Hell The Devils Domain
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00:00:00For centuries, great religions have preached of sin and punishment, of Satan, and hell.
00:00:20Stories of an evil Satan and hell's torment are handed down in Scripture.
00:00:25Jesus spoke far more about hell than he did about heaven.
00:00:28Where was the devil in the Garden of Eden? And, of course, the serpent.
00:00:32But concepts of a fiery underworld watched over by a great beast evolved.
00:00:37Most of what we believe about hell and the devil is not taken from the biblical tradition.
00:00:43Just what is hell? And who is Satan?
00:00:58In recent decades, numerous people have reported near-death experiences,
00:01:03a conscious perceptual experience which takes place during a near-death encounter.
00:01:09Most describe a peaceful journey, being guided through a tunnel bathed in bright light.
00:01:16But a select few have experienced something far more frightening.
00:01:22They claim they have journeyed into a world alive with torment.
00:01:26They believe they have been to hell and back.
00:01:30Anything that you've ever imagined or seen in a horror movie, it was worse than that.
00:01:36In 1985, 38-year-old Howard Storm was traveling in Europe
00:01:40when he suddenly collapsed with a perforated stomach.
00:01:44Rushed to the hospital, his condition quickly worsened.
00:01:48The doctors told me that my life expectancy was about five hours.
00:01:52That night, Howard lost consciousness.
00:01:57As he slipped toward death, Storm believes he left his body.
00:02:01Mysterious voices called out to him and he followed them into the hallway.
00:02:06There were a number of these people, male and female, all adults,
00:02:10and very difficult to see them.
00:02:17They immediately encircled me.
00:02:22They were getting closer and it was getting tighter
00:02:25as we went into this increasing darkness.
00:02:29And I'm like, I'm just completely terrified.
00:02:34So they began to push and pull at me.
00:02:38They were definitely trying to elicit pain.
00:02:42What they were doing at first was scratching and biting.
00:02:46And then it got much worse.
00:02:49And I had their mouths in me and on me.
00:02:58I was screaming, I was fighting.
00:03:05Although not a religious man, Storm says he called out prayers
00:03:09he had learned as a child in Sunday school.
00:03:12And the people who were around me couldn't bear the mention of God.
00:03:18And they became extremely violent and agitated.
00:03:23So I yelled out with everything that I had,
00:03:25Jesus, please save me.
00:03:28And he came to me and touched me and lifted me up
00:03:34and made me whole and filled me with his love and embraced me.
00:03:41Within minutes, Howard Storm was revived.
00:03:44And after surgery, he recovered.
00:03:46But his life was forever changed by what he believes he saw.
00:03:50This was like the portal of hell or the entrance to hell.
00:03:54People need to know that they are making their eternal destiny
00:03:59right now, today, at this moment.
00:04:05Death, the great equalizer.
00:04:08People across the globe and throughout time
00:04:10have believed that life endures beyond the grave.
00:04:13Modern religions offer differing concepts of an afterlife.
00:04:17But most are linked by two beliefs.
00:04:20A life lived in accordance with God leads to a positive afterlife, a heaven.
00:04:27A life lived in league with the devil leads to something negative, a hell.
00:04:32Reward and punishment in an afterlife is axiomatic to a belief in a good God.
00:04:38If you believe that God is good, then by definition you believe
00:04:43that there is reward and punishment after this life.
00:04:46But just how will evil be punished?
00:04:53Is hell a physical realm?
00:04:55A state of suffering?
00:04:58Or does it exist at all?
00:05:00We all feel guilt and therefore we all need torment.
00:05:03And in a sense, we all need hell.
00:05:05And if we don't believe in it literally, we find some way to create it here.
00:05:09The Bible indicates that hell is a place
00:05:12because it's a place where God sends the devil and his angels
00:05:16and it's a place where Jesus said that those who reject him by faith
00:05:20will one day live.
00:05:22Hell, of course, is a metaphor.
00:05:24Hell is a mythological concept.
00:05:27What it means is to live without any relationship to God,
00:05:30which is the great gift of human life.
00:05:33Hell may be symbolical in the sense that we are not roasted over fires
00:05:38for eternity or for two minutes, for that matter,
00:05:41but the symbolism is critical.
00:05:44Most Christian faiths hold that a mighty force both draws us towards evil
00:05:49and watches over hell.
00:05:51This power, this persona is most often identified as the devil.
00:05:56There's something that grasps human freedom
00:05:59and radically corrupts people's ability to choose good.
00:06:05And we call that the devil. We call that the evil one.
00:06:08Over the past 2,000 years,
00:06:11the devil has been depicted as God's great adversary,
00:06:14the one who can lead us to eternal damnation.
00:06:18God is trying to tell us this is what the story of man is all about,
00:06:22is the devil is coming to test us and tempt us
00:06:25and try to get us to curse God.
00:06:29God wants people to follow him by choice.
00:06:32He doesn't want robots.
00:06:34He wants us to choose to place our faith in him,
00:06:36to choose to live in obedience to him.
00:06:38And perhaps the devil gives that opportunity for us
00:06:41to make those very hard choices.
00:06:43When every other word, every other complex modern idea fails,
00:06:48we do fall back on the devil
00:06:50because it's the only way we can put into words
00:06:54our horror, our confusion, our uncertainty, our fear.
00:07:00Over time, the devil has been given many names.
00:07:04The beast, the deceiver, the father of all lies.
00:07:11And hell has been imagined in countless ways.
00:07:17Those perceptions began to take shape ages ago,
00:07:21in a time before Jesus walked the earth.
00:07:33The hell of fire and brimstone
00:07:35is but the most well-known vision of the netherworld.
00:07:39From Neanderthal man to the 21st century,
00:07:42from the deserts of Mesopotamia to the islands of Greece,
00:07:46humankind has created strikingly similar images
00:07:49of an unpleasant afterlife,
00:07:51portraits of our darkest imaginings.
00:07:56The ancient Egyptians were obsessed by the idea of immortality.
00:08:00They built elaborate tombs to protect the physical body.
00:08:04For any soul to reach the next life,
00:08:07it first had to conquer a gauntlet of terrors,
00:08:10lakes of flames, harsh deserts, ravenous crocodiles.
00:08:16The whole afterlife, according to the Egyptians,
00:08:18was an incredibly complex world that had to be navigated.
00:08:22When a person died, there were seven different gates
00:08:25that a person had to go through
00:08:26just to get to the entrance to the actual afterlife.
00:08:30The Egyptian Book of the Dead listed the secret spells
00:08:33and intricate rituals needed to navigate this supernatural maze.
00:08:38The Egyptians were the first to believe
00:08:40that souls would be judged after death.
00:08:43Those who traversed the underworld
00:08:45came before King Osiris for final judgment.
00:08:50The just were granted eternal life.
00:08:53The unworthy, savagely devoured by the hideous monster Amut,
00:08:58one of the first depictions of a hellmouth,
00:09:00a gruesome creature who devours the damned.
00:09:03One of the oldest and most pervasive images of hell
00:09:08is the hellmouth.
00:09:10A person doesn't so much go to hell
00:09:13as hell consumes souls.
00:09:16It's not something that they passively go to
00:09:18and are destined to enter,
00:09:20but something that comes up to claim them
00:09:22and take it into its bowels
00:09:24for untold horrors that would lie within.
00:09:29An equally grim fate awaited those
00:09:31who followed the 6th century B.C. prophet Zoroaster.
00:09:36The religion of Zoroastrianism dominated Europe
00:09:39and the Middle East for nearly 1,000 years.
00:09:42According to its myths,
00:09:44swift and sure judgment of the dead
00:09:46takes place on the razor-thin Shinva Bridge.
00:09:49And this bridge is hazardous.
00:09:51It's very thin.
00:09:53The good person survives the bridge,
00:09:56the walk across the bridge,
00:09:57because their body and their soul are light.
00:10:00The sinful person or the evil person
00:10:03doesn't because their body is heavy,
00:10:05so they tip over and they fall,
00:10:07they fall right into the pits of the fiery hell,
00:10:09into eternal judgment.
00:10:14Zoroastrianism would soon be dwarfed
00:10:17by the teachings of a new prophet.
00:10:19Eventually, the disciples of Christ,
00:10:22the apostle of love,
00:10:23would also help define the hell of eternal damnation.
00:10:37For many people,
00:10:38their concept of hell is based on one book.
00:10:44The Bible says that hell is a place
00:10:46where people who reject his gracious offer of salvation
00:10:49through faith in Jesus Christ will spend eternity.
00:10:52It's a place of eternal separation from God.
00:10:57Biblical conceptions of hell evolve
00:10:59over the course of the Bible.
00:11:02The Old Testament contains only fleeting
00:11:06and indirect references to hell.
00:11:08Sheol, the Hebrew abode of the dead,
00:11:11is sometimes compared to the gloomy perceptions
00:11:14of modern hell.
00:11:15But in reality, it is quite different.
00:11:18The common destination of both the righteous
00:11:22and the unrighteous dead,
00:11:23Sheol was synonymous with the grave
00:11:26and with separation from God.
00:11:29For Sheol cannot thank you.
00:11:31Death cannot praise you.
00:11:32Those who go down into the pit
00:11:34cannot hope for your faithfulness.
00:11:35The living, the living, they thank you,
00:11:38as I do this day.
00:11:39Isaiah chapter 38, verses 18 and 19.
00:11:42Sheol is a place where everybody went.
00:11:45It wasn't a matter of reward or punishment.
