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Matt and Sam pick up where they left off in their recent mailbag episode and keep answering listener questions. Topics include: KYE merchandise, the existence of Hell, Francis Fukuyama, Mormonism, gun violence, and more.
Sources:
David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (Yale University Press, 2019)
John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard University Press, 2012)
Francis Fukuyama, "Still the End of History," Atlantic, October 17, 2022
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992)
W.H. Auden, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (1940)
Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976)
Sohrab Ahmari, "Urban Jeremiah: Mike Davis, 1946-2022," Compact, October 26, 2022
I've never talked about this, but when I was growing up fundamentalist, I feared hell. I still do in a way, but I would go to bed and I would pray and I would start at the beginning of my day and retrace my steps trying to remember every sin I committed and then would ask God to forgive me. Even though I was ostensibly saved, there was still the drama of like, is it real? Like because I was taught there are sort of fake Christians, right, carnal Christians, Christians who fall away. I would think my friends would be going to hell and I would like to invite them to church or I would press them on whether they actually knew Jesus as their Lord and Savior because you love them. Exactly. But I do think like there's something experientially, you grow up and you travel more, you meet all kinds of people and the question like, is it really true that everyone's going to burn in hell forever, but the narrow faction of people I grew up going to church with. Like any morally sensitive person, that's a kind of monstrous possibility. It's kind of like if that's true, then the religion is wrong. Do you know what I mean? Well, yes. I mean, I'm not saying that that's how you thought of it, but if you fall in love with the world and with people who you care about, who do not share those beliefs and that love is strong enough and you know that what you're supposed to believe about them is that they're you know, internally damned, it compromises the religion more than it compromises your belief. Or it does compromise you and you turn into a fanatic, right? Yeah. One thing I would note is that over time, I mean, I became convinced of universalism, meaning I think heaven and hell exist, but I think hell will prove empty. Because I do believe in an afterlife, I'm not ashamed to say that. I mean, it's mysterious to me, but I think this isn't all there is. So for me, eventually I just came to the position that if God is all powerful and all loving, no one can be forever outside the scope of his redemption, right? It is a little bit insane to try to reconcile an all loving God with the idea that he made a little special place for people to suffer forever and that he's filling it up with souls. But I do think just as a basic proposition, God is all powerful and all loving. And that means, at the end, the love will finally win out. Hell exists, but it's empty. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
