Going to Hell

[00:00:00] Astonishing Legends Network. Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Collari. And I'm Ed Vecola. And if you listen to this show on a regular basis, you know that we generally say a lot of fucked up things. And today, we're being punished for that.

[00:00:27] With a trip to the bad place, Gehenna, Hades, the pit, you might know it more simply as hell. It is the oldest dwelling place of nightmares, an eternal torment that billions of people all over the world and throughout time have been threatened with. But what do we really know about hell? It's hot, it sucks, it's lorded over by Satan with a pitchfork. But it turns out there is a lot more to eternal torment than that.

[00:00:51] Today, we're going to explore the surprising similarities and vast differences between different cultures' versions of the underworld. Trace how these ancient concepts of hell evolved into our modern understanding. And hear from people who claim they've actually been there during near-death experiences. So, listener, if you will, say a prayer for our eternal souls and join us in the pit of the damned. These two scaredy cats are going to hell. What are we? Scared. When are we? All the time. Join us.

[00:01:21] Join us. Join us. Now it is time for... Time for... Scared over the time. Holy shit, everybody. Welcome back to the show. It is February 11th, 2025. And I just had a baby. Well, my wife had a baby. On February 7th at 1.27 in the morning on 2.7. Seven months from my birthday on September 7th. So, I think that means there's some good luck in there somewhere. I don't know. No one knows.

[00:01:50] I can't be sure. I'm hoping. Felix is great. He's the best already. Anna is doing well. We're having all kinds of learning experiences as new parents. But thank you guys so much for all the kind words and the gifts that I still haven't picked up from Ed because I've been busy having a baby. But it's really been heartwarming. I actually... We were in the hospital for an extra few days because just baby stuff. And my wife had some blood pressure stuff.

[00:02:19] And I was reading her the comments on the Instagram and Facebook that you guys all left. And it really made her smile. And it's made the beginning of this journey really special. So, thank you so much. Now's a great time to join Patreon. Patreon.com backslash scared all the time. But no, I figured in lieu of five-star review this time around for housekeeping, I would tell a story from the birthing room because it made me laugh.

[00:02:47] And I think it might make you guys laugh too. It's very Hollywood. So, well, there's two parts to this story. The first part to this story is last Wednesday, we went to what was supposed to be the second-to-last doctor's appointment for my wife before we gave birth. We were scheduled on the 11th, which was today, to be induced. So, we go to this doctor's appointment on the 7th. And the doctor's like, your blood pressure's really high. You need to go to the hospital, which is something we've been doing a lot.

[00:03:15] Every time we go, they would send her to the hospital. And she would get checked out. And this time, I was very stressed because Ed and I were supposed to record an episode that night. So, I really didn't want to go to the hospital. And I had basically two other jobs that I had to be doing stuff for at the same time. And we had a couple very awesome interviews and guests lined up. This fucking baby, man. If I can make it about me for a minute in the middle of your story. I'm just kidding. Go ahead. I'm joking. But I gave the OB a little guff.

[00:03:44] Not guff, but I just was very clearly annoyed that we were going to have to go to the hospital. What's an OB? The OB-GYN. About to say it, I didn't know if there was an OB and then there was also a G-Y and an N. I don't know how this. No, it's. So, there's only one, though. It's an OB-GYN. And you've just been there long enough that you're on a first couple letters basis? Yeah, pretty much. Okay. And so, I tried to explain to her, like, no, no, no. It's fine. Obviously, we'll go to the hospital. Health is the most important thing here. It's just like, I have a podcast.

[00:04:12] And as the words came out of my mouth, I was like, in LA, if you tell someone you have a podcast. Doors close to you, honestly. Yeah. I just don't tell anyone, really. You know, I kind of stuttered through being like, no, you know, we're supposed to record tonight and whatever. We'll figure it out. So, then we go to the hospital and the hospital's like, hey, this baby's coming out tonight. And so, then they moved us to, like, the delivery room.