00:11:48Everybody went there, good or bad.
00:11:50It was just another way of describing
00:11:53what happens to you when you die.
00:11:59The word Sheol does not appear in the New Testament.
00:12:03Instead, the Bible makes reference to Hades.
00:12:06In Greek mythology, Hades is both the name
00:12:09for the ruler of the netherworld
00:12:11and his domain.
00:12:12And on this rock I will build my church,
00:12:15and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.
00:12:18Matthew chapter 16, verse 18.
00:12:21But scholars assign the same meaning
00:12:23to Sheol and Hades, the realm of the dead,
00:12:26not a place of torment.
00:12:30The Bible's first clear reference
00:12:32to a hell of punishment comes in the book of Daniel.
00:12:50But not until the New Testament
00:12:52does hell find a home in the Bible.
00:12:55Jesus' ministry turned human eyes
00:12:57away from the earthly
00:12:59and toward a transcendent relationship with God.
00:13:02In the Gospels, Christ proclaims
00:13:04a message of redemption,
00:13:06but also warns of sin's consequence.
00:13:25Jesus talked about hell
00:13:27more than he talked about heaven.
00:13:29And I think implied in there
00:13:31is an urgency to warn people
00:13:33that unless you do something about it,
00:13:35you will be going to hell.
00:13:42Jesus also gives his followers
00:13:44a visual depiction of what hell might be like.
00:13:50Just outside of Jerusalem was Gehenna.
00:13:53A noxious trash dump where refuse was burned.
00:13:56In the Gospels, Christ speaks of Gehenna
00:13:59as a metaphor for the fires that will not cease to burn.
00:14:06The imagery comes from this trash heap
00:14:09on the edge of Jerusalem
00:14:11where the refuse of Jerusalem was constantly burned.
00:14:14And that provided the kind of image
00:14:16that has come down through the Christian tradition
00:14:19of hell as a place of smoke and fire
00:14:21and eternal torment.
00:14:28It communicated a thought,
00:14:30the worst possible place, the most painful,
00:14:33a fire that never goes out.
00:14:35It's a terrible place.
00:14:37Although the Bible makes relatively few overt references to hell,
00:14:41its graphic nature is forever emblazoned in several passages.
00:14:45They will throw them into the fiery furnace
00:14:47where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
00:14:50Matthew 13, verse 42.
00:15:02But for all the torture described in biblical portraits of hell,
00:15:06many theologians hold that the ultimate agony
00:15:09described in the Bible comes from eternal separation from God.
00:15:20They will be punished with everlasting destruction
00:15:22and shut out from the presence of the Lord
00:15:24and from the majesty of his power.
00:15:262 Thessalonians, chapter 1, verses 8 and 9.
00:15:30Probably the most basic meaning of hell
00:15:35is separation from God.
00:15:37That really is what it's all about.
00:15:38That's privation.
00:15:40Absence from the presence of God forever.
00:15:45However, some who read scripture literally
00:15:48believe hell is a physical place,
00:15:51with the Bible offering clues to its location.
00:15:54The earth opened its mouth and swallowed them.
00:15:57They went down alive into the grave.
00:15:59The earth closed over them.
00:16:01Numbers, chapter 16, verses 32 and 33.
00:16:05Hell is located in the middle of the earth,
00:16:07the center of the earth.
00:16:08God created that place for the devil and his angels.
00:16:11Jesus tells us that.
00:16:12Biblical descriptions of hell's agony
00:16:14culminate in a brief notation in the book of Revelation,
00:16:17the apocalyptic story about the end of the world
00:16:21and final judgment.
00:16:22And the devil who deceived them
00:16:24was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur
00:16:26where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown.
00:16:29They will be tormented day and night, forever and ever.
00:16:33Revelation, chapter 20, verse 10.
00:16:35I think many of the descriptions of hell in scripture
00:16:39are allegorical.
00:16:40The Bible describes hell as a lake,
00:16:42and a lake is always changing, undulating,
00:16:45never the same, it's not stable.
00:16:47Hell is a place of enormous instability
00:16:49where you always feel that things are changing
00:16:52and nothing is the same.
00:17:01As biblical concepts of hell were defined,
00:17:04concepts defining codes of conduct
00:17:06that might earn a sentence of eternal damnation
00:17:09emerged in the early centuries.
00:17:11Perhaps none of Christ's followers
00:17:13did more to formulate notions about who goes to hell
00:17:17than the 4th century philosopher Augustine.
00:17:20St. Augustine felt that in order to appreciate
00:17:26the grace of being saved,
00:17:29you had to know that the majority of the people you knew
00:17:35were probably going to be damned.
00:17:38Augustine spent his early years in drunken debauchery.
00:17:41Despairing over his misspent youth,
00:17:43he yearned to find meaning in his life.
00:17:46In the Confessions, what St. Augustine says
00:17:48is that I reasoned as far as I could go
00:17:50and I still couldn't make the jump to religious belief.
00:17:53He's in a state of almost madness,
00:17:54tearing his hair out, running up and down,
00:17:56trying to overcome his lack of religious faith.
00:18:01Finally, while attending his mother on her deathbed,
00:18:04Augustine was convinced by her to convert to Christianity.
00:18:11His conversion was very dramatic for him.
00:18:15He felt that he had performed deeds
00:18:18which should normally have condemned him to hell
00:18:21for all eternity, and had distanced him from God.
00:18:26And for no reason that he could justify
00:18:29or ever explain in his life,
00:18:31God came to him with great love and God, grace,
00:18:35and Augustine was converted.
00:18:37Augustine's subsequent writings combined the zeal of the converted
00:18:41with a love of logical reasoning.
00:18:43He found comfort in devising strict codes
00:18:46to regulate salvation and damnation.
00:18:49He believed such things that unbaptized infants
00:18:53could not ascend to heaven,
00:18:55not because of anything they had done wrong,
00:18:57but because all human beings were born
00:18:59with the original sin from Adam.
00:19:01And until they were baptized, that sin could not be washed away.
00:19:05Augustine played a critical role in making sexual sins
00:19:09one of the most common signposts on the road to hell.
00:19:12Lust requires for all its consummation darkness and secrecy,
00:19:16not only when unlawful intercourse is desired,
00:19:19but even such fornication as the earthly city has legalized.
00:19:22St. Augustine, city of God.
00:19:24It was a bit like someone who'd been a chain smoker
00:19:27who suddenly gave it up and couldn't bear to be in a room with a cigarette again.
00:19:31St. Augustine had a lot of sex before he found Christianity,
00:19:35and then suddenly having found Christianity,
00:19:37turned his back on that and became very, very pessimistic about sexuality,
00:19:41very pessimistic about women.
00:19:43Augustine's dark message soon found a ready audience.
00:19:47During the first 1,000 years of Christianity,
00:19:50hell was rarely mentioned from the pulpit.
00:19:52But with the dark ages,
00:19:54holy men latched on to Augustine's teachings,
00:19:57sometimes to further their own agendas.
00:20:00Where you needed some kind of power,
00:20:03other than guns and rifles,
00:20:05to convince people to follow your way rather than someone else,
00:20:09then hell as a place became more and more real.
00:20:13In a time ripe with famine, plague and war,
00:20:17most people had no trouble envisioning an equally savage afterlife.
00:20:21Augustine's warnings of the terrors of hell
00:20:24helped to convert pagan masses who lived in the shadow of death.
00:20:28To know that you can wake up and in one week lose your entire family to the plague,
00:20:33and that half of Europe is lost to a plague over a period of four years,
00:20:38this tends to put a whole new perspective on the afterlife.
00:20:42As preachers would constantly tell their congregations,
00:20:45think on death, think on death often.
00:20:51Righteous in their cause,
00:20:53church leaders used the fear of hell to scare souls into pews.
00:20:58And they would go on and on and on about the tortures of it,
00:21:01the misery, the pain, the horrible smell, the unending fire,
00:21:05the flesh writhing in agony.
00:21:08Eventually what they found was that people were coming more
00:21:11and more to hear the spectacle about hell.
00:21:14It's like going to a good horror movie.
00:21:16You want to be grossed out, you want to be terrified.
00:21:18And the preachers realized that hell was becoming the attraction in itself.
00:21:24For Europeans of the 1500s,
00:21:27hellfire sermons were truth incarnate.
00:21:30We had this sense of hell and this sense of hell was very real
00:21:34because all people had was this life in this little town.
00:21:38And this little town only had a church.
00:21:40And that church was your gateway to salvation.
00:21:43And whatever was said in that church was true.
00:21:47The elites are not necessarily gulling the masses
00:21:51when they proselytize about heaven and hell.
00:21:53They're actually telling them what they understand to be the truth.
00:21:58But forceful sermons were not the only tool used
00:22:01to paint portraits of a fiery underworld.
00:22:04Church art and architecture vividly visualize the story of hell.
00:22:11What you can see with your eyes and you can hear through your ear
00:22:15when the sermons are being spoken to you,
00:22:17the hymns are being sung to you,
00:22:19or the scriptures being read to you,
00:22:21come together then in your heart and are emblazoned with you forever.
00:22:25Frescoes favored the abominable fancy,
00:22:28the saved up in heaven gazing down upon the horrors of the doomed.
00:22:34Many early Christian pictures show people sitting safely up in heaven
00:22:41looking down as if they were up in the upper balcony at a theater,
00:22:45looking down at sinners being tortured in hell
00:22:49and metaphorically at least rubbing their hands in glee over this.
