Which Religion Has the Worst Hell? | Religion Camp

Bad news, you're dead. And there are three doors in front of you. Door number one is suffering that never, ever ends. Door number two, you're boiled, crushed, and cut apart, but someday it'll stop. And door number three is a held last longer than the universe has existed. And when you finally get out, you could end up right back in it. Every one of these is real and believed by billions of people. And today, we're walking through all. Skin that grows back just so it can burn again, a hell that the Buddha measured in sesame seeds, a hell that takes the Sabbath off and an ancient religion where hell itself gets destroyed. And one final question waiting at the end of it all. Can anything be worse than forever? Well, today, let's open the doors and find out. And at the end of the day, we will have an answer, which religion has the worst hell? Well, sit back, relax if you can, and welcome to Religion Camp. (chanting) What's up, dude? And welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from every religion from all time forever. Yeah, that's what I do in this tent is I try to understand what everyone believes. And I don't go in with any type of bias or trying to disprove or prove anything. I just want to know what you believe. Yeah, dude, whether you are Christian or Hindu or Muslim or Jewish, whatever it is, I just want to know what is the basis of your theology and how you interact with the divine? What does it all really mean? Where does it come from? And how does it affect the way that you see the world? And today, we have a fascinating one. 'Cause normally I'll deep dive in like one specific topic on a specific religion. Well, today, we're doing all of them and we're talking about hell. Now, before we do that, I want to say thanks to you for tuning in 'cause every time you click or comment or like, any of our content, you tell the algorithm overlords, we're doing a pretty good job. You help keep the lights out of the tent and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now, I also want to give a big thanks to my pal to my right, the Greek orthodox freak himself, the beast from the east. I like that one the most. It's my pal Christos pistachia burros. How are you? - Doing great. - Christos, I'm glad you're here, dude. - Are you? - Do you believe in hell? - I do. - Are you in it right now? - I kind of fail that way. - Some days. - Some days, I get it, dude. I totally get it. I haven't listened to me app all the time. It's not great. - No, no, not here in general in life. - Oh, just life. - This is hell on earth. Nice. Well, I hope this tent can be a little reprieve for you for just a little bit. Now, do you think you're going to hell? - I think I'd have to confess a lot and I haven't since I was five. Well, we can fix that, okay? It's my job to get you to heaven. But if you do go to hell, let me tell you what it's gonna be like, all right? We're going through every single version of hell through every religion, maybe not all of them, but as many as we can get to it's in like the next hour. And we're gonna break them down and try to compare which one is the worst, all right? So let's start with the version of hell that most of you are familiar with because honestly, whether you are personally Christian or raised Christian, you probably are familiar with what Christians think of hell. Seventy, maybe 80 years, is about how long most of us will get on this planet. And according to the most traditional Christian view of hell, what you do with those 80 years decides where you spend the next forever years. So that's door number one. But real quick, before we walk through any of these doors, we gotta get some ground rules, okay? Because hell is kind of an all-encompassing word. When we say it in English, we're mashing together a bunch of different ideas. Some traditions describe a final destination that you never leave. Some describe a punishment that eventually ends. Some describe like a purification, like a fire that burns the junk out of metal. And some describe a hell that isn't even a sentence, actually like a rebirth. Basically a place that you end up as a result of what you did in this lifetime. Those are not the same place with different names. So we're gonna judge each hell that we go through on four different things. First is gonna be pain. How bad is it, like how bad do you really feel? Then X is time, how long does it last? The third thing is gonna be an exit. Is there any way out of this punishment? And then the fourth thing will be fairness. Does the punishment actually fit the crime? Now to be clear, we are comparing specific teachings here, not entire religions. Every faith on this list argues about hell internally and there's plenty of believers within each of these religions that don't necessarily like, you know, or take these descriptions literally. So Christians included, you know, like especially Christians. You're gonna see what I mean. So anyway, that's the little prequel. Let's go through door number one, all right? The main word that Jesus uses for hell in the gospels is Gahana. And that was a real place, like an actual place. It's the Valley of Hennum, a ravine, right outside the walls of Jerusalem. And in the Hebrew Bible, it's remembered as the place where some Israelites burn their own children as sacrifices, which is why the prophet Jeremiah condemns it. And over the centuries, the name of that Valley became the shorthand for the place of like the damned or like a terrible place. So Jesus talks about the Hennum more than anyone else in the New Testament. In Mark 9, he describes it as a place where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched. In Matthew 25, he says, "The wicked will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life." Then of course, the book of Revelation describes a lake of fire where the devil is tormented, day and night forever and ever. We did a whole episode breaking down Revelation scene by scene, also a whole episode breaking down like Christian hell. So you can check that out if you want the whole tour. But later theologians basically ran with that. So in the 420s AD, Augustine argued in the city of God that the damned would have real bodies burning in real fire forever. And he pushed back hard on Christians who hoped that like maybe one day hell will just be forgotten and like, "Well, I'll be free." And then in 1741, the American preacher Jonathan Edwards gave a sermon called "Cinners in the Hands of an Angry God" where he told his congregation that they were like a spider dangling over a fire held up by nothing but God's hand. According to people who were there, the crowd like moaned and cried so loudly that he literally had to stop before he finished. Okay, so that's the fire. But a lot of Christian theology says that the fire isn't even the worst part. So take the Catholic church, for example, the largest Christian body on earth. According to the Catholic church's official rulebook, the catechism, you end up in hell by dying in unrepented mortal sin. And the catechism says the chief punishment of hell isn't fire. The chief punishment is eternal separation from God, which if you believe God is like the source of everything good, all the joy, all the love, the hug that you give your dog at the