GO TO HELL!--WITH DANTE

The theme at Goat Rope this week and last is Dante's Divine Comedy, one of literature's all time greatest creations. You'll also find links and comments about current events. El Cabrero's goal, Gentle Reader, is to encourage you to give Dante a whirl whether for the first or fiftieth time.
For more background on Dante, please click on the earlier entries.

To briefly recap, Dante is so far gone that his only hope for salvation is to take the grand tour of the afterlife, which was brought about by the intercession of souls in Heaven. His guide for most of the story is the ancient Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid.

Basically, hell is shaped like a funnel with the spout pointed down. It's bigger at the top and gets worse as you go to the bottom. There are nine circles, although some circles have more circles within them. The kind of punishment a condemned soul gets in hell is designed to fit the sin. To use just two examples, fortunetellers have their heads on backwards and people driven by lustful passions are blown around in a storm, just as they metaphorically were in life. You kind of become what you invest in.

The only difference, however, between souls that are saved and those that aren't is that the latter did not repent. People in Heaven did just as much bad stuff as those in hell but changed course. Here's a line from Heaven explaining that:

When condemnation of the sin bursts forth from the sinner's lips, here in our courts, the stone is turned back against the blade.

Dante's classification of sins and punishments in hell is probably different than ours would be. Most people today would probably place violent people in the bottom. He uses a different schema, based on an ancient version of psychology. Sins of intemperance, such as lust or gluttony, are not as bad for him as sins of violence. Sins of violence are not as bad as sins of fraud and deceit.

I think this goes back to the Greek idea that we had a three-part soul. The lowest level was associated with the appetites, the middle was concerned with honor and spirit, and the highest was the rational. The perversion of our highest self was considered more serious than lack of self control or lashing out in anger.

One more item for today: Dante's hell has scars. It was wrecked at the time between the death of Christ and his resurrection when, as the Apostle's Creed asserts, "he descended into hell." In medieval times, this was believed to mean that he rescued the souls of the faithful from the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament who were held there. He pretty much trashed the place.

More on hell tomorrow...

ON A RELATED SUBJECT, many Iraqi refugees have given up the hope of returning to any kind of decent life, according to this report.

RESTORING THE RIGHT TO ORGANIZE could get us back to an economy with shared prosperity, economist Dean Baker argues here.

BEING HAPPIER is easier when we don't act like selfish jerks, according to this Washington Post article.

HAST ANY PHILOSOPHY IN THEE, SHEPHERD? If so, click here.

HYENAS are smarter than we thought.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CHRISTIANS AND JEWS

Caption: The western wall of the Jerusalem Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme for this week's Goat Rope is early Christian history. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

One of the most tragic features of Christian history is its role in the rise of anti-Semitism, which has had horrible consequences over the centuries.

It's important to remember that Jesus was a Jew who spent virtually his entire ministry among Jews, with perhaps a few exceptional encounters such as those related in the gospels. All of his earliest followers were Jewish. The whole New Testament, with the exception of Luke, Acts and possibly some minor epistles, was written by Jewish believers in Jesus. Likewise, many early converts were either Jewish or were Gentile "God fearers" sympathetic to Judaism.

However, controversies soon arose between the new religion and the old, reflecting Christian anger over the failure of more Jews to convert. While many Jews of the time expected some kind of Messiah, for the overwhelming majority, Jesus did not fit the bill. He was, after all, a peasant who was executed in the most degrading way and many recalled a passage in Deuteronomy that said that anyone hanged on a tree was accursed by God (21:23).

Early Christians engaged in a series of polemics in which they attempted to present themselves as the legitimate heirs of the Hebrew Bible and Jews as those who rejected their redeemer and ultimately God. The Jewish connections were further frayed as more and more Gentiles joined the movement.

Also, as early Christians attempted to survive in a Roman world, they began to shift the blame for his crucifixion from Rome to the Jewish leaders and even to the entire Jewish people. At the same time, Roman anti-Judaism increased after the Jewish revolts of the first and second centuries which resulted in the destruction of the Temple and the disperal of Jews throughout the empire.

Finally, when the church became the official religion of the empire, the state was fully set for centuries of bloody persecution.

IRAQ. Despite the Bush administration's efforts to put a triumphal spin on events in Iraq, the Washington Post reported the following:

Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.

A GOOD RESOURCE for current information about the need for "An Economy that Works for All" is here.

MORE ON THE JUDICIAL HELLHOLE CLAPTRAP can be found here and here.

NEW DRUGS could change the nature of death, according to this Wired Science item. The post speculates that with new anti-aging drugs, people would still die, but without a lot of the distasteful preliminaries.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED