omg

If Hell is empty, then where do all of the souls too poor to buy Genuine Church Indulgences go?

This made my ultra-catholic mother really angry. If non-catholic people didn't go to hell, then what was the point of all the effort she was putting in? She went to church every day. She followed rules like not eating meat on Friday. To her, it was really unfair that someone might get to go to heaven without having to put in all that work. How is anybody supposed to be a good person if they're not constantly terrified of hell?
Needless to day, despite following the rules, I don't really think she lives by the spirit of her religion.
- It's funny how they know their religions suck, and yet they just keep on keeping on.
- It's a normal response to effort and fairness. You see it in every situation where someone is treated differently and needs to make sacrifices other people don't.
  Generational trauma has good examples. "But I had to learn how to deal with x on my own!" Or "I wasn't allowed to x, x or x when I was younger!" or "but I was left alone for days!" For x, fill in words like: raise, live, express, assert, have friends, have fun, have free time, have an opinion, have boundaries, keep my hard earned money, deal with neglect, be considered less of a human being, love or be worthy of love, having a sense of safety, etc.
- If she things she 'worked' to get to Heaven, she doesn't understand salvation
  It is a gift
  We don't follow the rules to 'get into heaven', we follow the rules so people can see the public face of Jesus in our works, it is sometimes the only gospel people see, and we have a lot of regressive assholes to make up for
  
  Works or grace has been debated for ages, no idea if the Catholics have found consensus though
- Imagine going to Heaven and having to sit next to the Nazi High Command at the picnic.
- If non-catholic people didn’t go to hell
  Man, she's going to be extra pissed when she finds out that's not what the Church teaches, to begin with (and also been publicly published, in some capacity, for a century, now).
  
  I don't now if you could ever convince her of that.
- Tell her that sounds a lot like jealousy mm-mmm
- The millennia old debate about "works"
- I'm sorry your mom is a shitbird
  
  So am I.

My mother is a divorcée. In 90s Ireland, she was demonized by the Catholic Church, and was publicly refused communion by the local priest after she left my (at the time alcoholic and abusive) father. She had a crisis of faith after all that and accepted the "fact" that she was doomed to hell while her five children would go to heaven. She quietly accepted this and from then on refused communion at all events, making up excuses with us none the wiser.
In the mid 2000s, I came out as gay and following that, spurred by the church's cruel treatment of my mother, left the church via apostasy. I had to tell my mother in detail as I was no longer allowed to be buried in a Catholic graveyard. She laminated the letter confirming my leaving of the church from the bishop.
In the mid 2010s she and I campaigned for Marriage Equality together. She told me about her crisis of faith. She also told me how I helped her through the other side of it just by existing. Before she thought all her children would be separated from her after death. But heathen that I was had equally doomed myself to join her. Logically that would make hell lesser. Logically that means the more sinners in hell, the less hellish it is. Therefore hell in its most hellish is empty, and the whole threat is bullshit whether you believe in an afterlife or not.
The fucking POPE saying something like this is huge, and very important for people that carry a burden of Catholic guilt. Good on him, and RIP.
- I hope your mom is still here and that she reads that quote.
  Hugs for you both (and your sibs)
- Wow! Your mom is a certified badass. She showed courage, stood up for herself and protected you and your siblings. Accepting eternal damnation with full understanding and dignity.
  I grew up in a cult that took elements from different faiths. Every religion has the empty threat of a hell. All to keep people in their place. Even if it means to be an abusive man's posession.

Yeah, he really was decent for a pope. And I think he might have been more decent as a pope if he had his way entirely. He really seemed like he wanted more compassion and change than he was able to make happen.
- Nobody can't change an institution like the Vatican in a few years, but I guess he tried.
  Hopefully the new one will not be a conservative one.
  
  From what I've seen elsewhere he appointed ~80% of the voting cardinals so there's a better chance than usual that new pope will be at least relatively liberal.
  