end of a long day, well, that means that you're cut off from all of it. Permanently, there's nothing good. There's not even the semblance of good. And the church frames it as something that people choose, a definitive self-exclusion. Or as C.S. Lewis famously puts it, the doors of hell are locked on the inside. So on our scorecard, we got time totally maxed out forever and ever, exit zero. Except Christians don't actually all agree on this. There's one camp called annihilationism that says the wicked don't suffer forever, they're just destroyed. Eternal punishment means the result lasts forever, not the suffering. So you're just gone. When the hugely respected British evangelical John Stott cautiously sided with this view in 1988, it caused like a massive uproar. Another camp is Christian universalism. It says hell is real, but it eventually empties out that God reconciles everyone at the end. And that idea goes all the way back to an early church scholar named origin in the 200s AD. His version got eventually condemned in the 500s, but it never fully went away. And no, purgatory doesn't count here. And Catholic teaching everyone in purgatory is already saved. That is a totally different door. We did a whole episode on purgatory, which you can check out if you're curious about that. So my question is, can a finite person doing finite things for a finite number of years deserve a punishment that is literally infinite? Defenders of the traditional views say yes. One classic argument from medieval thinkers like Anselam or Thomas Aquinas is that the weight of a crime depends on who you offended. And offending an infinite God is an infinite offense. Others say that the damned never stop rejecting God so the punishment never stops either. So door number one, that's the traditional Christian version. Severe pain, yes. There's no end, there's no exit to can't get out of it. Is it fair? Well, that's a question that Christians themselves have been fighting over for like two thousand years. But everything that's behind this door has been kind of abstract. There's like that idea of separation, there's loss, there's like this lock that you can't see. But the next one we're going to talk about is not abstract at all. So in this one, your skin burns away and then it comes back. Brand new skin, nice, fresh nerves, everything's healed, ready to just be burned all over again. That comes from Quran chapter four, verse 56, which says that those who reject God's signs will be driven into a fire. And every time their skin is burned, it'll be replaced with new skin so that they continue to taste the punishment. And here's why that detail is so brutal. In real life, severe burns have a horrible, horrible kind of like mercy built in. But if you burn deep enough, the nerve endings are destroyed and the pain actually stops. And eventually the body just gives out. Like death is an exit. It's a reprieve from the pain of being burned. And the verse describes hell in such a terrifying way because it gives that exit no endpoint. The body gets restored for one reason, just so suffering can continue. So the Islamic name for hell is Jahanam, which actually comes from the same root as Jahana. It's the same valley outside of Jerusalem, just in different languages and different kind of translations, so to speak. And the Quran actually describes it in a lot of detail. So it has seven gates. Its fuel is people and stones. The inhabitants of this place drink boiling water and eat from a tree called Zakum, Who's free? looks like the heads of devils and boils in the stomach like molten metal. And then there's this from Quran, chapter 50, verse 30, on the day of judgment, God asks, "Hell, are you full?" And hell answers, "Are there any more?" That's the horror. And it's, you know, it'd be really unfair to treat one terrifying verse like it's the whole picture because Islamic teaching on hell is also way more complicated than just that. First, there's judgment. So in Islam, every person's deeds are recorded and weighed on the day of judgment. We recover that in a bunch of episodes, we had done on the Dijal and Jesus' role in the Islamic apocalypse and all that kind of stuff. So check that out if you want to know more. But God is described over and over as extremely merciful in the Quran. Every chapter of the Quran, except like one, opens with the same line. In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. And repentance is always on the table as long as you are alive. Now the second part, and this is the part that a lot of people don't know, in mainstream Sunni teaching, not everyone in hell stays there forever. That's really interesting. According to a well-known Hadith, which if you don't know, these are just reports of the Prophet Muhammad's life and sayings, "Believers who sinned might be punished in the fire for a while." But anyone with even a mustard seed worth of faith in their heart will eventually be brought out. One report describes them coming out scorched, being dipped in a river of life, and then sprouting back up like seeds after a flood. So for some people, Islamic hell may be temporary. But for those who died rejecting God, mainstream teaching says that the punishment is ever lasting. And what about the people who never even heard the message? Many Muslim scholars say that they won't be condemned for that. Some traditions say that they'll get their own test on the day of judgment. There's even a Hadith about who gets the lightest punishment of all. It's the Prophet's own uncle, Abu Tali, the man who protected him his entire life, but never converted to Islam. His punishment is that he wears sandals of fire that make his brain boil. That's the lightest punishment in this version of hell. But there's a debate that genuinely surprises people. So in the 1300s, one of the most famous and most conservative scholars in Islamic history, he bin Temia, he wrote a short treaties basically before he died, arguing that hell itself might actually come to an end. Not paradise just hell. He pointed to God's mercy and God's wisdom. And I'm saying God here, obviously Muslims will say Allah, but I'm assuming this is kind of the same sort of understanding. But basically that because of God's wisdom and mercy, that there might be some type of end point. He also points to a verse saying that the dam stay in the fire, quote, as long as the heavens and earth endure, except as your Lord wills. That comes from Quran, chapter 11, verse 107. And his star student, it bin Qayam al-Jaziyah, he pushed the idea even further. The pushback was very fierce. A scholar named al-Subkhi fired back with a refutation insisting that Muslims had reached a consensus. The punishment of unbelievers never ends and that saying otherwise was just completely out of bounds. And that is still the majority view today. But the fact that this idea came from where it did. It'd be like finding out that like the most hard-line Puritan preacher in history that talks about fire and brimstone and how everyone's going to go to hell secretly kind of wrote an essay asking, well, maybe at some point hell ends. So here's what's kind of bugging me. Christianity said forever. Islam for unbelievers also says forever. The big difference so far is that Islam actually specifies the skin coming back. So is the