00:22:53But visions of hell's torture were not complete
00:22:56without a picture of an evil angel to watch over the netherworld.
00:23:00Holy men and authors would elevate the host of hell to dazzling heights of power.
00:23:10For centuries, hell and Satan have been inextricably intertwined.
00:23:19According to the Christian tradition,
00:23:21the devil both watches over hell and entices us to join him there.
00:23:25The quickest path to hell is doing Satan's bidding here on earth.
00:23:30The devil's presence and the devil's temptation
00:23:33give me a choice to do right or to do wrong,
00:23:37a choice to give in to the temptation or to resist it and be obedient to God's word.
00:23:45The devil has many ancestors.
00:23:50Ancient faiths were guided by an array of spirits, angels, ghosts and goblins.
00:23:57Two deities foreshadowed later imagery of the devil,
00:24:00Seth, the Egyptian crimson god of the underworld,
00:24:04and Pan, the Greek mythological half-man, half-beast
00:24:08with cloven hooves who ruled sexual desire.
00:24:13Perceptions of a modern Satan began to be formed in Bible passages.
00:24:18The Old Testament devil was an enigmatic and minor figure,
00:24:22not an evil mastermind.
00:24:24But early Christians, zealous to spread the word about Christ as the Messiah,
00:24:29used Satan to their advantage.
00:24:31They warned of the devil's wickedness
00:24:33and sought him out in Scripture where he had not yet been found.
00:24:37What the writers of apocryphal literature did
00:24:39was they started poring over virtually every text in the Book of Genesis
00:24:42to try and find evidence of the devil there.
00:24:45In the Hebrew Bible, the snake in the Garden of Eden is simply a snake.
00:24:49That changed.
00:24:52They look at the Garden of Eden and they say,
00:24:54well, why did it go wrong for Adam and Eve?
00:24:56Where was the devil in the Garden of Eden?
00:24:58And, of course, the serpent.
00:25:05The overt biblical birth of Satan is described in the Book of Revelation.
00:25:10Lucifer, the light-bearer, is one of God's most beautiful and beatific angels.
00:25:16But his hubris drives Lucifer to challenge God.
00:25:20The Bible says that Lucifer decided in his heart he wanted to be like God.
00:25:25In fact, he wanted to be God and he wanted to ascend to the throne.
00:25:30Lucifer and his warrior angels engaged the army of God,
00:25:33led by the archangel Michael.
00:25:38The great dragon was hurled down.
00:25:40That ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan,
00:25:43who leads the whole world astray.
00:25:45He was hurled to the earth and his angels with him.
00:25:49There was a battle. There was a fight. There was an argument.
00:25:52There was a reckoning.
00:25:54And God said, you can't be up here anymore.
00:25:57I cannot use you as I'll use others, and banished him to earth.
00:26:01Lucifer is joined in exile by his legion of watcher angels,
00:26:05one-third of all the stars in God's heavenly court.
00:26:09God grants him dominion over hell,
00:26:12from where he schemes to avenge his fall from grace.
00:26:15He knows he can never be restored to his former greatness.
00:26:18He knows he can never hurt God.
00:26:20But it's like a human being.
00:26:22If you've got a big, strong, beefy neighbor,
00:26:24you might not want to take him on,
00:26:26but when he's not looking, you might kick his dog.
00:26:28When he goes after human souls,
00:26:30he's doing it to try to get even with God.
00:26:35The perception of Satan's ability to lure human souls
00:26:38was enhanced by human beings.
00:26:40In the 6th century, Pope Gregory the Great
00:26:44imbued the devil with sweeping powers
00:26:46by laying the seven deadly sins at his doorstep.
00:26:49If you look at the seven deadly sins,
00:26:51in many ways what Gregory was doing was rejecting the world.
00:26:54So everything that the world liked doing,
00:26:56not working or eating too much or enjoying themselves,
00:26:59anything worldly, he characterized as the work of the devil.
00:27:03So the seven deadly sins became a means
00:27:05by which the Christian church almost damned the world
00:27:08and set itself up against the world.
00:27:10So everything worldly was the work of the devil.
00:27:13Everything otherworldly was the work of God.
00:27:17As the devil's biography was developed,
00:27:19visual portraits of an evil beast
00:27:21were imagined in stone and glass in magnificent cathedrals.
00:27:25The imagery of the medieval cathedral
00:27:27with Satan with his horns and his tail
00:27:30and Satan tempting Eve as a snake
00:27:34wrapped around the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
00:27:37these are all medieval Christian notions.
00:27:39And all of that comes from imagery.
00:27:41By the 10th century, the beast had assumed monstrous form.
00:27:45He dominated religious art,
00:27:47appearing in a thousand grotesque and terrible guises,
00:27:51dressed in black, the color of dark, night and evil.
00:28:00The devil's color changed during a Renaissance reincarnation.
00:28:04If you are furthest away from God,
00:28:06then you are in the dark.
00:28:08You are not near the light.
00:28:10You are not near warmth.
00:28:12You are in eternal cold.
00:28:14Eternal cold, you are blue.
00:28:16So we begin to see the devil
00:28:18either represented as half human and half animal
00:28:21or fully animal form, but dark blue.
00:28:28Depictions of Satan began to take on characteristics
00:28:32of the Catholic church's rivals,
00:28:34with the stakes no less than eternal salvation.
00:28:37Anyone who opposed the church was tagged as a friend of Satan.
00:28:41Images of the devil merged with caricatures of Jews
00:28:45with long, hooked noses.
00:28:47In the stories of the Gospels,
00:28:49the Jews arrive to doubt the story of the empty tomb,
00:28:54and this is considered demonic.
00:28:56The Jews begin to be symbols
00:28:58for people who doubt the truth of Christianity,
00:29:01and that's why they get demonized.
00:29:03Plagues were blamed on those who traded with the Jews.
00:29:06In 1236, Pope Gregory IX condemned the Talmud,
00:29:10the Jewish holy text, as satanically inspired.
00:29:14Christians, puzzled by the Muslim habit of frequent bathing,
00:29:18dubbed Islamic bathhouses temples to the devil.
00:29:21So everybody is demonized.
00:29:23It's basically the idea that if you're not with us, you're against us,
00:29:26and if you're not in the Christian fold
00:29:28and doing what Christianity wants, you are the servant of the devil.
00:29:31The early church was instrumental
00:29:33in molding perceptions of both Satan and hell.
00:29:36But come the Renaissance,
00:29:38two poets would overcome their personal demons
00:29:41to create a new vision of hell,
00:29:43a vision that lives to this day.
00:29:55The hell of popular imagination has many authors.
00:29:59Most of what we believe about hell and the devil
00:30:02is not taken from the biblical tradition.
00:30:04The Bible doesn't say all that much about it.
00:30:06The details come from our poets, not from our prophets.
00:30:10Most prominent among literary works
00:30:13that helped shape our sense of hell is Dante's Inferno.
00:30:17I am the way into the city of woe.
00:30:20I am the way into eternal pain.
00:30:22I am the way to go among the lost.
00:30:25Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
00:30:28The Inferno, canto 3.
00:30:36Composed by Alighieri Dante in the early 1300s
00:30:40while in exile from his beloved hometown of Florence, Italy,
00:30:44the Inferno was inspired by turbulent events in the author's own life.
00:30:52During Dante's time,
00:30:54the Vatican coveted control over all of Tuscany.
00:30:57Dante, a devout Catholic,
00:30:59believed that the Church should share power with civil authorities.
00:31:04While in Rome, he was arrested on a series of bogus charges,
00:31:07including hostility against the Pope.
00:31:10The Church threatened his life, confiscated his property,
00:31:13and banished him from his native city, never to return.
00:31:19Dante responded by composing the Inferno.
00:31:22Midway upon the journey of our life,
00:31:25I found myself in a dark wilderness,
00:31:27for I had wandered from the straight and true.
00:31:30The Inferno, canto 1.
00:31:33It's a voyage of the soul. Dante is also a pilgrim.
00:31:36He is going through the entirety of the cosmos,
00:31:39which means that he's also going through the entirety of the soul.
00:31:42Dante's portrait of hell is far more detailed than biblical descriptions.
00:31:46He imagined nine circles of hell,
00:31:49each level designed to imprison souls guilty of specific sins.
00:31:53It started on the uppermost level of hell,
00:31:57and described the Inferno as nine descending realms,
00:32:00with the worst, most vile sinners at the very pit of hell,
00:32:04in the ninth realm, with Satan himself.
00:32:10Connecting punishment to the severity of sin,
00:32:13Dante graphically described the suffering of the damned.
00:32:16People stripped naked, and their faces torn with rage.
00:32:20They thumped each other with the head, the chest, the feet, the teeth,
00:32:25snapping to rip each other limb from limb.
00:32:28The Inferno, canto 7.
00:32:32It really hit people on a very different level
00:32:36than just another hellfire sermon that talked about how bad things were,
00:32:39because it equated it with what a person does
00:32:42is directly connected to how he will suffer in the afterlife.
00:32:46The fortune tellers were said to walk through eternity
00:32:49with their heads sewn on backwards for pretending to see the future,
00:32:52which could be known only to God.
00:32:54People who had given in to their passions,
00:32:57people who were adulterers, were swept along eternally by winds,
00:33:01because in life they had been swept by their passions.
00:33:03Every sin had a very specific punishment.
00:33:10I set the father and the son at war,
00:33:13because I severed two such persons joined.