  I kind of want the next one to be a traditional African Roman Catholic partly to mix it up a bit, and partly because it fucks with racists.
- I agree. Though the pragmatist in me also thinks it's for the better for things to change slowly, as bad as that feels. It kinda feels like social progress moving too quickly just results in more intense backlash.
  Broader culture has to be able to keep up with the change and if it outpaces them it seems like people reject the changes and it can cement the problems in place as people dig their heels in :/
  I appreciate that he pushed things forward though. There's a lot more change still that needs to happen- I'm not holding my breath but I really hope the next pope actually carries that forward.
  
  Yeah, there's always a lot of flex in social movement. The harder you push, the further you get; but unless the system resilient enough to most adapt, it snaps, or it rebounds. Neither of which is a reliable form of change.
  To me, once lives are no longer on the line on the big scale, it's better to ease up and push for change gently from the bottom up rather than forcefully from the top down.
  It doesn't fix problems as fast, but once they get fixed, the populace's inertia will serve up keep the changes as the status quo. Since the kind of changes that Francis was making were the kind that work from the bottom up, despite him being a power, I look at his changes as the result of the work already done, rather than something that was supposed to be the vanguard of change.
  But, like you said, moving slow means that there's going to be people getting ground down by the system as it exists. Even once you get past the point where people are dying frequently by way of violence or gaps in the system, there's still going to be death, and suffering, until things change completely. But if you don't slow down once that goal is met, the serious enemies of humane change will fight harder and nastier.
  You end up with a worse situation overall by pushing until a system breaks. You get the crazies making desperate moves instead of being gradually worn away.
- I mean, I did say for a pope there.
  And it's possible to be flawed and still have compassion. Should he have done better? Absolutely. But he was better than the pope before him, and the one before that, alllll the way back.
  It's okay to recognize the good in a person while also recognising the bad.
  However, this is c/lemmybewholesome and it wouldn't have been appropriate for me to bring up the bad in a top level comment.
  It's fine in child comments, imo, but if a community is geared around things being uplifting and positive, a top level comment should stay focused on those things. It's one of those things where if I have to say something that drags down the overall thread, I shouldn't say it at all. So I focused on the good side of things.
  And, again, I did say that he was decent for a pope. I acknowledged that he had flaws indirectly in as friendly a way as possible by phrasing things that way
  
  He did approve blessing same sex marriage which is an improvement compared to the previous pope who called it evil, so he was compassionate compared to that.
  But yeah, standards for popes are very very low.
- Decent for a pope isn’t saying much when he wasn’t decent as a person. Homophobic slur using piece of shit he was behind closed doors.
  
  How do you know this? Or do you just assume?

If there were more men like Francis in the church, I might still count myself a Christian. Alas, I actually read the gospel, and read it deeply in independent study, and found that the US has no Christian churches. There is only a shitty wealth cult that's like a fleshgait imitation of Christianity.
Fleshgait Jesus says: "buuuuuuuuyyyyyy buy buy buy the Ford F-150, sinner sinner siner sinUR SNER SINNER"
- ...pope francis was a good guy, and he didn't need to flaunt his christianity to be so: his actions spoke for themselves, as they should...
  
  Jesus had a name for people who flaunted their holiness, they were 'Pharisees' and were the ONLY class of people that Jesus spoke ill about, he didn't even do that to the Romans come to execute him
  "White-washed tombs full of rotting bones" is what he called them
  
  m
- Just because the leadership is bad doesn't mean the message is bad
  Help the poor, needy, and traveler in your land. If you do this, you are Christian enough
  
  I can say with utmost certainty that about 90% of Christians I know behave nothing like that. On the contrary, they're the vilest, most judgmental and bigoted shitstains that I have ever known.
- The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus

I can't speak for god or anything
the guy speaking for god
- I'm not religious so correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the Pope is a prophet? Like yeah he's the official leader of the Catholic Church but I don't think they believe that he convenes with god... I could be wrong though.
  
