Bin Laden in Hell?

One of those manufactured for the news cycle polls, conducted a few days ago by CNN asked whether Osama bin Laden was going to Hell. Sixty-one percent of those surveyed said they thought he was in hell with 24 percent saying they didn't know and 10 percent saying no, they didn't think so. Five percent of respondents did not believe in hell.

To be fair, the poll responded to an incendiary Daily News front page that screamed "Rot in Hell" alongside Bin Laden's photo, the day after his killing by Navy Seals.

Hell's getting a lot of interest these days, as a new universalism seeps into the Evangelical community. Ross Douthat, a NY Times opiner, wrote an April 24 piece about "A Case for Hell." I responded in an unpublished letter to the editor:

Full disclosure: I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist minister since 1977, and I interned at an historic Universalist church in 1976-77 in Syracuse New York, so I have a bona fide Universalist identity.

I’m amused by the contemporary brouhaha over the doctrine of universal salvation that my thoroughly liberal faith tradition resolved in the first few decades of the 19^th century. And I’m also amused by Ross Douthat’s recent op-ed piece “A Case for Hell,” in which he seems to argue that moral choice and its consequence of heaven or hell makes us more fully human.

His reasoning is thin from the perspective of traditional theology, which for the old Universalists turned on a doctrine of the Atonement along with the notion of a loving Father. For them, free will mattered and their choices responded to God’s overarching Love. Therefore, it can be argued, in contrast to Mr. Douthat’s reasoning, that choice can operate in a system of universal salvation through the agency of love.

Such nuances of theology seem so antique and irrelevant, relative to a progressing understanding of the human condition increasingly grounded in the sciences, especially neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and moral psychology. Mr. Douthat dismisses this sort of scientific materialism along with universal salvation as forms of determinism that steal our free will. He appears to be defending a higher notion of the human condition by declaring, “The doctrine of hell… assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make.”

Rather than resorting to time-worn theologies of universal salvation and hell to get his point across , I’d love for Mr. Douthat to deal directly with the deep issues, the notion of free will and doctrine of the human condition, from a contemporary point of view.

Actually, the question of the CNN poll offers an opportunity for serious religious conversation. Poll a group of Muslims, say in Saudi Arabia, if bin Laden is in Heaven and you'd probably have an overwhelming majority giving a resounding "yes!"

Which point of view is true in an absolute sense? Neither. Heaven and Hell are irrelevant, and such partisan doctrines only cause grief in the world, because it leads to belief that God is partisan, too.

Back in the day Bob Dylan sang, "And you don't count the dead when God's on your side."