00:33:16Severed, I carry now my brains, alas, from their stem in this trunk.
00:33:21Thus you may see the rule of retribution work in me.
00:33:25The Inferno, canto 28.
00:33:31One of the interesting things about the Inferno
00:33:34is that the thing that gets people sent to hell,
00:33:36the thing that's damnable and sinful about them,
00:33:38is the fact that they love, but they love the wrong things.
00:33:41Everyone is in hell because they love.
00:33:44If you love wealth or sex or political power
00:33:47or any of the other possible things that we could love,
00:33:50instead of loving God, those are damnable sins.
00:33:53For Dante, the one unforgivable act was betrayal of trust.
00:33:58The ninth and lowest level of hell
00:34:00is occupied by history's greatest traitors,
00:34:03engulfed not in flames, but in an arctic chill
00:34:06that distances them from God's light.
00:34:08If you were the great traitors, like Judas and Brutus and Cassius,
00:34:11you were going to spend eternity being chewed upon
00:34:15in the mouth of this three-headed beast
00:34:18who was immobile, blue and frozen
00:34:22in the deep, dark coldness of hell, separated from God.
00:34:28Dante placed several church fathers,
00:34:31including Pope Celestine V and Pope Boniface VIII
00:34:35in his lowest circle of hell.
00:34:37Are you standing there already, Boniface?
00:34:39The great priest, may he be dragged to hell.
00:34:43The Inferno, Cantos 19 and 27.
00:34:46Dante was exiled from his country, had many enemies,
00:34:50and you find them all in his hell.
00:34:53They're all there being punished with his artistic imagination,
00:34:57just as they deserve to be.
00:35:00The Inferno's impact was profound and immediate.
00:35:04It was read aloud to large assemblies of enthralled listeners.
00:35:08It was quickly translated into every European language.
00:35:12Italian artists discarded time-worn clichés
00:35:15and began painting Dante's hell.
00:35:18What Dante does, he manages to put into narrative
00:35:22a way of thinking about the sublime,
00:35:25a way of thinking about the divine,
00:35:27that all the language of hell is kind of shorthand caricature
00:35:30trying to talk about moral possibility,
00:35:33about what human life might be like.
00:35:36Dante had transcended simplistic views of hell
00:35:39with a grandly metaphorical vision.
00:35:42He transformed hell into an ongoing story
00:35:45of man's struggle to understand the world.
00:35:50Just as Dante forever expanded our notion of hell,
00:35:54English poet John Milton revolutionized the character of the devil.
00:35:59Milton elevated Satan to a champion of the dark side,
00:36:02an immensely powerful force for evil.
00:36:05He's a warlord, and all of the other mafiosi under him
00:36:09are paying tribute to him.
00:36:12His ego is enormous, his individuality is huge.
00:36:17During his college days in the 1620s,
00:36:20Milton dreamt of creating an epic poem
00:36:23on the scale of the Iliad or the Odyssey.
00:36:25But his youthful idealism crumbled
00:36:27under the sorrow of the deaths of his two wives,
00:36:30two children, and an illness that left him blind.
00:36:35Twenty years after losing his sight,
00:36:37Milton battled back to produce his masterpiece, Paradise Lost.
00:36:43The mind itself is its own place,
00:36:45and in itself can make a heaven of hell a hell of heaven.
00:36:49Paradise Lost.
00:36:52His insight is opened up and becomes sharpened
00:36:55by his lack of external sight,
00:36:57and his insight is not sight into the world around us,
00:37:00it's sight into his own soul, into his psyche.
00:37:03That's where he finds Satan, and that's where he finds God.
00:37:10Paradise Lost retells the story of Lucifer's fall from heaven.
00:37:14In this version, Satan is a romantic hero brought low by his pride.
00:37:21The story opens with a dramatic landscape of hell.
00:37:24The rebel angels are defeated and demoralized
00:37:27until Lucifer rouses them.
00:37:30Here we may reign secure, and in my choice.
00:37:33To reign is worth ambition, though in hell.
00:37:36Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
00:37:39Paradise Lost.
00:37:42Milton kept the idea of him as being an immensely potent,
00:37:46charismatic, outsized figure.
00:37:49The sort of leader that you can understand
00:37:52would bring down a third of the stars from the sky,
00:37:55a third of the angels in heaven followed him down there,
00:37:59because he was their leader.
00:38:02A magnificent leader,
00:38:04Milton Satan cannot bring himself to atone to God
00:38:07for leading an insurrection.
00:38:10Satan's loss is somehow powerfully human
00:38:14in a way that God can't be.
00:38:16It's very hard to identify with God in his perfection,
00:38:19but we all know what it's like to have a certain satanic impulse in us.
00:38:22All of us know what it's like to transgress.
00:38:24All of us know what it's like to be stubborn
00:38:26and to refuse to admit that we were wrong.
00:38:29The demons of self-justification
00:38:31are things that almost everyone can identify with.
00:38:35Milton's vision embellished the notion of a powerful Satan
00:38:38in an adversarial role.
00:38:40Throughout time, the devil would engage in epic battles,
00:38:44clashes against both God and man.
00:38:50From the beginning of time,
00:38:52man and God have battled the evil one.
00:38:55One of the earliest biblical examples of the devil
00:38:58standing up to God and testing human faith
00:39:01is found in the book of Job.
00:39:03The book of Job recognizes that there are other forces,
00:39:08other powers that somehow are under God's control,
00:39:13but God is not in control.
00:39:16Satan is under God's control,
00:39:18but God is not the cause of evil,
00:39:21even though he's master of the universe.
00:39:24So you have God who's in control of everything,
00:39:27yet not the cause of evil.
00:39:29Satan who's the tempter who causes that evil to happen.
00:39:34In scripture, God boasts to Satan
00:39:37of his faithful servant Job's righteousness.
00:39:41Satan counters by charging that Job reveres God
00:39:45only because wealth and prosperity
00:39:47have been bestowed upon him.
00:39:49In the book of Job, Satan is a member of the heavenly court
00:39:53who tests human beings.
00:39:55Satan challenges God by stating that if afflicted,
00:39:58Job will denounce the Almighty.
00:40:11Satan is saying that man is only good
00:40:13because he expects a reward,
00:40:15and God says, no, that isn't true.
00:40:17So the devil says, well, let's put them to the test.
00:40:19Satan makes a wager with God.
00:40:21Now, this is profoundly diabolical.
00:40:23I mean, what could be more futile than betting against God?
00:40:26What are your chances of winning? Zero.
00:40:28So why would anyone take such a bet?
00:40:30Only to do evil for evil's sake.
00:40:33God permits Satan to visit Job
00:40:35with a series of shattering catastrophes.
00:40:38The only restriction is that he not physically harm Job.
00:40:43In one day, Job loses all his material possessions.
00:40:47Satan also robs Job of his family.
00:41:01Your sons and daughters were feasting and drinking
00:41:04when suddenly a mighty wind swept in from the desert
00:41:07and struck the four corners of the house.
00:41:09It collapsed on them, and they are dead.
00:41:16Though Job is deeply grieved, he does not curse God.
00:41:20But Satan does not back down.
00:41:23He claims Job will falter if he can inflict harsher treatment.
00:41:27God agrees to the test,
00:41:29with the exception that Job's life be spared.
00:41:32Satan smites Job with boils from head to toe.
00:41:36Finally, Job assails God for his misfortunes.
00:41:54In the end, Job repents and pledges full allegiance to God.
00:41:58Satan goes down to the earth and removes these good things from Job,
00:42:02takes away his family, takes away his property,
00:42:04takes away his health, and still Job does not blaspheme.
00:42:10Man has stayed true to the Almighty,
00:42:13but Satan has exposed a fissure that he will forever seek to exploit.
00:42:19There are many lessons to be learned from the book of Job,
00:42:22and one of the lessons is that Satan cannot touch my life
00:42:26except he has God's permission.
00:42:28So when bad things come into my life
00:42:30and perhaps Satan has orchestrated some of them,
00:42:33I know that my Heavenly Father has shielded me and protected me,
00:42:36and if he lifts his hand of protection and allows Satan to attack,
00:42:39it's going to be for my own good and there's a better ultimate purpose.
00:42:45While Satan is allowed by God to bring tragedy upon Job,
00:42:49in the book of Matthew, the devil tests the Son of God.
00:43:04While Jesus fasts in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights,
00:43:09Satan offers Him three temptations,
00:43:12including the most alluring one of all, power.
00:43:19The devil took Him to a very high mountain
00:43:22and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.
00:43:25All this I will give you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me.
00:43:29Matthew 4, verses 8 and 9.
00:43:32We are tempted not with the worst of sins, but with the noblest.
00:43:38We're tempted to take things into our own hands rather than to trust God.
00:43:44Jesus, in that time of spiritual isolation, of testing,
00:43:48is tempted to take things into His own hands,
00:43:52is tempted to use His power to control rather than to serve,
00:43:57to create an empire rather than to be God's Son.
00:44:02Jesus refused to take any shortcut.
00:44:05He refused to get the kingdoms of this world,
00:44:08which Satan offered Him as the God of this world,
00:44:11He refused any shortcut to the cross.
00:44:13He had to die.
00:44:19After Jesus' death, one Christian text suggests that He descends into hell.
00:44:26The Apostles' Creed, written sometime between the 2nd and 9th centuries,
00:44:30is the most popular creed used in worship by Western Christians.
00:44:35He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
00:44:40He descended into hell. On the third day, He rose again.