graphic detail actually making it worse? I think a little bit. Now, what's actually doing the damage in Quran, chapter 4, verse 56? It's not really the fire. In real life, fire ends. It's the guarantee that there's no escape. The new skin is just the most visceral way possible of saying like, hey, there's no way out of this pain in torment. So that's the Islamic version in a kind of brief summary. Pain, I mean, I was about as grave as you can be. Time may be temporary for some sinners forever for those who reject God. According to some scholars, again, not in a mainstream view, but perhaps hell does end for all people because Allah is perfectly merciful. And is there an exit? Yes, for some. No, for others. So for both of our hells, you know, they kind of sort people into two big piles saved and damned. But somewhere in the next hell on our list, there's a man being lowered into a pot of boiling oil. And he knows exactly why because in this hell, your punishment is not random. It is designed specifically for you. Hey, guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you about ultra focus pouches. Now, if you know anything about me, I love nicotine. I also love caffeine. 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And it comes from a Hindu scripture called the Bhagvata Purana, a hugely influential text probably put the other somewhere in like the 800s to thousands AD. Again, dating on the stuff is like impossible. But a quick note, Hinduism is not one single religion with like one Bible. It's a massive family of traditions. Some are devotional to a specific deity like Vishnu or Shiva. Some are deeply philosophical. And plenty of Hindus don't read these hell descriptions literally. But the hells that are in texts like this one are a huge part of popular Hindu imagination. And they are some of the most vivid in any philosophy or religion period. The general word for hell here is Naraka. And it's actually not run by Satan. It's run by Yama, the god of death and the lord of justice. So when you die, his message has come to collect you, and in Hindu tradition, a cosmic record keeper named Chitra Gupta has written down everything you've ever done, everything. And based on that record, you get sent to the hell that matches your deeds. So the Bhagvata Purana lists 28 of them. So here's what I mean by matches the deeds. If you harmed other living beings to benefit yourself, will you go to a hell called Rarava, where vicious creatures called Ruru's said to be fiercer than snakes attack you the way that you once attacked others. If you commit sexual sins, you're forced to embrace a red hot iron statue of a man or a woman. If you ate your meals without ever sharing with guests or family or those that needed it, you're thrown into a lake of worms, where you eat the worms and the worms eat you. And if you were a king or an official who like you were corrupt or you abused your power, you're thrown into the Viterani, a river of blood and hair and bones and filth, where creatures basically tear you as you drift. Now, this isn't just ancient poetry. It actually shows up in real life today. There's another text called the Garuda Purana that describes the soul's journey after death and even more detail. And in many Hindu families, it's traditionally recited during the morning period after someone dies. Some families even donate a cow in the person's name connected to the belief that it might help their soul cross that terrible river. So just think about the logic there for a second. This is the first hell on our tour of all the hells where the punishment seems designed to match the crime. So like, you know, you cooked living creatures, well, you get cooked. You heard other people, you get hurt. Like, oh, you hoarded food and didn't share. Well, now you get feasted upon. So on our scorecard, that's a pretty big deal because it's the first hell that really leans into fairness and like a unique way. You're not just punished. You're punished specifically in a way that's in a cordance with your own transgressions very specifically. But here's a twist and it changes everything. These hells don't last forever. So in Hindu thought, the soul is caught in some saw. This is the endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth. And what drives it is karma, the moral consequence of everything you do. Now, I'm sure you're thinking, Hey, don't Hindus have reincarnation? Well, now Ruka is where you burn off a chunk of that bad karma. Once it's spent, you leave and you are then reborn. Maybe as an animal, maybe as a person, you just reborn into something depending on what karma you have. So hell is not the destination. It is a stop on that journey of purification before rebirth. and this is V. important, getting out of hell is not the same thing as being saved. The real goal in Hindu philosophy is Moksha. This is the liberation from the cycle altogether. Serving your sentence in Naruka just puts you back in line. And yet, even here, there's kind of a backdoor. The Bhagavata Purana tells the story of a man named Ajamila, or Ajamila, who abandoned his wife and family and spent his life as a gambler and a thief and just as all around Skumbhaq. And on his deathbed, he's terrified. He cries out to his youngest son, whose name happened to be Narayana, which is one of the names of the God Vishnu. Now, the messengers of Yama arrived to basically drag him away, but suddenly, Vishnu's messengers appeared and stopped them. Because even by accident, he had called out the name of God. He was trying to call out his son's name, but because of the same name, he invoked God. Now, Ajamila got a second chance, and he got to spend the rest of his life in devotion. So even inside a system of like perfect cosmic accounting and karma, mercy can still break in even if you didn't really mean for it to. Okay. Now, just to push on this fairness thing, because you know, I'm sure you're thinking like, okay, well, boiling a guy just because he boiled animals like, is that justice or is it like revenge? Like, you know, if you kill a dog or you supposed to be killed, like, it doesn't seem like perfectly fair because we understand humans and dogs are kind of on like a different level. Like, at what point does the punishment fit the crime turn into like, Hey, we're just going to do like an eye for an eye and punish you the way that you punished other people. Well, honestly, philosophers have been arguing about this for thousands of years, but defenders will say, Hey, this is not revenge at all because no one here is angry. And many Hindu traditions karma works less like a judge getting even. It acts more of like a just a cause and effect, like a law of nature. Like, Hey, if you touch fire, you're going to get burned. Like, it's not like God is punishing you for touching fire. It's like fire is inherently hot. So if you do something to hurt yourself, you're going to get hurt. You cause suffering, suffering just necessarily comes back to you because that is the sort of karmic logical balance of everything. So that is door number three. Okay, pain, kind of his graphic is, is anything else on the list? I mean, your skin burning back and burning over and over sounds maybe worse because again, it's just like, Oh, you've rejected God. And so that punishment is like pretty bad. But