[00:04:40] And I started texting Ed about, like, I know we've got this recorded tonight. They said it could be, like, 48 hours before the baby even gets here. So, I think I probably can record or maybe we'll do it tomorrow. We'll try to figure it out. And then, while we're in the labor and delivery room, I'm trying to figure all this out. There was a moment where I just got frustrated because I was juggling too many things at once. And the nurse who was in the room picked up on my frustration.

[00:05:06] And Anna said, hey, is there any way that he could record his podcast in here? And the nurse is like, what? Like, this lady looked at me like I had something wrong with me. A room is a room. A room is a room. A room is a room. And I just started stuttering like, yeah, no, it's a real podcast. And we have, like, sponsors and, like, contracts. And, like, I make money from it. It's a job. It's actually a job. It's actually a job.

[00:05:34] And she was like, I think you're probably not recording your podcast. So, I was feeling uncomfortable that now two people had heard about the podcast. Yeah. And both thought I was putting a podcast recording above the health and safety of my wife and child. Yeah. Which I wasn't. I was just trying to practically figure out if I could record. Can we do both? Could I do both? It doesn't seem impossible. It doesn't seem impossible. So, my wife has Felix.

[00:06:02] And as the OBGYN who comes to the delivery, Felix is out. We're talking five minutes after Felix is born. You got a mic in its face. You're interviewing him. The OBGYN is between my wife's legs, stitching her up. And she looks up and goes, so, Chris, what's your podcast about? Jesus. And I was like, it's called Scared All the Time. It's like, I'm clutching my wife's hand. And she's, like, delirious from, like, pain.

[00:06:31] She's just given birth. And I was like, it's called Scared All the Time. And it's about fears. And the OBGYN goes, oh, have you ever done childbirth? And I was like, no. But we've had some people suggest it. It's, you know, it's on the list. And she goes, oh, I think I'd be a great guest. Oh, my God. And I was like. Yeah. Infant mortality rate comes up a lot in the show. Mother mortality rate comes up a lot in the show. I should say, if she's listening to this, because she said she was going to listen to it, she's a great OB. She's really good.

[00:07:01] And I do think we may actually do this episode and have her on the show. The timing of it was just like, I could not. I could not. She was trying to, I think, lower the anxiety in the room because, you know, it was a stressful thing. And I think she was just trying to be friendly and bring everything down. But after being so embarrassed about it twice to have her be like, hey, so.

[00:07:23] It's like how in movies and TV shows, there's how coroners are always like eating a hot dog when they're trying to talk to the detective while there's like showing the body. I think maybe it's a little bit that, too. She's like, I've seen I've stitched up a thousand ladies who are a mess and I can do two things at once. And then you should have said, really? Because I was told I couldn't do two things at once in this room. Interesting that you're able to do two things at once in this room. And then, you know, there's three other nurses.

[00:07:50] So the OB asked the shift nurse or whatever, like the guy in charge of the nurse shifts who was standing there. She's like, what's your fear? And he was like, ending up alone. Oh, wow. I was like, this is taking a weird turn. They're all going to be guests on the show. So anyway, cheers to St. John's, to Dr. Mercy, to the whole crew that helped deliver Felix safe and sound. It was a wild ride. I haven't slept in three days. Because the episode that we're recording tonight is going to be hilarious.

[00:08:19] See if I can keep my shit straight. Well, I'm sure Felix will make sure you can't. And in case anybody's wondering, no, the name Felix for my son has nothing to do with the fact that the cat is the mascot for our show. Used to be. Used to be. We were just looking at names and it was between Felix and Elliot. And my wife and I were driving down to my cousins for Thanksgiving. And as I said, well, what are the pros of Felix? We drove past a car dealership. Felix Chevrolet. Felix Chevrolet.

[00:08:49] I was hoping your kid's middle name was going to be Chevrolet. Felix Chevrolet Calari sounds like maybe like a pool hustler or something. There's something there. I think there's nothing off limits if your name is Felix Chevrolet Calari. But yeah, so, you know, not a big believer in signs, but this was a literal sign. And so we kind of went, well, we like the name. We just wanted to be happy. And Felix roughly translates to happy. So, well, here's a fun story.