00:44:49Most scholars interpret the passage to mean that Jesus descends
00:44:53not to battle Satan or deliver the damned,
00:44:56but rather that He journeys to Sheol in order to free the just souls
00:45:00who had gone to the realm of the dead.
00:45:02After His death on the cross, Jesus, in a spiritual sense,
00:45:06went to Sheol, to these Old Testament saints,
00:45:09to announce to them that the ultimate sacrifice had been made,
00:45:13their sins were forgiven, that heaven was open for them.
00:45:16Over time, Catholic oral tradition expanded the story
00:45:20into the so-called harrowing of hell.
00:45:22One reason the harrowing of hell becomes so important
00:45:25is that Christianity wants to save the Hebrew forefathers.
00:45:30It wants to save Abraham and Isaac especially.
00:45:33It shows Jesus in a role that is very different
00:45:36from anything we actually see in the Bible.
00:45:39We see Him not as being a preacher or being crucified in a sort of passive role.
00:45:45We see Him really and truly as Jesus Christ's superstar.
00:45:49As Jesus coming down, rescuing people,
00:45:52a very virile, strong image of Jesus.
00:45:57A few biblical passages hint at this story, but none directly supports it.
00:46:02Hence, many Christian denominations have removed the phrase
00:46:05descended into hell from the Creed.
00:46:10At no time in the harrowing of hell, or in any biblical story,
00:46:14is Satan able to control Jesus or God.
00:46:19But can he invade a human being?
00:46:22You know the devil has his claws in you.
00:46:25I came here for that sole purpose,
00:46:27to be delivered from all these evil spirits that were inside of me.
00:46:32And if possessed?
00:46:34Come out of her!
00:46:35How does one recover?
00:46:37Satan! Go now!
00:46:41In 1973, the horror movie The Exorcist shocked audiences
00:46:46with its vivid portrayal of satanic possession and exorcism.
00:46:54But notions of demons infiltrating the human body date back throughout time.
00:47:00Some believe concepts of possession originated in prehistoric shamanistic beliefs.
00:47:06Those believed to be shamans drove evil spirits
00:47:09from the bodies of victims of witchcraft.
00:47:12By the 1500s, church leaders, authors, and artists had popularized Satan.
00:47:21Sermons, paintings, books, and plays all confirmed that the devil was everywhere.
00:47:29Leering from the church door,
00:47:31launching wars,
00:47:33lurking in every man's bed.
00:47:37Even Martin Luther, who rejected much of Catholic dogma,
00:47:40believed that demons invaded his body.
00:47:43Martin Luther was the most devil-obsessed man in history.
00:47:46And Martin Luther, it appears, suffered from very bad constipation for most of his life.
00:47:50And he believed that was the work of the devil.
00:47:52The devil was there in his bowels.
00:47:54Luther lived in an age when the demons were everywhere.
00:47:57From 1500 to the early 1700s, witch hunts raged across Europe.
00:48:02Neighbor was set against neighbor, husband against wife,
00:48:06as accusations of lust, envy, desperate love,
00:48:10and frustrated desire filled kangaroo courts.
00:48:14Witches were considered to be evil spirits.
00:48:17But the devil was not.
00:48:19The devil was not evil.
00:48:21The devil was not evil.
00:48:24During the witch hunts, you had a terrible explosion of guilt.
00:48:27People cannot bear to feel too guilty.
00:48:29It torments them.
00:48:30Finally, they can't punish themselves enough.
00:48:33And they have to project that rage on other people, and punish it in others.
00:48:39During the Inquisition, 100,000 women were burned at the stake as witches.
00:48:44The number of women killed in the Inquisition increased.
00:48:48During the Inquisition, 100,000 women were burned at the stake as witches.
00:48:53The great deceiver, the father of all lies,
00:48:56was thought to delight in corrupting the innocent.
00:48:59The more innocent you looked, the more often you went to church,
00:49:02the holier you seemed, well, the more likely it might be
00:49:05that you are an agent of Satan, because who would suspect you?
00:49:08You seem so innocent.
00:49:10You seem like someone who would never do this.
00:49:12You are the perfect tool for Satan to use.
00:49:16Soon, new tools were adopted in the never-ending war with Satan.
00:49:23In 1468, Pope Paul II decreed that torture was acceptable
00:49:28in cases of suspected witchcraft.
00:49:31Two years later came the Malleus Maleficarum,
00:49:35one of the most popular books of the age
00:49:37and the unofficial textbook of the Inquisition.
00:49:40It emphasized that witches were in league with the devil
00:49:44and offered hints on identifying the guilty.
00:49:47So if they had stones sewn into their garments
00:49:50and they were thrown into a lake or a pool and they drowned,
00:49:53the understanding was not that the stones had held them down,
00:49:56but their evil deeds had held them down
00:49:58and it was a sign that they were truly witches.
00:50:00Prior to the modern world, politics and religion are not separate.
00:50:03They're the same thing.
00:50:05If there's a disorder in society, it has a religious dimension.
00:50:08They honestly and seriously believe that when something peculiar occurs
00:50:12and it has an adverse impact on society,
00:50:14that somewhere along the line there is some diabolical aspect to this.
00:50:18It's a way of personifying the evil that they experience in the world.
00:50:22When the Puritans journeyed to the New World, they brought old fears.
00:50:27Early Protestantism was very, very devil-obsessed.
00:50:31It was also very anti-sex.
00:50:33So when you get to groups like the Puritans,
00:50:35who went over to America and settled in New England,
00:50:38they brought that baggage with them.
00:50:40They were devil-fearers. They saw the devil all around them.
00:50:44One of the most effective at instilling the fear of the devil in his followers
00:50:48was Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards.
00:50:51His commanding sermon, Sinners of an Angry God,
00:50:55demands all be righteous or face the horrors of hell.
00:50:59There is no want of power in God to cast wicked men into hell at any moment.
00:51:04They deserve to be cast into hell so that divine justice never stands in the way.
00:51:09Justice calls aloud for infinite punishment of their sins.
00:51:13Sinners of an Angry God, Jonathan Edwards.
00:51:18When Jonathan Edwards was preaching Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,
00:51:22why would they go for three days in the snow to listen to this man preach
00:51:26when what he had was, in effect, their eventual damnation?
00:51:31People like fear.
00:51:33We place ourselves in fearful situations.
00:51:36Fear and terror are primary human emotions.
00:51:40Consumed by fear, the Puritans generated the Salem Witch Scare of 1692.
00:51:46Once again, there was no defense against a charge of collaborating with the evil one.
00:51:51The people doing the questioning in witchcraft interrogations
00:51:55often worked from a prepared set of questions.
00:51:58They knew what the devil did.
00:52:00The Salem Scare was small by European standards.
00:52:04Just a score of women tried, condemned, and executed over a single year.
00:52:10The devil seemed to take a vacation for a time.
00:52:14For nearly 300 years after Salem,
00:52:17legal cases involving the devil were rarely seen in American courts.
00:52:23But suddenly, with the satanic ritual craze of the 1980s and 90s, he was back.
00:52:29Hundreds of parents and daycare workers in Britain and the United States
00:52:33were accused of abusing thousands of children in bizarre witches' sabbaths.
00:52:38When supposed victims failed to support allegations, they were said to be in denial.
00:52:43There was a theory put forth that, essentially, the worse the abuse,
00:52:49the harder the children would struggle to deny it.
00:52:51So, in a sense, the less information you got from the child,
00:52:54the more evidence it was that they'd been abused.
00:52:57But children were not the only alleged victims.
00:53:00Many of the charges were thought to be the result of Recovered Memory Syndrome.
00:53:06If we dig too deeply into our past, and we say to ourselves,
00:53:09as in the Recovered Memory Therapy,
00:53:11that all the monsters and all the dreams and all the ghosts we saw as children were actually real,
00:53:17then the demons come out and haunt us.
00:53:20Some therapists drugged and hypnotized adult patients,
00:53:24urging them to probe their memories for signs of childhood abuse at the hands of satanic cults.
00:53:30The media fanned the flames by inflating cult numbers.
00:53:34Hosting a television special on the phenomenon in 1987,
00:53:38Geraldo Rivera estimated that there are one million practicing satanists in the United States today.
00:53:46But after exhaustive investigations into hundreds of cases,
00:53:50the FBI found little evidence of ritual satanic abuse.
00:53:54No bodies, no blood, no bones, no signs of ceremonial sites.
00:54:02While widespread satanic abuse has been discredited,
00:54:06there are groups that firmly believe in demonic possession and the power of exorcism.
00:54:13Begone Satan, inventor and master of all deceit!
00:54:18It's really a prayer for the healing and the liberation of this person
00:54:23from some kind of evil force, personal or impersonal,
00:54:28that seems to have a hold of the person.
00:54:31The Catholic rite of exorcism is rooted in New Testament accounts of Jesus casting out demons.
00:54:37In the Middle Ages, the practice became more popular.
00:54:41But Catholic exorcism has never been commonplace.
00:54:45In 1999, the Vatican announced a revised rite of exorcism,
00:54:49the first change in the rite since 1614.
00:54:53In the name of Christ, be gone!
00:54:57Still, the new rites of exorcism are almost identical to the old.
00:55:01The primary change is an emphasis on using exorcism only as a last resort,
00:55:06making exhaustive efforts to rule out physical, psychological,
00:55:10and emotional behaviors that might be confused with possession.
00:55:15Exorcisms are a rare event.
00:55:21The 1973 film The Exorcist is based on the Catholic rite of exorcism.