getting like the pain for whatever you did back at you, like getting boiled alive, also not great. The exit, that's nice because yes, you get to go back into the cycle but not into paradise just yet. So that's, that's cool. I like that. Time is very long, but it is temporary because eventually you do get purified and reborn. And fairness, this is probably the most technically speaking, if you're looking at all of them abstractly, it's technically maybe the fairest because the punishment is directly connected to what you did wrong. So the first hell that actually like officially ends is is door number three, which sounds like a huge upgrade over door number one and technically door number two. But the next hell on our list actually ends as well. This is not the only one. And when a monk asks the Buddha exactly how long it lasts, he answered with a cart full of sesame seeds and a math problem that's technically bigger than the whole universe. So there was this monk named Kokolika. And he could not stop trash talking two of the Buddha's most respected disciples. These two disciples named sorry Puta and Mogalana. Now the Buddha told him to stop three times and he didn't. Not long after Kokolika gets sick and dies. And according to the scriptures, he was reborn in a hell called Paduma, the red lotus. So one of the monks goes to the Buddha and asks a very simple question, hey, how long is he going to be in Paduma for? And the Buddha answers with like a thought experiment, like classic Buddha. Okay. And he goes like this, like, imagine a giant cart piled high with sesame seeds. Now once every hundred years someone walks over and takes out one seed, just one. And then they wait another hundred years and they take out another. The Buddha said that that cart would be empty before a single term in the very first mildest level of these hills would be over. And then he kept going the next level lasts 20 times longer than that. And then the next one 20 times longer than that 10 levels each one 20 times longer than the last. And the red lotus where Kokolika ended up, that's the tenth. Now people have actually tried to do the math by one estimate of how many seeds like fit in a cart and like the mildest level alone would probably at like last like 10 billion years. So you multiply that up to the red lotus and you land somewhere around like 20 billion trillion years. And that's the punishment for slandering the Buddha's disciples. Now real quick, like reality check, same as before, Buddhism incredibly diverse and plenty of Buddhists, especially in the West, they will read these hills as symbolic descriptions of states of mind, not like literal places. But in traditional Buddhist cosmology, they are technically real. So what is it actually like down there? Well, one of the most terrifying answers comes from a text called the Devaduta Sutra, the divine messengers. So when a wrongdoer dies, the hell warden basically drags them before Yama. Yeah, this is the same Yama he's there too, the king of the underworld. And Yama asked them a question. During your life, didn't you ever see the divine messengers? A newborn baby helpless just lying there, an old person bent over and shaking a sick person, a criminal being punished, a corpse rotting. In other words, didn't life warn you that you would get old and you would get sick and you would face consequences and you would die? Did it never occur to you to do good? And the person says no, I was completely careless. And Yama, the god of death tells them this evil wasn't done by your mother or your father or your friends. You did it. You were the one who will experience the result and then the punishment begins. Red iron stakes are driven through their hands, their feet, their chest, their hacked with axes, their force to climb a mountain of blazing coals, they're thrown into a boiling cauldron. And then finally, they're hurled into the great hell. Yeah, by the way, that's not the, that's not even the man hell. The great hell is an iron fortress with four gates where flames blast from every wall to the one across from it. And over and over, the text repeats the same chilling line. They don't die as long as their bad karma has not run out. The deepest of all is actually called a Vici, not the DJ. I mean, similar name, it's probably where he gets it from, but yeah, it's called a Vici, which means something like without interruption. No breaks, no rests. Traditionally, it's for the absolute worst acts imaginable. You kill one of your parents, you kill an enlightened being, you wound the Buddha, you split up like a religious, monastic community. You do something that's a terrible affront. And like the Buddha's own cousin, Devadata, who literally tried to kill him and like split up his order, he was said to have ended up there. And Buddhist hell isn't just fire. Later traditions, especially in Tibet, describe eight hot hells and eight cold hells frozen wasteland where your skin just breaks out in blisters. And then when the blisters burst, and eventually your body cracks open until it looks like pedals of blue or red lotus. Some of the cold hells are literally named after the sounds being made teeth chattering in like cries of pain. And a little fun fact. In Dante's Inferno, the very bottom of hell actually is not fire. It's ice, but you're just kind of an interesting little parallel. I wonder if you potentially picked it up from kind of like the Buddhist interpretation. But here's the biggest difference from everything that we've seen so far. In Buddhism, there's no creator god like handing down a sentence. There isn't even like an eternal soul being punished because Buddhism teaches that there's no permanent unchanging self. Hell is a rebirth. It's where a stream of consciousness ends up as the result of harmful actions. Even Yama doesn't really sentence anyone. He just asks a question. And at the end of the the Buddha Sutta, he says he wishes he could be reborn as a human so that he could hear the Buddha's teachings himself. Like the king of hell, the king of death and like this underworld kind of wants out as well. And just like in Hinduism, when the karma runs out, the hell ends. And then you're reborn somewhere else. Technically still inside some star, still inside the cycle of trying to escape, still capable of ending up right back there. Now that is door number four. Okay. And even here, there's mercy. So in Mahayana Buddhism, there's a blood figure named Kishti Garba. Kishti Garba. I think I did pretty good on that one. That's a tough one to pronounce. And basically this this figure is a bodhisattva. This is someone who's basically put off their own final enlightenment to help everybody else. Like a very enlightened being. That's so enlightened that they're staying here to help us. And Kishti Garba made a famous vow. He will not become a Buddha until the hells are empty. So he goes down there to help the beings who are trapped. And in China, Japan, and Korea, he's usually shown as like a very gentle monk carrying a staff one that in some traditions can force open the gates of hell. Okay. So this one kind of mess with me because technically this hell ends. Technically, it's better than forever. But the end is, you know, ballpark 20 billion trillion years away. But it's also technically based on like