[00:09:15] The first time I heard his kid's name was going to be Felix, he sent it in like a group text with a bunch of us. And I thought this was a very funny joke. But turns out everyone in the group chat thought it was just mean. But so he was like, oh, we're going to go with Felix. And he put up like a little cute picture of like the baby's name on like a little blackboard thing with some baby shoes or whatever. And everyone's like, ooh, ah, ah, ah. And then my response in this mixed company was, you know, you can name your baby for free. You don't have to go look for something. It's in the public domain.

[00:09:46] And everyone was like, what the fuck? And I was like, I thought that was hilarious. And we talk about that shit all the time. It was pretty funny. Now you guys know why I'm uniquely qualified to talk about going to hell. And since I don't want to go to hell for spending two weeks not calling out our beautiful producers of our much needed Patreon at the moment. Let me take a moment real fast to read off the producers in good standings for the month of January. And they are, in alphabetical order,

[00:10:12] Adriana L, Amanda M, Anne-Marie V, Ariel M, Audra M, Bambi F, Buttercup H, Cassandra O, Christopher F, Christopher M, Claire B, David V, Diana E, Donna B, Gabrielle G, Ibis Ibis Abis. I will one day read the email. I'm so sorry.

[00:10:31] Isabella C, O, Jeff Q, Jonathan B, Jonathan L, Justin H, Justin R, Carly C, Catherine L, Kevin W, Kirsten T, Kristen S, Kyle E, Lauren M, Lucas P, Madeline M, W, Marshall K, Matthew S, Melissa L, Nicole G, Ovial M, Roger E, Royce D, Samantha C, Sean K, Tabby F, Timothy M,

[00:11:01] and Will F. All right. Well, with that, everyone's been read. Five star reviews are out there in the world being ignored at the moment. And we are ready to go to hell. Yeah, guys, you guys know a lot of times if you leave a five star review, we will read it on the show. Not this week. Not this week. You know it. You love it. Sometimes we'll do it. So go leave a five star review and we might read it on the show. If you join the Patreon, depending on where you sign up, if you sign up at the top tier, you become a producer, your name can join that storied list.

[00:11:31] That Ed just read aloud to you. You get button of the month. So we set out a button every month. So you get exclusive merch that no one else gets. And there's a ton of other stuff that we offer live shows. So go check it out. Go check out the Patreon. Patreon.com backslash scared all the time. We might add a tier where you can just yell at Chris's baby. Yeah, exactly. Try and scare Chris's baby. Hey, hey, there's something there. We'll work on it. Sure. Yeah. So until then, enjoy this trip to hell.

[00:11:59] So before we get started, I do want to note that we are obviously going to be covering a lot of religious ground today. And that means two things. First and probably foremost, we might get some stuff wrong. Sorry in advance. We've gotten stuff wrong on this show before. I know in this case, it's probably stuff that might feel a little bit more personal to some of you or important than me saying a Greek name wrong or something. So, you know, if we do fuck something up, I apologize.

[00:12:27] We try to follow the research. But there are so many pockets and sex and permutations of belief and religion. It's almost impossible sometimes to speak accurately to everyone's personal interpretation. So if we get something wrong, we promise it's not for lack of trying. And feel free to correct us. That's part of the social contract of this show. You are cool with us making tasteless jokes about deeply personal subjects. And we're cool with you telling us that we're wrong. Try it, fools.

[00:12:56] I'll delete that damn email so fast. Ed tells me I'm wrong all the time. So I'm at least used to it coming across the mic at me. I don't say he's wrong. When do I say you're wrong? About what? That's a good question. Maybe you don't actually say I'm wrong very much. I guess you do only know the things that I tell you. There it is. So if I'm only wrong because you told me the wrong thing. So it's probably just me coming back being like, I said this shit I heard learning the show at a bar and now everyone's making fun of me. You were wrong. Well, correcting us goes double for this episode.