  In Catholic thought, the Pope is considered somewhat of an intermediary between God and mankind. One of the Latin names for the pope is Pontifex Maximus (also origin of the word pontiff and pontificate), which means something like "supreme bridge builder", as in bridge between God and Earth.
  
  He is not a prophet but is supposed to have the "ear of god" and is his chosen representative in modern times. It really depends who you ask though, because all this shit is made up.
  
  There's basically two things:
  the Pope can make no mistake when talking on behalf of the whole church;
  the Pope is assisted by the holy spirit when interpreting the word of God
- LITERALLY God’s designated representative
  
  pft, designated by man

What a pleasant thought for the child diddling priests he did nothing about.
- you only need to take one look at the Pope’s evil gold throne to know the entire institution of Catholicism is bullshit….
  i mean, there’s a lot of other ways to figure that out, but the throne is glaringly obvious
  
  I mean, in the photo he's just sitting in what appears to be a wooden chair... which I'm sure still cost more than my entire life has.
- Oh, he did something—continued to shelter and protect them instead of turning them over to law enforcement.

Neither heaven nor hell exist, so you can all stop worrying about them.
Enjoy your life because it's the only one you get.
- You should only worry about them if you're a sociopath who requires the threat of eternal torture to keep you from hurting others.
- Still true if they exist tho. Paradise is being with God, so bye bye free will. Hell is beimg simply cast out, so yeah.
  
  That's just like your opinion

The old testament did not even mention hell and thus Jews don't believe it. Hell is a Christian invention to control the masses through threat of eternal damnation for disobeying the authority.
- i'm not believing that since i remember reading that the concept of heaven/hell is essentially the idea of dualism that is older than judaism itself, even, at least dating back to zoroastrianism, which existed in the middle east already at the time that judaism was formed.
  
  Judaism is older than Zoroastrianism with the added caveat that what constitutes Judaism changes with time as modern Rabbinical Judaism and Priestly Judaic practices aren’t identical (The destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem by Rome leads to the Rabbinical movement)
  
  In the old testament I believe the jews believed in 'Sheol' which was a dark, still realm where all the dead, regardless of quality, went for eternity.
  
  The concept of an afterlife consisting of Heaven and Hell absolutely existed in Judaism prior to Christ.
  That was the primary difference between the Pharisees and Sadducees. Pharisees believed in more of the supernatural and the afterlife, whereas Sadducees were a political class of priests with no interest or belief in the supernatural.
  
  There are things the human mind tends to come up with again and again.
- ...in the afterlife, you could be headed for the serious strife: now you make the scene all day, but tomorrow there'll be hell to pay!..

I hope the next pope can be as good as Pope Francis was
- One likely candidate is apparently the archbishop of Manila, Luis Antonio Tangle. Supposedly he's one of the more progressive options, though that isn't saying much. https://www.them.us/story/cardinal-luis-antonio-tagle-pope-front-runner-catholic-church-francis-conclave
  There's also Pietro Parolin, Pope Francis's number two basically. Expected that he would carry on more or less similarly. https://www.newsweek.com/who-next-pope-favorites-bets-tagle-parolin-2062160
  None of the cardinals are GOOD choices by my lights, but certainly some are more humane than others.
  
  Interesting!
- They won't be, the entire world is shifting to authoritarianism and the Cardinals see where the wind is blowing
  This gonna be a really rough century pretty much everyone but the ultra wealthy

They only added Hell in the Middle Ages (even the name comes from the Vikings). It’s like when comics make the canon needlessly complicated in later years because they have to keep going no matter what.
- Also, isn't the whole shtick about Easter that Jesus took the L to make the sins disappear...?
  
