Unending Torment Vs Annihilationism Essay

This is a typical sermon of the Great Awakening, emphasizing the belief that Hell is a real place. Edwards hoped that the imagery and language of his sermon would awaken audiences to the horrific reality that he believed awaited them should they continue life without devotion to Christ. The author's tone throughout this selection is threatening, cautionary, condemning, unsympathetic, and strict. Jonathan Edwards uses threatening imagery in order to provoke change. The most famous image used is that of a "loathsome insect." He says that God looks at people as if they were loathsome insects and in fact hates us more than we would hate such an insect. He firstly compares the wrath of God to damned waters, with God holding back "the fiery floods".

Fear is the most terrifying thing in this world and the Puritan society had used this fear for so long against their people, government, and everyday life. There are many things that they can use fear in everyday life no matter who you are. The most common fear they used is one of many things that many people know today and that is hell. So come and learn a little bit about how fear was used in Puritan society.

“Hell is a...foulsmelling prison,” James Joyce asserts in his essay Hell, “an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke” (295). In addition to both supporting these claims and constructing an engaging narrative, Joyce places himself in the piece as the narrator, guiding the audience through this hellscape. However, Joyce’s authoritative position alone cannot effectively illustrate the scene. As a result, Joyce relies on literary tools to elicit the intended impression of hell, immersing the reader in this environment. By employing an organized structure and a combination of different modes of description, diction and syntax, Joyce cultivates a compelling portrayal of hell that in return, evokes a visceral reaction from the reader.

William Rowe addresses the problem of evil through an examination of the relationship between the existence of evil with an omnibenevolent, omniscient creator. His argument stems from the notion that because human and animal suffering is so intense, an atheist is rational in their belief and that the co-existence of evil and God is unlikely.

A Puritan pastor in the early 1700s and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, in his sermon, “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God”, describes how angry God is towards sinners. Edward’s purpose was to scare sinners and unconverted men with the realities of hell so that they would seek a relationship with God. He adopts an aggravated tone to express to the sinners in his congregation that they should seek redemption because God can send them down to hell at any moment, but instead He gives them another chance. The metaphors and imagery that Edwards use in his sermon for the Great Awakening helps him to describe God’s wrath against sinners to make unsaved people convert back to the original ways of Puritans.

Many of us sometimes lie awake thinking of life, death, and what happens after. Nobody knows for certain what happens once the soul leaves the body, we don’t know if there will be life after death, we don’t know if we will be punished for all that we’ve done wrong, and for that reason many of us fear death and try to stay on the straight, morally right path in order to avoid Hell. In the epic poem, The Inferno, written by Dante Alighieri, we get a sense of what Hell is like, or at least Alighieri’s rendition of Hell. After venturing from the straight path, Alighieri’s self-based character, Dante, finds himself on the verge of entering Hell. Dante’s figure for human reason, Virgil, a Virtuous Pagan, leads Dante through the nine circles of Hell

Throughout Dante’s travels through the lower levels of Hell, he meets meets many tormented souls. As he and his guide Virgil get to and goes down through the different circles of Hell, he sees the punishments that each sin gives consequence to and learns of how these souls lost their way and ended up here being in pain for eternity. Specifically in Canto XXVIII, he meets the souls in the ninth bolgia of the eighth circle of Hell who are being persecuted for they have committed sins of scandal and schism. Here the souls are being tormented by a devil who inflicts wounds continuously for each lost soul. Each soul he meets along the way tells him a warning or a story on how to avoid theses punishments himself. With each soul he encounters and sees the eternal physical condition of their souls and pain that they are put through, he comes to understand why sins of schism and scandal are so horrible.

The problem of evil has been a major concern in the human race with various attempts being made to reconcile the belief in God with the existence of evil in this world. The Christian conception of God as supremely good and powerful has made the problem of evil to be very difficult simply because such a being will make the world a better place than it is by preventing evil from causing pain and suffering to humanity. Both Christianity and Judaism face a great challenge to solve the issue of evil and its existence because of the impact of evil that the holocaust caused on millions of people. Scholars have devoted their time to account for the horrifying events that took place during the holocaust by examining different theodicy