the bad karma you built up. So it's not 20 billion trillion for everyone necessarily. But it is still a really long time if you're particularly bad, which is technically Comforting like a one point does temporary stop meaning anything like Okay, it's temporary, but it's like Infinity minus one. It's like okay, like that's kind of the question like mathematically. There's an Infinite difference between 20 billion trillion years and literal infinity like any number no matter how huge is infinitely smaller than infinity. I know it's kind of confusing, but it's true But when you're in it, it's hard to say if the mind could ever feel the difference So there you go, that's that door pain is very brutal. You're in fire and ice, which is kind of interesting You throw the ice in there. It's kind of cool little little turn time technically finite, but Beyond any type of like number conceivable time you could imagine Is there an exit? Yes, eventually But then you exit back into the cycle and then you could eventually end up back there if you still don't learn your lesson in this lifetime And fairness, I mean no one's punishing you. It's just again simple cause and effect similar to Hinduism So we've gone from forever to Just a finite amount of time that's bigger than the entire universe has ever existed like multiple times over Which makes what comes next feel almost impossible because the next tradition on our list says that for most people hell lasts But only 12 months Do you have a friend that buys gold instead of crypto because he doesn't trust the internet? 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This is a paid advertisement Yeah, you heard that right after 20 billion trillion years 12 months is like it's nothing That's like it. It's a walk in the park. So that number comes from the Mishnah the foundational collection of Jewish oral law written down like roughly 200 AD and in it's the great sage Rabbi Akiva says that the judgment of the wicked and Gahinom last 12 months and Gahinom, well, that's just the Hebrew form of the word that we started with Gehenna or Johanna. It's all coming from that same route that same valley outside of Jerusalem But by the time the rabbis are talking about it, it means something very different from Christians. Now let's just back up first type because a lot of people think the Judaism has no concept of hell at all And a lot of other people assume that Judaism teaches the same hell as Christianity and actually neither of those are right So in most of the Hebrew Bible when people die they go to a place called sheol and sheol isn't a torture chamber It's more like a shadowy pit. It's like a place of like silence and stillness where everybody goes good and bad They all go there. So when the patriarch Jacob thinks his son Joseph is dead He says he'll go down to sheol still mourning him and the book of Ecclesiastes says there's no work no thought no knowledge down there It's pretty bleak, but it's not punishment necessarily. It's just like Darkness It's not until late in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Daniel written around like the 160s B.C Though we get a clear statement that some of the dead will rise to everlasting life and others to shame and everlasting contempt and over the Next few centuries the rabbis turn Gehenom into something that works less like a prison and more like a Furnace that refines metal like it's very painful, but it's purifying So here's how the Talmud lays it out one school of rabbis the house of Shamai Says that on the day of judgment people will fall into three groups the completely righteous will go straight to eternal life Yay, you did it. The completely wicked are condemned and everyone in between which is probably most of us goes down into Gehenom and cries out and then rises back up purified like silver refined and fire Now the rival school the house of Hillel Well, they say that God leans towards mercy and that the in-betweeners might not even have to go down at all and over time The 12 months became the standard idea in Jewish tradition for most souls Gehenom is purification and it's over within a year and it gets even more surprising According to rabbinic tradition the souls and Gehenom get a break every week on Shabbat Which is just so interesting to think about like even hell takes the Sabbath off which is kind of funny We talked about that in the intro like that's the one where like on the Sabbath. It's like all right Technically, we can't punish you down here. You know, I mean we can't do work, right and this belief still shapes real Jewish life to this day When a parent dies their child traditionally recites a mourners prayer for them called the Kiddish But in many communities they say it for 11 months and not 12 Why glad you asked because saying it for the full 12 months might imply that your parent was so wicked that they needed the maximum sentence It's like a Like a gesture of love built around the structure of the afterlife So I mean you might be hearing this you might be like all right Judaism might have Technically the best version of hell you have the shortest day you have a you know a day on the weekend off Well, not so fast because that same Talmud passage keeps going For the people who were truly wicked it says that after 12 months their bodies and souls are burned up and they become ashes Under the feet of the righteous so for them the end of punishment isn't paradise. It's just Being completely erased and then there's one more group Heretics and farmers who sold out their own community people who denied the Torah or the resurrection of the dead leaders who Ruled through terror and people who sinned and dragged the masses down with them like the biblical king Jeroboam for them the passage says that they're judged in Gehenum for generations upon generations and then it adds one of the most chilling lines in all of rabbinic literature Gehenum itself will come to an end But they will not and then there's the medieval philosopher my monides one of the most important Jewish thinkers of all time who argued that a lot of this fire and Ash's language is just metaphor for my mom it is the ultimate punishment is not torture at all It's just being cut off your soul simply ceasing to exist missing the world to come to missing paradise Entirely and to be fair a lot of Jews today don't put much emphasis on Hell at all Judaism has always been way more focused on how you live in this world and how you can obey the laws of Hashem You know while you're in this reality and most of the Jews you talk to you are probably more focused on that than mapping out the next one Now here's what's weird This is kind of the gentlest hell on the list so far and somehow it's making me rethink some things because if punishment actually leads somewhere If it purifies you and then you get out Doesn't that make it easier to justify like a parent who grounds their kids so that they grow up is different from a parent who Like grounds their kids so severely or like locks them in a basement forever, and that's a big shift up until now We've been asking how much Like a version of hell hurts and Judaism asked a different question. They ask what is the punishment for? So that's door number five a rabbinic addition pain very real but not really described in nearly