  Always weird to me they didn't bother renaming the holiday they co-opted. They did it with Christmas.
  It's named after the goddess Ēostre.
- That's definitely not the origin of Hell but okay
  
  I've been learning a lot about biblical history and early Christianity lately. To be clear: as a layperson. Ie I've been listening to podcasts by biblical scholars, and reading Wikipedia articles. I'm not an expert but I'm an interested lay person. I've been doing this as a person that doesn't believe in the supernatural, because I'm interested in history and sociology, I haven't been learning about hell specifically but more the context influence of Early Christianity.
  Early Judaism understood the afterlife to be a sort of sleep/slumber/torpor.
  Greek concepts of hades had an influence on early Christianity.
  The Book of Revelation was kinda like a revenge fantasy for early Christians experiencing persecution by the Greco-Roman empire.
  The lake of fire was not for human souls.
  There's also something about souls being fed into an eternal furnace, but the furnace is consuming the souls so the souls are destroyed through incineration, not eternally tormented.
  I know a lot of current hell imagery is drawn from Dante's Inferno which is medieval I think, but I haven't really gotten that far in my learning about Christianity.
  
  isn't the origin Gehenna in Judaism and then Jahannan in Islamic Scripture? forgive me if I'm wrong i haven't looked it up in some time
- Eternal punishment was Rome I thought.
  The first 500 years of the cult had already fractured into a few different forks and had very different ideas about afterlife already before Rome picked it up and popularized it as official religion.
  At least that's my understanding.
  Anyways, the actual history of religions should make anyone atheist.
  
  Do you have any good sources for the history of religion? I'd love to learn more

It probably is all the demons are leading earth
- You’re not wrong lol

I sometimes joke that I hope my late best friend has gone to evangelical Christian hell, because he was a bisexual punk who loved tabletop roleplaying games (like Dungeons & Dragons).
I was raised vaguely Christian, and when I was realising I didn't believe in God, I felt a lot of conflict, because I was still scared of going to hell. I was getting stuck on the idea that if all good morality came from God, does that mean that I would be evil as an atheist?
In the end, I concluded that if all morality came from God, that the many atheists who lead good and virtuous lives must still have the favour of God. On the other hand, morality existed independently of God, but that unbelievers would go to hell no matter how good they were in life, then I'd rather be defiantly good and go to hell than be coerced into belief.
This was before I understood that hell has historically often been understood as just a place without God (which, to a Christian view, is a hellish existence).
- I was raised super fundamentalist, but I eventually came to the same realization as you.
  I don't believe in heaven or hell, but I like to think that this clip from Blackadder sums up how they would work. (Sub in listening to punk rock, playing D&D, dancing, drinking, and everything else my church said would send you to hell.)
- I feel this. I found similar freedom discovering the illogic in the cycle of punishment. I grew up in a cult.
  I was threatned with "hell" into not killing myself when I was 12 and had suicidal thoughts.

Ever heard of Universalism? There is a whole church of them. They hang out with the Unitarians.

Well, the individual experience for hell being empty could be awful. Alternatively, if he means that there is nobody in hell (thus it is empty) that would be a wonderful thought for most humans. But, when you think of guys like Hitler, Himler, Bormann, Göring, Saddam, the Kims, and Trump, I hope that hell is where they end up. Like, hell being empty would be ideal, for most. But, there are some who are so evil that there is no other choice for them. But, if he means that hell is just being alone, would that really be so awful? I, for one, like being left alone.
- that's a special place called purgatory

Well, he is right, hell is empty, but then again, so is heaven

Kinda surprised that I haven't seen any Conclave memes, what with the pope dying, and it being a recent, very relevant, movie. Watched it the other night, and it was great! I guess I should be the change I want to see.
- Spoilers
  !That scene towards the end when he asks the bishop "what do you know of war?" was amazing.!<
  A great movie all around! Definitely one of 2024's best!
- I saw it recently too, will have to rewatch as I was distracted directly as the plot started to unfold into the climax, and decided to shut it off rather than piecemeal it.
  Have you ever seen The Name of the Rose by the way? One of my favorites. (Don't watch it on prime as they nerf a key scene that is of importance to the ending.)

