation of Christian living that is not based on avoiding hell and earning heaven. I'm not taking about general Chutes & Ladders, merit-based soteriology. Catholics and Protestants might differ with respect to the machinations of salvation, but at the end of the day, both parties could sign a treaty on the Let's Make a Deal , two-door concept of Heaven and Hell.

Yet I am convinced that life is not a game show.

We follow Christ's teaching for the sake of doing good . Because doing good is the right thing to do. Not because life is a video game, and we're in search of a next level that doesn't include a lava lake panorama.

Last winter, on a drive to Myrtle Beach—which some might consider the very dictionary definition of hell—my daughter determined of her own accord that Satan and Hell are absurd concepts. I owe this to a run-through of Jesus Christ Superstar . (The Lord works in mysterious ways.) She asked me to explain what this idea of "the devil" and "Hell" were. I explained the concepts without projecting my own personal beliefs. She opined—in her own words—that human beings were sufficient agents of "doing bad" and didn't need any help along the way. Actually, she laughed at the tale of Lucifer the fallen angel and further found the idea of a God who makes a soul suffer for all eternity simply incomputable.

I wish I had had such wisdom at her age. It would have saved me decades of being bogged in a Dantean bolgia of guilt and fear.

Instead, when I was a child, I fell asleep most nights with the dread-inspired images of a Christian tract called " This Was Your Life " playing in my mind's eye.

I literally prayed myself to frenzied sleep that when God "replays the movie of my life" on Judgment Day—because everybody knows that Jehovah enjoys a good silver screen showing of a soul's terrestrial walk—my name would be found in the Book of Life. So many evenings, I awoke in sweaty terror from dreams of the Angel of Judgment standing on a square platform, pitching my soul into the Lake of Fire.

"This Was Your Life" is one of dozens of cartoon pamphlets distributed by Evangelical publisher, Chick Publications. Nearly one billion tracts have been produced by Jack T. Chick's organization since 1970. (In retrospect, it seemed that at least half of these copies were piled high on shelves in my childhood charismatic church.)

You can view the entire damnable Chick Publications catalog here . Some other classic Chick titles include "Are Roman Catholics Christians?", "A Demon's Nightmare," and "Allah Had No Son."

It is a bit of a consolation now to see that Chick Publications has been blacklisted on the Southern Poverty Law Center "Active General Hate Group" list . Yet I truly wonder how many millions of children (and adults!) have spent decades of their lives following Christ's teachings from Chick-inspired, pants-on-fire fear rather than because goodness, in essence, is its own reward.

And in the centuries prior to Chick Publications, how many millions more Christians followed the tenets of the Faith more from a dread of the manifestation of a Hieronymus Bosch horror-scape than because the Golden Rule was sufficient in and of itself?

Sadly,"This Was Your Life" doesn't hold an infernal candle to the depths of 21st-century fundamentalist fire and brimstone-mongering.

I'm about to send you to a vision of hell (viewed by nearly 1.5 million people at the link below alone) designed to scare the ever-Belial-bejesus out of viewers. It's called "8 Minutes in Hell." As near as I can tell, it originates from a website that goes by the moniker DoomsDayTube. And it appears to have been produced by a group of Christians who think that Rob Zombie and H.R. Giger are author-illustrators of a lost fifth gospel.

Do not let a child click this link !

Almost as disturbing as "8 Minutes in Hell" are the 13,000-plus viewer comments, many of which have been posted by believers in a God who designed a universe expressly to cast the majority of his sentient creations into eternal suffering. This, in the end, was the line of thinking that drove me to a categorical rejection of the centuries-long theological accretions of Gehenna, Hades, and the whole Abaddon Gang that were intimate parts of my Evangelical upbringing.

Could I really imagine that a Creator had gone to such trouble to create a universe so complex and vast, only to damn eternally those whom he had granted his image?

The answer that kept coming back was: No.

Of course, a traditional belief in hell wasn't about to go by the wayside without some colossal mental arm wrestling. There were, after all, The Screwtape Letters standing in my way. And, of course, that most famous of youth group apothegms: "Satan's greatest lie is getting you to believe he doesn't exist." And all those bloodcurdling tracts discussed above.

One by one I shed them. And here I stand, with this to say:

To hell with hell. Infinite suffering, be damned.

Pause for possible incoming lightning bolt strike.

Let us continue.

Earlier this summer, former Archbishop Desmond Tutu drew quite a bit of attention when he said that he "would not worship a God who is homophobic" . That's a pretty bold stand to take against an immortal, omnipotent being. If we lived in ancient Greece, religious media likely would have speculated that his Former Grace's rash words were enough to put him in line for being transformed into a shrubbery.

In reality, however, I believe Tutu was taking an axe of righteous indignation to a god created in the image of human hatred. A believer can engage in endless biblical criticism and survey, but at the end of the day, the mind itself, engaged in rational thought , is an incredibly powerful hermeneutical tool. Tutu, in my opinion, took a false god to the woodshed.

I find myself in a similar place. I am blazingly sick and tired of the manmade Masochistic Maker with his Lump-of-Coal Netherworld who has it out for the likes of Brutus and Cassius, Judas Iscariot, Adolf Hitler, and the billions of others who failed "to accept Christ" during their tenure on our Little Blue Planet.

Yes, evil is a problem. A big "problem," in the sense of a theological phenomenon. Yet theologians, like Nature herself, abhor an explanation vacuum. Just as the Old Testament Yahweh gave those grumbling, monarch-envious Israelites their King Saul, thus religious leaders and theologians through the ages have responded to the human desire to see that "people much worse than everyone else" get their just deserts.

Voila! Hell and the concept of ceaseless Sisyphean suffering in a sulfur sauna. (And enter Purgatory, as well, for theologians who believe that every soul deserves a second chance.)

But both sides of the afterlife coin, by their very definition, are unknowable.

Life is not a board game with cutesy tokens circumnavigating a cardboard plane, only a double-purple card removed from Candy Castle or Molasses Swamp. Divine Judgment, if there is such a thing, is in no way predicated on my belief about whether Heaven has Chrysoprasus orchards and Hell its Turkish tabasco baths. I trust God to judge my life's journey, and my soul's next step, with grace and mercy. And however the Creator of the Universe applies that same omnipotent understanding to others is none of my damned beeswax.

After all, what other choice do I have? All else is metaphysical masturbation.