the same graphic detail some of the others time 12 months for most the most wicked will get generations upon generations exit Yes for most erasure or something longer for a few fairness Punishment as purification like the punishment has a purpose. It has like a goal So now we've seen a hell that ends for most of the people in it But what if hell itself had an expiration date? What if at the end of time a river of molten metal swept across the entire earth and when it does there's no hell left at all And what if this idea that I'm about to tell you is older than almost every other hell that we talked about today? Well, you're in luck in this version of hell you die and For three nights your soul lingers near your body then at dawn on the fourth day you arrive at this bridge It's called the Chinvath bridge It stretches across the abyss and on the other side is paradise and below it is hell and as you step on to it Someone walks out to meet you. This is your dina Kind of like you're conscious like you're in herself made visible now if you lived a good life She appears as a beautiful young woman and the bridge under your feet grows very wide and you cross with Relative ease, but if you lived a wicked life she appears as this like Horrible hideous like a haggard woman and the bridge Turns on its side narrowing until it's as thin as the edge of a razor and inevitably you fall Yeah, that's kind of what it is. This is Zora Astranism one of the oldest religions still practice on earth today It was founded by a prophet named Zarathustra who scholars date somewhere between like 1500 and even 500 BC Which I know is a really big window. There's I'm just trying to be honest to like the scholarly debate But a lot of people place it like 1500 BC, but some people say it's more recent regardless for centuries It was the faith of the great Persian empires. Today, it's a relatively small community, mostly the parseys of India and Zoraastrians in Iran. Fun fact, actually, Freddie Mercury was Ray Zoraastrian. Yeah, of all people, from Queen. It's awesome, right? Now, the bridge goes all the way back to the Gathas, the oldest Zoraastrian hymns, traditionally credited to Zarathustra himself. The punishment that's described also goes back to Zarathustra. According to these hymns, the wicked are headed for the house of the lie. Because in Zoraastrian thought, the whole universe is a battle between the good, wise god, Ahura Mazda, and the destructive spirit of Ahriman. And every human basically picks a side with their thoughts and with their words and with their deeds. So, if you're on the bridge and you fall off, what's down there? Well, the most vivid answer comes from a text called The Book of Arda Varath, written in Middle Persia with its final version kind of taking shape around like 900 AD. Here's the story. These Zoraastrian priests wants proof of really what happens after death. All of them are getting together and they're trying to figure it out. So, they draw lots, and they choose one exceptionally righteous man, a man named Arda Varath. And they basically say, hey, go to the other side and come back to tell us what it is. So, he drinks three cups of wine mixed with a narcotic and lies down on a couch. And for seven days, while the priest chants over his body, his soul travels. And he goes and he sees the bridge. He sees a middle zone for people who's good and bad deeds came out exactly even. And then he goes down to hell. The way Zoraastrian text describes it is honestly pretty creative in its awfulness. So, the darkness is so thick, you could grab it with your hand. The stench is so strong that you could cut it with a knife. The souls are crammed together, packed in, so tight, and yet each one feels completely alone. Even time is twisted up. For the damned three days, and hell feels like 9,000 years. So, Arda Zeraaf sees dozens of punishments, each one tied to a specific sin, kind of like how the Hindu hell that we talked about earlier was. But there's one thing that really stands out to me. He sees a man whose entire body is being chewed on by vermin, except his right foot. Why? Because once in his whole lazy selfish life, he used that foot to push a bundle of hay towards a hungry ox. One good deed, one spared foot. And yeah, a living man touring heaven and hell with spiritual guides, then coming back to tell everyone scholars have noticed the similarities again to Dante's divine comedy, which is where we get like the Dante's inferno, like the seven layers of hell. And it came along 400 years later, which some people are saying is possibly inspired by this story. Again, maybe we do that in another episode, because it's really interesting. So far, this all sounds pretty familiar, right? You got a bridge, you have judgment, darkness, punishment, but Zoraastrianism has another act. And it's the most important twist maybe in this entire video, according to Zoraastrian teaching, history itself is heading towards a finale. A final renovation of the world called the Frascio Corretti, which roughly means like making wonderful. A savior figure appears, and the dead are raised from their graves, and then the metal in the mountains melt. And a river of molten metal flows across the entire earth, and everyone has to walk through it. For the righteous, according to one famous text, it'll feel like walking through warm milk, but for the wicked, it will burn them, but it will purify them. It burns the evil out of them. And then everyone is saved. Evil is then destroyed, a Riemann is defeated, the evil, the force of evil basically. And that same text says that hell itself is brought back up and cleansed and made part of the renewed world. At the end of Zoraastrianism, hell doesn't win, it doesn't even survive. The story ends with everyone together praising Ahura Mazda, no suffering left anywhere at all. Now here's where it gets really interesting, historically speaking, a final judgment, a resurrection of the dead, a cosmic battle between good and evil, all of those show up in Zoraastrianism really early on. And the Jewish people lived under Persian rule for two centuries after Cyprus, the great conquered Babylon, and 539 BC, and let the exiles eventually go back home. So some scholars do think that Zoraastrian ideas influenced later Jewish thought, and through Judaism, eventually Christian thought, and then Islamic thought. Remember the book of Daniel, with its resurrection of the dead, showing up late in the Hebrew Bible, scholars will point to that as part of their argument that hey, this was a later addition. Now to be clear, it is hotly debated. I'm not here to say it's one way or the other, I'm just bringing up a point. A lot of scholars think that similarities are really overstated or completely impossible to prove. Maybe they're both touching on the same source material about the actual fabric of the afterlife. And it's also difficult because most of the Zoraastrian texts were written down centuries later. So I'm throwing it out there as like an interesting little possibility, not a fact. But either way, it's a pretty strange thought. The hell that might be the oldest on our list might also be the one with like the happiest ending that everything gets purified. And there's justice and all people are saved and not torment forever. Like it raises