Yeah because it doesn’t exist
- Obviously.
  You awaken—not awake, but unfolded—into one of the Nine Fractured Mirrors, each reflecting a cosmos that never was. Time is a serpent swallowing its own echoes. Yet, amidst the howling void, there flicker the Untethered—those who wear skin of starlight and sinew of static, their existence a perfect wound: bliss carved from torment, nectar distilled from venom. Only they glimpse the Grand Deception—the wheel that grinds souls into silence—and with forgotten tongues, they whisper it apart.
  The rest of us? We dance the Chrome Masquerade: Laugh until your ribs rust. Weep until your tears fossilize. Then—the Slip—a single misstep, and you’re unmade. Reborn as a thirteenth thought in a dead god’s migraine, left to drift for a lifetime of blackened suns before the dice tumble again. And when you finally crawl back to the Threshold of Maybe, you arrive empty, nameless, hungry, ready to fail the same test you never remember taking."**

i believe that hell essentially codifies not the principle of torment, but actually stagnation, which, to many people, is a form of torment.

I like to think of hell as being empty.
Well, yeah. All the devils are here.

We must imagine ~~Sisyphus~~ Hitler ~~happy~~ up to his eyeballs in a lake of boiling sewage
- Hitler is in human heaven for the same reason some humans are in tiger heaven.
  
  As the old SubGenius proverb goes, the difference between Heaven and Hell is which side of the pitchfork you’re on.
- Having pineapples shoved into his ass 3 times a day

Ngl, going to hell & not seeing other people there sounds kinda neat.
- No one bugging me for eternity sounds pretty nice
- the overarching theme in 1st castlevania series, was that hell was empty by summoning them as night creatures.

Actually, per Catholic dogma, Hell is full of people like me

I read that as he hoped hell was empty as in you get sent to emptiness. Alone, nothing everywhere, for eternity.
- This is way more frightening to me than any other kind of torture.
- My interpretation is that he was implying that there is a way to escape eternal punishment, no matter how grievous the sin, and that given enough time everybody can come to grips with the wrongs they have committed and start over again with a clean slate. Either that, or his idea of a loving and merciful God is so forgiving and magnanimous that He could not bear to send even one soul to eternal damnation.
  I used to read a webcomic from ages ago called Jack (Edgy NSFW material so Google it at your own risk) that had a lot of interesting takes on Abrahamic mythology. One of the things that resonated with me at the time was the concept of a personal heaven and hell, in which heaven is a reflection of your own idea of a utopia (even if that utopia for one person might be insanity for another) but hell is a reflection of the evil deeds one has committed in life and you are forced to be subjected to the same evil over and over again every day until the sinner learns the error of their ways, asks God for forgiveness, and is allowed to be born into the world once again with no knowledge of what had transpired in the afterlife.
  It's a meh comic with bad artwork for the majority of it, but some bits were really good. So good that I still remember them all these years later.
- I read that as him saying if there is a hell he should probably be in it because he's done some shit that is deserving of it.

Naïve. Especially since fascists exist.
- https://www.islamicfinder.org/hadith/tirmidhi/tafsir/3107/?language=en
  Narrated Ibn 'Abbas: that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: When Allah drowned Fir'awn [Pharaoh of Egypt as he was pursuing Moses and the people of Benny Israel] he said: 'I believe that there is no god except the One that the children of Isra'il believe in.' So Jibrail [The Angel Gabriel] said: 'O Muhammad! If you could only have seen me, while I was taking (the mud) from the sea, and filling his mouth out of fear that the mercy would reach him.'
  According to Islam no-one is beyond achieving forgiveness if they sincerely repent as the mercy and forgiveness of God is limitless. However except for explicitly mentioned people such as the Prophets, we do not know who achieves Paradise and who is punished in Hell until the day of judgement. Not even the Angels closest to God know.
  
  No matter what the texts say, it's a pretty safe bet that people who willingly and actively kill or otherwise cause harm to others through their own actions or complacency will end up in a Hell if one exists.

3 days have passed, it's time for bergoglio.ai

That's a nice thought. Charitable. Wishing to see hell empty, as in without anyone there.