00:55:26The 1973 film The Exorcist is based on the Catholic rite of exorcism
00:55:32and is a fairly reliable guide to what church officials look for in possession.
00:55:39In each case, the exorcist must find four types of behavior.
00:55:44A subject who exhibits a superhuman strength,
00:55:47who shows a fierce reaction to holy things,
00:55:51who displays hidden knowledge,
00:55:53and who speaks in languages he or she would not normally know.
00:56:01As described in the Catholic rite,
00:56:03exorcisms begin with the sign of the cross and a sprinkling of holy water.
00:56:08A selection of prayers, litanies, and gospels are read aloud.
00:56:13Straighten her will. Let vanish from her soul the temptings of the mighty adversary.
00:56:20After these rites are complete,
00:56:22the exorcist places the end of his stole on the neck of the possessed,
00:56:26reveals a crucifix, and traces the sign of the cross upon the forehead.
00:56:32If deemed necessary, the exorcist then commands the devil to leave the possessed person.
00:56:38We command you to leave in the name of God.
00:56:42The ceremony concludes with a prayer and blessing.
00:56:45The entire rite can be repeated.
00:56:50Catholicism is not the only Christian faith to practice a form of exorcism.
00:57:00I rebuke you, Satan, now, and leave him now.
00:57:05Go from his soul and from his mind in Jesus' name.
00:57:11Each week, Pastor Tom Brown, a charismatic evangelical Christian,
00:57:15delivers dozens of souls from Satan's grip at the Word of Christ Church in El Paso, Texas.
00:57:21Leave her now in Jesus' name. In Jesus' name. There you go. There you go.
00:57:27We don't really use the term exorcism.
00:57:30We prefer the term deliverance or casting out demons.
00:57:33We don't use the word possessed because possessed implies a total control.
00:57:38What we believe is that demons can influence us.
00:57:42Pastor Brown traces the practice of casting out demons back to Jesus.
00:57:47If you read the first account in the Gospel of Mark of an exorcism,
00:57:51is when Jesus is in a synagogue, a demonized person,
00:57:54all of a sudden lifts up his voice and says,
00:57:57Aha! We know who you are, the Holy Son of God.
00:58:01Have you come to torture us before our time?
00:58:03And so this man is screaming, but it's not the man, it's the demon.
00:58:07And then Jesus tells the demon to shut up and come out, and the man is set free.
00:58:11We believe there are millions, perhaps even billions,
00:58:15of fallen angels that are working underneath Satan's control.
00:58:18So with so many of them, we do believe we have to be on guard.
00:58:23I said let her go now!
00:58:26Satan doesn't want anybody on this earth to be happy.
00:58:30She's done wrong. She doesn't deserve this.
00:58:33You have no legal right to be in her.
00:58:36He wants everybody to be unhappy,
00:58:40and he wants everybody to be with him in hell.
00:58:44You let my sister go now?
00:58:47Come out of her!
00:58:49Because he is very real.
00:58:52He is very, very real.
00:58:54You can't see him, but he is real.
00:58:58Once and for all, come out in Jesus' name.
00:59:06Hallelujah!
00:59:08I heard voices, evil voices,
00:59:12telling me to do things, to do evil things to my family,
00:59:18and I was trying to fight that.
00:59:21Nazarene! He is mine!
00:59:25I believe when people are shaking and talking in voices
00:59:28that the demons are reacting.
00:59:31The demons are using their vocal cords,
00:59:33and they're screaming out things.
00:59:35I did feel them physically inside of me to a point
00:59:38that the demon almost made me commit suicide
00:59:41just maybe two or three days ago.
00:59:43That demon told me get a butcher knife
00:59:46and stick it in your stomach.
00:59:48There it is, there it is, there it is, in Jesus' name.
00:59:52Oh, Jesus, thank you.
00:59:56I felt alleviated. I felt illuminated.
01:00:00And I felt free from all these evil spirits
01:00:05that were inside of me.
01:00:07Sing it!
01:00:12When it's time for Jesus to come back,
01:00:15he will decide.
01:00:17You are with me, and the others that are not
01:00:19will be cast in the lake of fire.
01:00:25For many Christians, the existence of Satan
01:00:28and some form of hell is self-evident.
01:00:32But there are also other visions of hell.
01:00:36We believe that only a few people
01:00:39are going to receive God's condemnation
01:00:42and God's wrath.
01:00:45For centuries, followers of the world's great religions
01:00:49have grappled with fundamental concepts
01:00:51of heaven and hell.
01:00:53If you look at all the images of the afterlife
01:00:57and you treat all of them with respect,
01:00:59you come to the notion that human beings
01:01:01always believe in an afterlife.
01:01:03So what could it mean?
01:01:05It could mean that there is no God.
01:01:07It could mean that there is no God.
01:01:09It could mean that there is no God.
01:01:11People always believe in an afterlife.
01:01:13So what could it mean?
01:01:15I think people look into the afterlife
01:01:17as if it's a mirror,
01:01:19and there they see what's important about themselves.
01:01:24Christianity, Islam, and Judaism
01:01:26have different views on the afterlife.
01:01:30Islam means surrender to Allah's will
01:01:33and contains no figure with the influence
01:01:35of Christianity's devil.
01:01:38However, Christianity and Islam
01:01:40do both believe in the existence of hell.
01:01:47The Quran tells us that hell
01:01:49is a physical and literal place,
01:01:52an abode for the sinners.
01:01:55Hell is an essential part of a human life,
01:01:59and without hell,
01:02:02this life will be in disarray and disorder.
01:02:06This is why God created the paradise and hell
01:02:10for us to be disciplined,
01:02:12for us to follow the truth.
01:02:17And when it is said unto him,
01:02:19Be careful of thy duty to Allah,
01:02:21pride taketh him to sin,
01:02:23hell will settle his account,
01:02:25an evil resting place.
01:02:31Those condemned to the hell of Islam
01:02:33are met in a frightening manner.
01:02:35We read in some of the Quranic passages
01:02:38that when the sinners are being driven towards the hell,
01:02:42it would welcome them with a huge roaring voice.
01:02:47They're going to hear the roaring of the fire,
01:02:51and the fire is deep, narrow, tight.
01:02:56After arriving in Islam's hell,
01:02:58the pain is fierce.
01:03:02Low, hell lurketh in ambush,
01:03:04a home for the rebellious.
01:03:06They will abide therein for ages.
01:03:08Therein they taste neither coolness nor any drink,
01:03:11save boiling water and paralyzing cold.
01:03:20The Quran continues to mention
01:03:23how people are going to be tortured
01:03:27and receive chastisement there.
01:03:30Their skins will burn,
01:03:33but God would renew their skins
01:03:37so they can taste the punishment of the fire.
01:03:41The torture is not one time or twice,
01:03:44it's innumerous, it's continuing.
01:03:46Although relentless in its torture,
01:03:48the hell of Islam is not permanent.
01:03:51Punishment may take days, weeks, or years.
01:03:54However, all but the most evil
01:03:56will eventually find their way to paradise.
01:03:59And the Quran implies that a majority of souls
01:04:02will avoid hell entirely.
01:04:04We believe that only a few people
01:04:08are going to receive God's condemnation
01:04:12and God's wrath,
01:04:15and therefore few of the people are thrown into the fire.
01:04:19He has to be, in his character,
01:04:21he has to be angry and wrathful.
01:04:24But this is only temporary.
01:04:26We always say that his mercy
01:04:30overcomes his wrath.
01:04:32And he uses his mercy more than he uses his wrath.
01:04:38But the wrath is needed for people to serve him.
01:04:45But not all faiths embrace belief in a physical hell.
01:04:49The Hebrew Bible does not emphasize the afterlife.
01:04:53It's not unusual today to find conservative and reformed Jews
01:04:57all over the world saying that Jews don't believe in an afterlife.
01:05:00They believe that the good that one does lives after one,
01:05:03one is remembered by one's family,
01:05:05that one should do good deeds
01:05:07and attest to the memory of one's forefathers,
01:05:10but there's no literal afterlife.
01:05:12However, according to one of the 13 principles,
01:05:16a code of ethics penned by Rabbi Maimonides in the 12th century
01:05:20and still sung aloud today at synagogues,
01:05:23reward and punishment exist after death.
01:05:27Maimonides set forth 13 principles of the Jewish faith.
01:05:31One of them is that God judges people
01:05:34and gives to the bad according to his badness
01:05:37and to the good according to his goodness.
01:05:39Literal hell is not a big issue in Jewish life,
01:05:43but it doesn't matter.
01:05:45What matters is, does the truly evil person get his just desserts?
01:05:50And the Jewish belief is emphatically yes.
01:05:57Even Orthodox Jews, some who do embrace an afterlife,
01:06:01find it improper to appeal to God
01:06:03for a better station in the next life.
01:06:06The Mourner's Kaddish,
01:06:08the prayer recited by those grieving for lost loved ones,
01:06:11does not mention the deceased or ask God to look over them.
01:06:16Rather, it reaffirms the survivor's faith in the Almighty.
01:06:22The Buddhist conception of an afterlife
01:06:24differs considerably from many creator-based religions.
01:06:28The afterlife is not a place, but a state of existence.
01:06:33Hell is a realm where the dead are reborn into anxiety and distress.
01:06:38He sees living beings seared and consumed by birth,
01:06:42old age, sickness, and death.
01:06:45Care and suffering sees them undergo many kinds of pain
01:06:48because of their greed, attachment, and striving.
