Condemned to the Fires of Hell
Gods and their Fires V
‘Hellfire’ is an air-to-surface missile, either radar-guided or laser-guided, so the attacker is not revealed to the target – it is an anonymous kill. According to ‘the future of warfare-prediction’ AI controlled missiles follow this trajectory of anonymity. In his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV just declared AI as one the most defining moral challenges of our time. The encyclical alerts to the use of AI in warfare, calling for the “most rigorous ethical restraints” on weapons developed using AI. The Pope addresses governments’ investing in autonomous military technologies and calls for ethical oversight, social justice, protection of workers, responsible governance and peace. The Pope promotes a civilization of love, centred on human dignity, solidarity, truth, compassion and the common good.
The Pope’s wish sounds like heaven. However, Hell has been unleashed on earth. On a daily basis our screens depict scenes of missile strikes where people are annihilated en-masse, stripped of their individuality and identities. At first, the ominous clouds of dark smoke billowing in the skies indicate a target has been hit and a few hours later perhaps an image of a teddy bear among the ruins of the destroyed apartment blocks reminds us that people lived there. Rarely do we actually see the mutilated bodies of people killed in those strikes. People were burnt to death, concrete collapsed on top of them, they bled to death, they suffocated due to smoke inhalation, but we are spared these images, for the sake of their relatives, sensitive viewers, propaganda or our collective conscience?
Throughout history, thousands of victims have remained anonymous – archaeologists unearth mass graves of genocide, numbers of unidentified victims of serial killers are clinically recorded as data in research articles and the photographs of their crime scenes clog police dockets in dusty archives. The blood of slain soldiers saturate battlefields and civilians killed as collateral damage decompose beneath mud brick and concrete rubble. History tells that perpetrators such as war lords, emperors, kings, generals, serial killers and individual murderers are eventually identified, yet since many people evade prosecution and literally get away with murder, humans designed a system where justice may be carried out post-mortem. The idea of retribution for evil thoughts and evil deeds features almost universally in human cultural history.
After the birth of Christ, humans came up with the popular concept of Hell. When we read about atrocities such as murder, war crimes, torture, and rape committed by one human being against another, we are inclined to condemn them to ‘burn in hell’ once they are dead. That makes us feel better – knowing there is such a place. But is there? Many people have a rather simplistic, yet popular concept of Hell as a place where the Devil rules and bodies burn in an eternal inferno, encapsulated in Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century description in the Divine Comedy: Inferno.
There is a genre of paintings depicting the torture of humans in Hell in graphic detail - bodies being torn to pieces by hooks, hung upside down with their heads fried in flames, boiling in cauldrons over flames, burnt with red hot irons, and the Devil and his demons eating their souls. Isabella Meyer in her 2022-article Famous Paintings of Hell – Infernal Depictions of the Afterlife in Art in Context renders an insight into such paintings for example The Last Judgement (1306) by Giotto di Bondone and The Last Judgement (1431) by Angelico Giovanni da Fiesole, depicting the corporeal torture of the ‘sinners”.
What always puzzles me, is when a person dies, they no longer have a body or bodily sensations, so how could they feel their body “burn in hell?” Can people really burn in Hell? No, they cannot. Souls do not have physical sensations.
Where were murderers sent to before there was a Hell? Did ancient civilizations have a punishment for the evils committed by humankind? Common people had no means of retribution against harsh rulers, kings were considered godly, so how could they revolt against them? How could priests keep populations in tow and prevent them from rising against their cruel gods? To both the downtrodden and those in power, the fires of Hell had a purpose – it provides a psychological state of fear.
Long before the ‘Devil and his Hell’ were conjured up, ancient civilizations ‘content created’ effective mythologies of afterlife punishments to control their populations.
