Most Christians and Muslims think that hell is a real place where people go and suffer forever. Revelation 14:11 says “the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night.” Surah Al-Baqarah Ayat 167 says:
Those who followed will say, “If only we had another turn [at worldly life] so we could disassociate ourselves from them as they have disassociated themselves from us.” Thus will Allah show them their deeds as regrets upon them. And they are never to emerge from the Fire.
Harsh! But I think there’s something a bit suspicious about this belief that gives us reason for doubt.
Religious beliefs are suspicious, in my sense, if they’re the kinds of beliefs that are unlikely to be true but are likely to be made up. For example, Joseph Smith’s belief that God wants many people—including other people’s wives—to have sex with Joseph Smith is suspicious. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that God would say, but it does seem like the kind of thing Joseph Smith might say.
Similarly, if you notice a belief bears striking resemblances to wrongheaded prejudices held at the time, that’s suspicious. I find a lot of the Old Testament suspicious in that sense. The common belief at the time was that it was okay to commit acts that we’d now call serious war crimes. All the ancient empires did that. So if you notice that stories attribute to God actions of genocide and ethnic cleansing, in a culture where everybody thought those things were okay, you should be suspicious!
Or, to take another example, the belief that the Jews were God’s chosen people is suspicious. It’s surprising that God would pick a favorite ethnic group, but it’s much less surprising that some ethnic group would think that they were God’s favorites!
A belief can also be suspicious if it’s very easy to see how it would have caught on. For example, a while ago I wrote a piece arguing that if Greta Thunberg thinks that climate change will kill everyone in the world, she probably shouldn’t transition to mostly Gaza activism. In response, lots of people argued that really the best way to deal with the climate crisis was by doing Gaza activism, because Israel’s war is bad for the environment.
This belief is suspicious because it’s pretty implausible on its face, but it’s easy to see why people might argue for it. They’re passionate about Gaza but think climate change is an existential risk. They also wanted to defend their hero Greta from that cretinous canine columnist (me), so they ended up thinking something implausible.
With this concept out of the way, I think belief in hell is very suspicious in a way that seriously undermines its veracity.