01:06:52They undergo numerous pains in their present existence,
01:06:55and later they undergo the pain of being reborn in hell
01:06:58as beasts or hungry spirits.
01:07:07The Wheel of Life offers a visual depiction
01:07:10of the many Buddhist states of being and realms of life.
01:07:14The second circle, half white, half black, represents the afterlife.
01:07:18Those who take the path of light are led to positive rebirths.
01:07:22Those who follow the path of darkness experience negative rebirths,
01:07:27the hells of Buddhism.
01:07:33There is no divine judge to condemn one to hell.
01:07:37Rather, one's own evil karma gives rise to rebirth in this realm.
01:07:42The result of a human soul either ascending or descending
01:07:46is no different than if a person ate spoiled food and became sick.
01:07:50When you become sick on the food, it's not because someone's punishing you.
01:07:54That's just the natural result. That's how the body works.
01:07:57That's how human nature is.
01:07:59They believed in the afterlife the same thing.
01:08:01A soul would either ascend because it was light and beautiful
01:08:04or it would descend under the weight of its own evil.
01:08:09In Chinese Buddhism, there are multiple realms of hell.
01:08:17In these hells, living beings suffer incalculable and indescribable pain.
01:08:22Gnawed by hungry jackals, ravens, black dogs, speckled vultures and crows,
01:08:28the sufferers groan.
01:08:30Such a state is experienced by the man of unwholesome deeds.
01:08:33It is a state of absolute suffering.
01:08:36Buddhism, Sutta Nipata, verses 672 through 676.
01:08:47But as in Islam, the suffering is not eternal.
01:08:51The living beings suffer the pain of hell
01:08:53until the unwholesome karma they have generated in life is exhausted.
01:09:11When their bad karma is exhausted,
01:09:13the occupants of hell are reborn in more fortunate realms of existence.
01:09:23For all their differences,
01:09:25the dominant religions of the world generally agree on a code of human conduct.
01:09:30But over time, rebels and dissenters have challenged traditional notions of hell and Satan
01:09:36and adopted the devil as one of their own.
01:09:44The Devil's Coattails
01:09:52Rebels of all stripes have long latched on to the devil's coattails
01:09:56to express disdain for conventional authority.
01:09:59Celebrating the devil is a startling way to oppose all that society holds sacred,
01:10:05a fact that some in rock and roll have exploited.
01:10:08What better way to define itself as being rebellious in a Christian society
01:10:12than to start glorifying hellacious imagery
01:10:15and having bands who took on the persona of demons and devils
01:10:19and who sort of laughed at the idea that hell is a bad place.
01:10:22Hell is a place where the partiers go.
01:10:24It's the place of scantily clad women,
01:10:26where the alcohol never stops flowing,
01:10:28and the parties go on forever.
01:10:34Throughout history, hell and the devil have served as symbols for the disaffected.
01:10:42America was born in rebellion,
01:10:45and a few of its greatest icons made alliances with the host of hell.
01:10:53In the late 1700s, a group of Englishmen formed the first Hellfire Club,
01:10:58a fraternity dedicated to drinking, sex, and at times,
01:11:02ridiculing Christianity and mocking its sacred rituals.
01:11:07Members met at ruined monasteries to revel in black masses and drunken orgies.
01:11:13An occasional participant was the American ambassador to Great Britain,
01:11:17Benjamin Franklin.
01:11:20A century later, Mark Twain displayed his iconoclasm by celebrating the underworld.
01:11:26But I recall Mark Twain's apt quip,
01:11:28heaven for climate and hell for company,
01:11:32that if you want to meet really interesting people,
01:11:34you don't go to heaven, you go to Dante's hell.
01:11:37Twain's essay, Letters from the Earth,
01:11:39includes fictional missives penned by the devil
01:11:42that expose the egocentric aspect of human nature.
01:11:47He thinks he's the creator's pet.
01:11:49He believes that the creator is proud of him.
01:11:51He even believes the creator loves him,
01:11:53has a passion for him,
01:11:55sits up nights to admire him,
01:11:57yes, and watches over him to keep him out of trouble.
01:12:01Ain't it a quaint idea?
01:12:03Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth.
01:12:09Writing in the same age as Twain,
01:12:11British romantic poets embraced the devil as a powerful way of rejecting society.
01:12:17William Blake said a true poet is of the devil's party
01:12:21and saw the greatest sin as ignoring the impulses of one's own heart.
01:12:26As William Blake wrote in Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
01:12:30We need both the heavenly and the hellish aspects of the world
01:12:34and aspects of the soul to have a full human life.
01:12:37Now, this is deeply anti-Christian.
01:12:39This is deeply anti-religious.
01:12:41What the romantics do is turn art into a kind of substitute for religion.
01:12:46For Blake, hell was a realm of spectators,
01:12:49souls spiritually dead through their lack of creativity.
01:12:54Lo, a shadow of horror is risen in eternity.
01:12:57Unknown, unprolific, self-closed, all-repelling.
01:13:01What demon hath formed this abominable void,
01:13:04this soul-shattering vacuum?
01:13:06William Blake, Book of Urizen.
01:13:14By the 20th century, even many churches had de-emphasized the horrors of hell.
01:13:20The ruler of hell, often absent from the pulpit,
01:13:23found a second career in popular culture.
01:13:27Demonically themed novels and movies drew huge followings.
01:13:33For many children who came of age in the 1950s,
01:13:36one of their first reading experiences came from comic books set in a hellish underworld.
01:13:42Horror comics like Haunt of Fear and Tales from the Crypt
01:13:46grew so popular that Congress investigated the phenomenon.
01:13:50There was a very real fear that children were spending too much time
01:13:53with these undead, otherworldly creatures
01:13:55and that it was poisoning this upcoming generation.
01:13:58There was a very famous German doctor, Werthen,
01:14:02who said reading these comic books is absolutely destructive to the psyche.
01:14:07This is going to produce a generation of emotionally ruptured people
01:14:11who are incapable of having decent relationships and of functioning in a society.
01:14:18Today, rebels of all types adopt infernal imagery to outrage defenders of the status quo.
01:14:24One of the reasons that hell's angels use that imagery
01:14:28is because it makes other people angry.
01:14:31And they want to make other people angry.
01:14:33They want to make other people scared of them.
01:14:39But perhaps no group has ever taken on the trappings of the devil
01:14:43with more enthusiasm than the modern Church of Satan.
01:14:47In nomine Satanus, Lucifer excelsis Dei.
01:14:53In the name of our most exalted god, Satan, Lucifer,
01:14:58I command thee to come forth, come forth,
01:15:03and bestow these blessings of hell upon us.
01:15:07Hail Satan!
01:15:09Hail Satan!
01:15:11The Church of Satan has chosen Satan as its primary symbol
01:15:14It means adversary, opposer, one to accuse or question.
01:15:17And we see ourselves as being the Satans,
01:15:20the adversaries, opposers and accusers of all spiritual belief systems
01:15:24that would try to hamper enjoyment of our life as a human being.
01:15:29Founded in San Francisco, California by Anton LaVey in 1966,
01:15:34the Church of Satan sees belief in God or hell as delusional,
01:15:39and so they choose to practice self-reliance and self-worship.
01:15:43This is a very selfish religion.
01:15:45We believe in greed, we believe in selfishness,
01:15:47we believe in all of the lustful thoughts that motivate man
01:15:51because this is man's natural feeling.
01:15:55If you're going to be a sinner, be the best sinner on the block.
01:15:57If you're going to do something that's naughty, do it.
01:16:01And realize that you're doing something naughty and enjoy it.
01:16:05Many of the Church's beliefs are spelled out in the Satanic Bible.
01:16:09Behold the promise of Satan and his power,
01:16:12which is called amongst ye a bitter sting.
01:16:14Move and appear, unveil the mysteries of your creation.
01:16:18For I am a servant of the same, your God,
01:16:21the true worshiper of the highest and ineffable King of hell.
01:16:25The Satanic Bible, the 13th Key.
01:16:35The main ritual of the Church of Satan is the Black Mass,
01:16:39a highly theatrical rite designed to mock
01:16:42the sacred ceremonies of Christian traditions.
01:16:45The Black Mass exploits imagery of hell and Satan.
01:16:49Hail Satan.
01:16:50Hail Satan.
01:16:52Open wide the gates of hell and come forth.
01:16:57We've chosen purposefully to use the word Satan
01:16:59because of its theatrical value.
01:17:01Because we're attracted to the symbol of Satan,
01:17:03we have an approach that enjoys
01:17:05what we would consider a dark side of existence.
01:17:10Recently, History Channel producers were given permission
01:17:13to attend a modern-day Black Mass,
01:17:16an event rarely seen by anyone outside of the Church of Satan.
01:17:25In Satanism, we practice ritual magic.
01:17:28We call the ritual chamber intellectual decompression chamber.
01:17:31It's where we stop rationalizing and thinking.
01:17:34We go inside a room that's darkened and lit with candles,
01:17:38and we release our emotions in a way to clear out anything
01:17:41that might be hindering us from pursuing
01:17:43all the kind of things that we like to do.
01:17:48When we perform rituals,
01:17:50we believe that it's necessary to not have distractions.
01:17:54So most of the men, and many of the women,
01:17:57will wear black hooded robes.
01:17:59That sort of has a wonderful, almost Gothic sensibility.
01:18:02Hail Satan!
01:18:04Hail Satan!
01:18:07Hail Satan!
