Mood:
on fireTopic: Lectures On Doubt
I was stuck in Walmart last night with the fam. I'm not a big shopper, so I tried to find something in their book section and the most interesting publication I found was called "23 minutes in Hell" by some cross-eyed praiser of the Lord. But OMG, there are 40+ reviews of it on Amazon. 23 Minutes
It's one of these books where you can tell at the outset that the subject matter can be condensed into two pages but somehow they've got to stretch it out long enough to make it a book. So you can skip the lay preaching and his call to the ministry and all that and read the actual account of hell which takes five or ten minutes. First thing that's funny about this account is it's heavily annotated. Virtually every sentence he utters references some Bible scripture or another moron's NDE. Ron Livingston did the same thing with his "Sealed Portion." Some advice for up and coming prophets: follow Joseph Smith's example. Make up your story, publish it, and let others be the scholars and unravel the intricities. Don't show us all the stuff you read prior to your bad dream or episode of sleep paralysis. So what happens. He is taken from his bed, the knowledge that he's a Christian is stripped from him, and he is put in a 10x15x15 brick dungeon with two or three grotesque demons pacing about angry, smelly, and ready to hurt him. They beat him up, tear apart his flesh, throw him against the wall. Then from this enclosed space, he somehow can see outward a mile wide pit of fire. Inside the pit there are stone segregations so each person has their own individual fireplace. It's very important not to let the immates have any communication with each other - they have to be completely alone. I'll admit I was reading fast so I missed whether he was actually thrown in or just about to be thrown in and then Jesus came, gave him his memory back, and sent him away with the ole, "you had to experience this to warn the world" message. Some xtians are luckier than others I suppose. Some get to experience a lot of money, power, and sex and then repent, but had to go through all that stuff to warn the world about it.
The author goes on and on about how deformed the demons were, but I wonder what his standard of comparison was. The demons were faster, stronger, and endlessly superior to humans particularily in physical feats so it sounds to me like their design was rather sophisticated. The author also complains about how thirsty he was and there not being a drop of water anywhere in hell. Of course, human bodies are, as the sand entities in Star Trek put it, "bags of mostly water". And the demons were obviously constituted of water as well. If for no other reason, we know this because their flesh was hanging down, rotting, and smelling. Things don't rot without moisture, sorry. In heaven I suppose, he'd be drinking glacier water all the time and enjoying it with his wife - as he did on earth. Would he also be eating and having sex? Finally, he knows all this stuff about hell "intuitively" as he says, he doesn't know how he knows it, he just does. Like the demons are 1,000 times stronger than humans. That there is no water. That there are endlessly more pits like that one he described was a mile wide, and so on. Let me help you Mr. Wiess. You know these things because you're making up the story. The author of the story knows the answers about the story the characters inside don't.