“I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want more suffering.” said Ivan to his brother Alyosha after reflecting on the unjust evil innocents face because of humanity’s sinful actions. Ivan’s words shed light to the idea of idealism versus reality. Realizing that cruelty is present in the lives of the most innocent, lead me to assert that evil is a real problem as it intervenes between the harmonic and idealistic view that the world consists of genuine, good people. Additionally, in the theist point of view, God has the absolute power to manipulate the circumstances his people are encountering. In The Problem of Evil by Fryodor Dostoevsky, Ivan mentions how children pay for their parent’s wrongdoings and it’s unjust as the children are

Before entering Hell, Dante sees a stone sign that holds the message “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” on it as a warning for anyone entering into Hell (I, III, 31). Hell itself is a hopeless place filled with hopeless souls. Every single soul that has been damned to stay in Hell for all eternity shares a single punishment with all other damned souls: the loss of hope. From the “nearly soulless” that run in the Vestibule of Hell to Satan in the center of Hell, hope is abandoned in their sufferings (I, III, 31). However, the souls that do not reside in Hell and have not been damned still possess hope through divine salvation. No one that forever belongs in Hell has hope of being saved, but other souls do possess hope through salvation.

In the Inferno, Dante describes the different levels of hell and the punishment which corresponds to the sin. Dante categorize hell into three major sins consisting of incontinence, violence, and fraudulent. Fraudulent is portrayed as the worse sin in the Inferno while incontinence is seen as a less serious sin. Each category has sinners which have all been punished for their wrong doings in life. The three major sins consist of circles where Dante separates the different sinners. Each circle explains the sin and the punishment the sinners endured in their afterlife. Some circles even included historic figures in Dante’s hell because of their actions in life. The Wife of Bath Prologue and Tale reveal characters who were not portrayed as good people. In the Prologue, the Wife of Bath explains the encounter she had with five of her husbands. Three of the husbands were pleasant while the other two were not. On the other hand, in the tale she tells a story about a Knight who takes the maidenhood of a young girl which almost causes him to lose his life and about women gaining sovereignty. The Wife of Bath fifth husband, King Arthur, the Knight, and the Wife of Bath will be placed in Dante’s hell in the Inferno.

In the opening of the sermon an analogy is stated between the ability of a person to crush a worm with the ability of God to cast his enemies to hell (First Paragraph). This supports the main idea of how God is a superior being, able to freely decide people’s fate. The author’s persistent imagery of Gods abhorrence towards sinners is continually mentioned as a form of repetition, to cause a vivid depiction of Gods wrath in the audience’s perspective of him. This is illustrated when it’s stated how unconverted men walk over the pit of hell and how God has unsearchable ways of taking wicked men out of the world (Paragraph 3). He also introduces a metaphor where he associates Gods wrath as a bent bow with an arrow aiming towards your heart; this again typifies Gods supremacy to take away sinners existence unless they convert (Paragraph 6). Edwards also implements the rhetorical question, “who knows the power of Gods anger?” this presents the question of who will suffer the eternal dreadful misery. The answer of who is able to escape his anger is the ones who repent and are born again. The whole sermon is an entire repetitive restatement exemplifying Gods mighty wrath and our only chance of salvation is to be reborn, to develop a more personal intimate relationship with God. An only this way he pardons our sins and allows us to exult in his

In the short story "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", Jonathan Edwards uses techniques such as diction, figurative language, and figures of speech to generate the two tones, condemning at first and merciful in the end.

Various religions across the world employ several different concepts that non-believers often find very strange or difficult to grasp. There is however a concept that is universally understood and somewhat accepted by the vast majority of our contemporary society. This is of course the concept of an afterlife. The afterlife can be defined as a sort of state of being where the consciousness of an individual persists even after the physical death of the body. This concept plays a central role in nearly all religions that employ it and is sometimes dependent on the existence of a God. However, not all religions that employ the concept of an afterlife revolve around the existence of a God and taking into account the primal instinct of self-preservation

There is many interpretations of Heaven and Hell. Some imagine hell as being a place where the absolute wicked are tortured from all eternity, made by the Devil himself. A common depiction is that souls end up in Hell as punishment. In the final part of the Divine Comedy, Dante reflects on free will, and its perfection as a gift. It is this gift that Dante believes is Gods greatest gift to humanity. He utilizes this idea that free will is a major factor to a souls place in the afterlife With regards to this idea, free will, driven by love, is the prominent force for all the souls in each level throughout the Divine Comedy. God so loved us that he created us to love him.