01:18:09Hail Satan!
01:18:13Hail Satan!
01:18:15Following in the tradition of founder Anton LaVey,
01:18:19the modern Black Mass is sexually charged.
01:18:22Satanism acknowledges the fact that we have love and lust.
01:18:25It's natural to the human animal.
01:18:27So if you're seeking a partner, you might do a lust ritual.
01:18:30Women sometimes will dress in clothing
01:18:32that's sexually stimulating to the men,
01:18:34because as we know, men are very easily visually stimulated.
01:18:42Also a part of the ceremony is the destruction ritual.
01:18:47We do unto others as they do unto us.
01:18:50So if someone harms us, we fully believe that you have the right
01:18:53to avenge yourself against that kind of injustice.
01:18:56So vengeance is part of our philosophy.
01:18:58We have a destruction ritual, which is meant to clear away
01:19:01any kind of hatred that might arise in us
01:19:03because someone has wronged us.
01:19:05The mighty voices of my vengeance
01:19:07smash the stillness of the air
01:19:09and stand as monoliths of wrath
01:19:11upon a plane of writhing serpents.
01:19:14Whoever has harmed you, you might make a doll of this individual.
01:19:18You might stick pins or nails into it or rip it into pieces.
01:19:21That will be the heart of what the destruction ritual is,
01:19:24the elimination of the person who has harmed you.
01:19:29I see your remaining days
01:19:32as nothing but a quiet, tedious collection of hours.
01:19:36You will find no new love.
01:19:39You are lost.
01:19:41Every day will be the same.
01:19:44You may as well have never have lived at all.
01:19:47The beliefs of the Church of Satan
01:19:49put it on the very fringe of the socially acceptable,
01:19:52a fact members savor.
01:19:54We are the adversaries to all the spiritual creeds
01:19:57and all the people who would say,
01:19:59you have to take your cue from somebody else, you have to obey.
01:20:02We create a heaven and hell here in our own existence
01:20:05and it's completely on our own shoulders
01:20:07as to how it's going to come out.
01:20:09Because Satanists do not accept concepts of an afterlife,
01:20:12they believe they won't be judged by their earthly deeds.
01:20:17However, most in the mainstream of religious practice
01:20:20firmly trust a day of reckoning awaits after death.
01:20:24For them, a haunting question lingers.
01:20:27Just who goes to hell?
01:20:38The history of hell and Satan is long and complex.
01:20:42From biblical teachings to secular imaginings,
01:20:45our fascination with hell and the devil
01:20:47reflect primal fears of death
01:20:49and profound longings for immortality.
01:20:52Ninety-some-odd percent of us answer yes to the question,
01:20:56do you believe in life after death?
01:20:58But liberals tend to ignore hell.
01:21:00They just don't think it's part of the afterlife,
01:21:03whereas evangelicals and fundamentalists
01:21:05believe in the reality of torment
01:21:08for people who are not like them.
01:21:10For those who do believe in hell,
01:21:12the fundamental question remains, who goes there?
01:21:20We don't really know who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.
01:21:23Some Christians, for example, in the Russian Orthodox tradition,
01:21:26nourish the hope that in the end all people will be saved,
01:21:31including the devil, including Satan.
01:21:34But that's one of the great mysteries.
01:21:36Even if God's will is unknowable,
01:21:39it seems beyond comprehension
01:21:41for mass murderers like Hitler, Pol Pot,
01:21:44and Jeffrey Dahmer to escape damnation.
01:21:47I can sleep at night only because I do believe
01:21:52that the good get their reward,
01:21:54and the bad get their punishment.
01:21:57I can sleep at night only because I do believe
01:22:01that the good get their reward,
01:22:03and the bad get their punishment.
01:22:05If you don't believe that there is a hell,
01:22:08then you are saying that Hitler
01:22:11does not have any different fate from Mother Teresa,
01:22:16that the most vile, cruel human being
01:22:19has the same fate as the kindest.
01:22:26That logic of our mind suggests that
01:22:30if God is just, if there's righteousness,
01:22:33if there's some sort of basic fairness in life,
01:22:37then there needs to be judgment as well as reward.
01:22:43Even those who agree on a day of judgment
01:22:46differ on what it means to go to hell.
01:22:49It's really not very good theology
01:22:51to say that God punishes us,
01:22:53that God sends people to hell.
01:22:55If people go to hell, it's because they've sinned.
01:22:58If people go to hell, it's because they have somewhere along
01:23:02in the course of their lives made a decision
01:23:05that they will not, need not,
01:23:07do not have to live in relationship with God.
01:23:10The reality of a final judgment
01:23:12in which there will be a parting of the sheep and goats
01:23:17is simply basic Christian truth, Christianity 101.
01:23:21And that implies a hell,
01:23:23but as to what specific content you can give to that,
01:23:27what that means, that's been open to debate since the 1st century.
01:23:35If you ask me, do you want to believe in hell,
01:23:38I would say, no, I don't want to believe in hell.
01:23:41I want everybody to go to heaven.
01:23:43But to deny hell is to deny God, he said it in the Bible,
01:23:48to deny Jesus, the one who I follow,
01:23:51to deny scripture.
01:23:54Wide is the gate, and broad is the road,
01:23:56that leads to destruction, and many may enter through it.
01:23:59But small is the gate, and narrow the road,
01:24:02that leads to life, and only a few will find it.
01:24:12Fundamentalists read Jesus' words as a sobering reminder
01:24:16that most souls are headed for damnation.
01:24:19They believe that anyone who has not accepted Christ
01:24:22as their personal Savior is doomed.
01:24:25Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
01:24:28No one comes to the Father except through me.
01:24:31Jesus is it.
01:24:33On judgment day, the one who's going to be the judge is Jesus Christ.
01:24:37So here's the question.
01:24:39At that point, when you see it's Jesus as the judge,
01:24:42what religion would you wish you were part of?
01:24:46In recent decades, Catholics and many Protestant denominations
01:24:50have revised their interpretations of scripture
01:24:53in a less restrictive fashion,
01:24:55opening the gates of heaven to a wider audience.
01:24:58Vatican II says very clearly
01:25:00that those who practice the other great religions of the world
01:25:03and even those who have no religion at all
01:25:06but who strive to live according to the graces that God offers to all people
01:25:11can be saved.
01:25:13The great religions of the world do agree
01:25:16that the very essence of hell and the core of its suffering
01:25:19is utter separation from God.
01:25:22And the sacred texts of each faith
01:25:24invite even the most wicked among us to join in redemption.
01:25:28Let the wicked forsake his way, and the evil man his thoughts.
01:25:32Let him turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on him,
01:25:35and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
01:25:39Isaiah 55, verse 7.
01:25:43So it doesn't matter if you're a murderer on death row.
01:25:47It doesn't matter if you've committed multiple murders,
01:25:50if you've stolen, if you've raped.
01:25:52All sin, any sin, can be forgiven
01:25:55when you come to the cross and claim the death of Jesus
01:25:59as God's forgiveness for your sin.
01:26:06All faiths hold that on your deathbed
01:26:11you can repent sincerely and somehow God will forgive you.
01:26:16I am not a big fan of the notion
01:26:20that you can torture children your whole life
01:26:24and then repent a minute before you die.
01:26:28I believe that if you've spent your life
01:26:32doing evil, engaging in cruelty,
01:26:36then you will pay the price for it.
01:26:40No matter one's beliefs,
01:26:43humankind faces one inescapable truth,
01:26:47we all will die.
01:26:49But after our loved ones have said their final goodbyes
01:26:53and our earthly bodies are retired,
01:26:55none of us knows our ultimate fate.
01:26:58None of us knows what's on the other side.
01:27:01Robert Frost's poet says,
01:27:02the strong are saying nothing until they see.
01:27:05We don't know.
01:27:06Everyone would like a simple answer.
01:27:08About hell or the devil or goodness or badness.
01:27:11There is no simple answer to a great deal of life.
01:27:14Most of it happens in shades of gray.
01:27:16But uncertainty does not preclude
01:27:18our constant speculation about hell and Satan.
01:27:27Hell is the ultimate affirmation of free will.
01:27:31And if there was no hell,
01:27:32then God would ultimately be saying,
01:27:34I don't care what you want.
01:27:35I don't care if you hate me.
01:27:36You're going to be with me forever, so deal with it.
01:27:38But the idea of hell seems to make sense
01:27:41for the souls who say, look God,
01:27:43I'm sure heaven's really nice,
01:27:44but I don't want any part of it,
01:27:46and I don't want any part of you.
01:27:49Satan could run for office and be elected,
01:27:52which is really troubling.
01:27:54He's very charismatic.
01:27:55He's a natural leader.
01:27:56The problem is, is that he always leads
01:27:59in the wrong direction.
01:28:06Penned over centuries,
01:28:07the history of Satan and hell
01:28:09seems to be rewritten every generation.
01:28:13Hell is a shared construction project.
01:28:15It's based on stories that have been told
01:28:17by some of the greatest storytellers in the world.
01:28:22Satan is here to stay.
01:28:24The idea of God, man, and the devil
01:28:26will be around for as long as people have
01:28:29longings that they can't realize
01:28:31and things that they fear.
01:28:33A lot of Americans are willing to say
01:28:35that hell is a simple delusion.
01:28:37If you look at the history of hell,
01:28:39you find out it might be a delusion,
01:28:41but there's nothing simple about it.
01:28:43It has an immense, long, important,
01:28:46and very telling history.
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