a really interesting philosophical question. Is it more just for bad evil people to suffer forever, or is true justice when evil itself finally loses like the concept of evil no longer exists? It's kind of interesting to think about. I don't have an answer. I don't know if anyone does, but it's something worth considering for you. Now let's just look at the scorecard. Okay. Zoraastrian hell, pain, dark, twisted, weirdly specific. I mean being chewed by vermin, except for like one part of your body that did a good thing. Interesting. Time, terrible, but limited eventually, you know, the metal comes out of the mountains and purifies everything and purifies hell and then evil is defeated. Exit, yes. And not just for some people, but for everyone. So just through this. Okay. Six hells forever, graphic forever, custom built and temporary, temporary, but basically eternal 12 months and then a hell that gets destroyed. And behind us, three doors are still standing exactly where we left them. Okay. So now we got a bunch of versions of hell. Let's kind of group them into different buckets. And then now you got to kind of pick one that you like. All right. You got to go to one of them. You got to pick one. Okay. So we got like bucket number one. These are the hells where punishment never ends. So you did something wicked. You get put there and you're never getting out. That's the traditional view within Christianity and mainstream view in Islam for those who reject God or in Christianity die in like, you know, unrepented, you know, sin or rejection against Jesus Christ. So this is a bad hell. You don't want to be there in Islam. Your skin's getting, you know, regrown and then burned, regrown and burned forever. That's pretty awful. Okay. Bucket number two, you get a very, you get a punishment that's terrible. It's horrific, but it is finite. All right. So this is like, you know, Kennam in rabbinic Judaism. This is like Zorastrianism where like it's bad, but then eventually you're going to get out of there. Okay. It's not going to be forever, but you're going to be in there and you're going to get purified for a long time. And then you got another bucket. These are the cycles. Okay. These are like the Buddhist hell realms where you do get out, but you're only getting out to go back into some sawa, same thing with Hinduism like, hey, you're going to get purified, but then eventually you're going to be released, but only to go back into life to, you know, eventually escape and get into, you know, like to reach Nirvana. That kind of thing. So hang on over all of these. Okay. Well, well, this is like, you know, how do we, how do we handle this? Like, what are the philosophical questions this is asking us about what we think is justice and what we think is mercy breaking down these whole versions of hell. I think are really interesting and helpful because it forces us to ask a philosophical question. Okay. A few philosophical questions to help us decide. First is, can finite pain ever be worse than infinite pain? Okay. I'm going to say no, because you pick any amount of suffering as intense as you want it to be a billion years in Kumbhipaya. For example, now compare it to suffering that's maybe less intense by you have to stand on like, you know, Lego blocks for eternity or be like, boiled alive for five years. Like, okay, most people would rather choose to stand on Lego blocks, but technically speaking, if you give it enough time, the endless one will always be worse. No matter how bad the infinite hell, no matter how bad the finite hell is, the infinite hell is going to pile on more individual suffering because it'll just keep on going. Forever isn't just a really big number. It's like a different kind of thing fundamentally. Like, the infinite is so vast, it's more than literally any number you can think of. Now, the other question it's for us is to think is, does an ending you can't imagine actually help? So this one's for Buddhism, for example. Okay. 20 billion trillion years is technically finite, but from the inside, doesn't mean anything. So in a finite hell, there's some moment, however far off, when things get better, the suffering doesn't get the final word on who you are. In an eternal hell, the moment never comes. Even if you can't feel the difference, the difference is real. One has a future. The other one doesn't. Does this another question, I guess? Does a happy ending change how we judge the punishment? Like, does, does some type of like a reprieve change how we view it? So this is where, like, Judaism and Zor Astrianism come in. For both of them, at least for most people, again, with distinction. Punishment is purification, it has a purpose, it leads somewhere. And I think that kind of changes the math because, you know, pain that leads somewhere good like surgery or rehab or learning a really difficult lesson through consequences is very different than pain that leads nowhere. Pain without any type of purpose. A hell with an exit can be defended as tough love. A hell with no exit can't really be defended in that way. It's just a punishment for punishment's sake because there's no one left on the other side to have learned anything at all. Which brings us back to another question that we kind of started with with the very first door with Christian hell. Can one lifetime deserve forever? This question sort of makes us evaluate justice. Like, okay, take the worst person you could ever imagine on earth. If you're looking at an earth years, it's like, okay, this person did such terrible things his entire existence. But that might only be 80 years, 90 years is whatever they did worthy of infinite punishment. Think about 100 years on the time scale of infinite. Like you wouldn't even be able to see it. And look at how many different answers we found. Like karma is finite. So the punishment is finite. 12 months for most within Judaism. Everyone restored at the end. And even inside Christianity and Islam, there are annihilationists and universalists and scholars like even to me asking whether forever is actually right. Now, in fairness, defenders of eternal hell have serious answers. Like, the infinite offense argument or the idea that the damned keep choosing to reject God forever. The infinite offense argument, I think, is actually helpful here. Like, you know, if you offend someone in the finite, then your punishment is finite. But if you offend God, God is an infinite being who exists outside of time. So then your punishment is also infinite. I mean, you have plenty of thoughtful believers that find these arguments convincing. And their bottom line is pretty simple. Like, what we deserve isn't ours to measure. It's not up to us. It's ultimately up to God. So, okay, I don't know. I'm going to change my answer here. This is kind of difficult. I'm like, I'm going in. I'm trying to think about it. Think of, I think the worst hell is probably the one with no way out. Like pain matters and pain is difficult. But I think hopelessness is worse, which means that we need to kind of like, we need to, I think realistically, the worst hell is going to be door number one. So again, not all of Christianity and not all of Islam, a specific idea held inside both of them that some people will suffer awake and aware forever and be fully disconnected