Free Create Your Own Religion by Daniele Bolelli Page B

it just me, or are we looking at a bit of a contradiction? What loving parent would burn his children forever for misbehaving? The idea of hell seems like nothing short of religiously sanctioned sadism. Tertullian, one of the early Church Fathers, makes this abundantly clear when he states that one of the joys of paradise consists in witnessing the unbelievers being torturedin hell. 39 Most scriptures of the heaven-and-hell religions take inordinate joy in detailed descriptions of the gruesome punishments awaiting unbelievers. Sadism oozes out of these pages.
    Among my personal favorites is the Zoroastrian punishment for a man who has sex with a woman during her period: he is force-fed menstrual blood for eternity save for brief breaks during which he has to cook and eat his own son. 40 The Old Testament is more moderate in this regard: it simply asks that a man having sex with a menstruating woman be sentenced to death in this life. 41 In comparison, the Muslim and Christian hells in which you are only burned for eternity suddenly appear benign by comparison. Zoroastrianism may take the cake for its graphic goriness, but some versions of Christianity win the prize for the most shocking theological argument: those who commit evil actions are not the only ones deserving of hell. Rather, everyone, including newborn babies, deserves to be tortured in hell because of humanity's original sin. Only through repentance and begging for God's forgiveness can anyone be spared this fate.
    The emphasis on otherworldly punishments found in the ideas of karma and heaven and hell betrays an attitude that is based on fear rather than understanding. Believers argue that a divinely supervised system of rewards and punishments is useful to teach people how to act in a moral manner. Heaven and hell (or karma, for that matter) are the supernatural equivalent of the carrot and the stick. With no incentive to behave morally, people would act like the selfish bastards that they are at heart. According to this logic, fear is a necessary tool to enforce social rules. But there is plenty of evidence to indicate that many human beings can act decently without being scared into it by boogeyman tales.
    The belief in supernatural rewards and punishments may help people overcome their fear of death. After all, the only thing youhave to do is declare your faith and follow the rules, and you no longer have to fear death since you are offered an eternity of bliss in heaven or a brand new body in a better reincarnation. But this idea has too many disturbing and horrifying side effects. If the goal is to conquer our fear of death, and we are so desperate as to be willing to embrace beliefs for which there is no evidence, we can surely come up with something better than this.
Heaven and Hell's Cousin: The Apocalypse
    Before we start to explore alternatives, it's worth pausing to look at a concept that is very much related to the heaven-and-hell system just discussed. The apocalypse, the end of time, judgment day, Armageddon: it goes by many names, but they all refer to the same thing: a prophecy predicting a global catastrophe that will put an end to the world as we know it.
    Several traditions speak of it, but none develop this concept with as much enthusiasm as Western religions. Many scholars believe that this idea of the apocalypse comes to us courtesy of Zoroastrianism, which later passed it on to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Zoroastrianism, in fact, we find the essential elements of Western theology: God and the Devil; heaven and hell; an eternal battle between the forces of good and evil, with angels and demons competing to recruit human beings to their respective sides; the arrival of a Messiah before the last battle, which will destroy the world and banish evil forever; the creation of a new universe after the destruction; and, finally, the resurrection of the dead and a final judgment of the souls.
    It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that the