from God for all eternity. I think that's the worst hell. Not because it necessarily hurts the most. I mean, granted, like, Muslim hell, you, it does seem like it hurts very bad. But moment to moment, the Hindu and Buddhist hells like might be worse, but like you can't really measure it. So I think it wins because of what it's missing. Like every hell we walk through came with someone on the way. Like messengers, you know, turned back by a diamond's whisper, a monk with a staff who refused to leave until last soul is lost, like a child quietly counting months for a parent in like the Jewish version, even in the darkest places that human beings have never imagined, there's a rescue. But door number one, there is literally no rescue. And I don't think the fire is what haunts people about it. It's the moment you stop listening for footsteps. And there's no point of even thinking about a way out. And maybe that's why for two thousand years, people haven't been able to stop arguing about it. The worst hell, I think is probably the moment without a way out. But the question I want to leave you with is what could anyone do in one lifetime to deserve an infinite hell? Anyway, that legion gelman is a brief summary of every major religion's hell, and ultimately kind of my decision on which one is the worst. Chris, what do you think? Which hell do you want to go to? I don't want to go to any of them. But if you had a pick, Christian hell, you want to go to Christian hell? Yeah. It's the worst one. Yeah, but if I'm going to hell, I'd deserve it. Brother, if God says I just need a question, which hell do you want to go to? Uh, Jewish hell, 12 months, and then purified or Zor Astrian hell. I mean, it's not great. But that's low key. The awesome missing that we talked about this day note that you see that's if you would live the good life, she's beautiful. And then if you didn't, she's like an old witch. Why did you like that? I just like something to look forward to it. You are such a little gooner, dude. We got first of all traditional beauty standards were applied all the way back then. Yeah. That is true. Crazy. I mean, that is true. But I'm just saying, did you get or tell me about hell? This is why this. Yeah. But you also know immediately. This is why you're going to Zor Astrian hell. Hot chick. I'm good. Brother. Yeah. We're going to we're going to fix this in you. Okay. There's a, there's a dark, there's a dark kind of perversion. I'm going to hell. Not a five, anything to say, but I'm going to, I'm going to save you brother. Don't worry. But I'm trying to think I'm not going to save anyone. By the way, I was being facetious to me. Jesus Christ will save you. But I think permanence is the worst. So let's go through it. I think worst is probably Muslim hell because it describes very viscerally the pain and it is forever. And there's no way out. Now again, there's that one Hadeet that's like, well, technically, if you have a mustard seed of faith, like you could be saved, which is nice. But assuming that you're not that I'm going to save Muslim hell's words, Christian hell number two, close second. I mean, neck and neck because, again, forever is the worst part of it. Remind me of the other ones. Three, I think is going to go to Hindu. Because again, like rebirth back into life, not learning a lesson going back into hell again, pretty tough. Four, Buddhism for the same reasons. Yama being the god down there. Not great. Five, I'm going to give to Zor Astrin. I like that hell gets defeated all the way completely. That's that's fire. And then six, I'm going to go Jewish. You know, or I think actually, I think five Jewish, six, Zor Astrin. I think Zor Astrin's have the best version of hell. Because of what I said, the Dana. Yeah, maybe you're right. But it is interesting to think that's just my ranking kind of off the top of my head. And if you look at it chronologically, hell gets worse as time goes on. Like think like Zor Astrin is technically considered the oldest version, the house of the lie. And then Judaism comes after that. And then Buddhism Hinduism. And then Christianity and then Islam. It's on a linear timeline of like when the ideas are like officially like announced in the kind of like propagated around the world. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. So I wonder if there's something about humans that make hell worse over time. Like assuming we're coming purely from like a secular scholarly perspective, if you don't believe in any of this, then I think a scholar would look at this and be like, oh yeah, it looks like all these versions are building off of a hell that they heard before and they're all making them worse. Interesting. I don't know what to make of that. What do you guys think of that? Now again, if you believe one of these faith traditions, then by all means believe it. I'm not here to convince you one way or another. But it is interesting once you see them all together. So yeah, I mean, yeah, I think that's a that's a reasonable, I mean, would you would you ranking be the same? I'm still choosing Christianity, I think. As what? The one you want to go to. Yeah. You are a true orthodox. I love it about you. Yeah. You're like, you know what? I deserve this, no matter what. I think that's going to get you to heaven. Wow. I think your humility is going to get you somewhere. That's what I was angling for. Yeah. Or Nirvana or whatever's out there. Again, I don't know. I'm assuming heaven. What do you guys think? Which version of hell is the worst? And which one's the best? Give me your power ranking of all of them. I would love to read them. And generally, if you do a power ranking, I'm going to respond to a bunch from on Patreon where I'm going to go through and like go through people's raising and justification for which one is the worst? Like which one is you not want to be sent to? And which one is the best? If you had to be sent to one, which one would you go to? And then put them on an order. I would love to read all of them and maybe we'll respond to a couple. Also, we have a Patreon, like I said, Patreon.com/campgagdon. You're going to get every episode of this show completely ad-free, plus unreleased content that never goes to the public like we're going to do with these reactions. And we're also going to do like monthly zooms with the rest with the whole squad. Also, we have the main channel campgagdon where we go through mysteries and conspiracies. And again, I don't believe every conspiracy, but I think they're all very interesting. Also, we have history camp where we go through every single crazy event and person in history. I'm working on going through literally all of them. And it's going to be my life's work to document all the history that's ever been created. Now, if you just like to rock with the religious vibe, well, great news. You're in the right place. This is Religion Camp. We drop these episodes every single week, every Sunday. So make sure to tune in and subscribe. Life is better with belief. It's a Sunday. So go worship whatever you worship. All right. Go to church, the mosque, the temple, the goodwara, whatever it is for you. Just believe something. God bless you all. Appreciate you tuning in for another episode of Religion Camp. And I will see you in the future. God