[00:13:24] And the other thing I want to flag kind of in relation to that is that, you know, we are going to be giving universal side eye to religions here. We don't find any one religion more or less correct than the others. Obviously, there are some religions, really one religion that's a little more instrumental in shaping the popular view of hell. And we'll be touching on that religion. Is that Flying Spaghetti Monster? Yes, you know it. The inventor of the devil, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

[00:13:53] So we'll be touching on those particular religions more than others, but we're not out to get anyone here. We both have devoutly religious family members who are probably worried that we're going to go to hell. So we're not here to upset anybody. That being said, Ed, how scared are you of going to hell? Depends on the day you ask me. Today, I don't know. Feeling okay about it? It depends what porn you were watching the night before. If I get to hell and they're like, oh, you watched porn? I'd be like, I'm going, fuck you.

[00:14:23] Like, that can't possibly be. I would never watch porn and then think I'm going to hell. That's crazy talk. I guess I don't think of hell. Just to go with your porn example, I don't see it as a sin. So I don't know. I don't remember anywhere in the Ten Commandments that it said, thou shalt not watch fucking porn. I think it might fall under thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife. Well, lust is one of the seven deadly sins. Yeah. So lust, I guess it would be a deadly sin. Covet thy neighbor's wife.

[00:14:50] I'm not watching marriedladiesonly.com or whatever. Like, I don't know if it's a website or not, but I fucking better not be. People are going to look it up. They should advertise on the show. If it's a website, give us a call. But anyway, to go back to whether or not I am afraid of hell. Yeah, I guess I'm afraid of it because we both grew up in a religion that really fucking thinks it's real. The only way I'd be afraid of hell is if they haven't updated the books. And I don't know if I've talked about this in the drug episodes or not.

[00:15:16] But what I guess I mean by that is, you know, if hell hasn't accounted for our changes in society, then I'm fucked. If it's still like, oh, if you use the Lord's name in vain or if you whatever fucking pilgrim shit, then yeah, we're all fucked. Well, okay, here's a question for you. Which of the Ten Commandments and or which of the Seven Deadly Sins would you be most worried about going to hell for? Ooh, gluttony. Okay. Definitely live a life.

[00:15:45] I live a pretty glutton-ass life. Fair. I don't know how many. Fair. I mean, to me, I don't think. Not murder. No, not murder. I don't think. The Seven Deadly Sins, I don't think, are actually things that send you to hell, but they seem appropriate to ask about. Does that come up in the episode, The Seven Deadly Sins? No. Interesting. I'm glad it came up now. We should maybe, as I'm sitting here racking my brain, years of Catholic school, couldn't probably name the Ten Commandments right now.

[00:16:11] I kind of feel like all those American citizens who, when an immigrant is doing their citizenship test and they know all this shit that we don't know about America. Right. I kind of feel that way about the Ten Commandments right now. So it's like, thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not forget any of these commandments. No, thank God. They should have made that number one. Number one is thou shalt not have any gods besides me. Yeah. So no false idols. Well, I think false idols might actually be a separate.

[00:16:40] Oh, boy. That's redundant. I think it might be. The top two, I think, are you shall have no other gods besides me. And then the second one, I think, is like no worshiping false idols because that's the whole golden calf. Yeah, I know that. Everyone knows that. And then there's don't take the Lord's name in vain. No murder. No coveting. Honor your father and mother, I think, is on there. I don't know. Anyway, I don't know. And I was stumbling through. Yeah, we didn't look it up. Half remembered. What I'm getting at is if we're like this, most people are like this.

[00:17:10] So you're going to end up going to hell. I'm going to be like, hey, why am I here? And they're going to say, oh, this commandment you broke. And I'll be like, I didn't even get that far down the list and remembering. I didn't even know I was breaking that commandment. Well, in Catholicism, there's like little sins and mortal sins. Yeah. And mortal sins are the ones that will get your ass sent to hell. Isn't suicide a mortal sin? Yes. It's fucked up. Yes. Shut out what dreams may come. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's a decent movie. I barely remember it. I don't.

[00:17:37] People didn't like it when it came out, but I feel like it's better. And I think I can see why they didn't like it, but it's still interesting and well done in its own way. Yeah. So, you know, I guess the question is, would you have committed a mortal sin recently? And I don't remember what all's on that list, but I do remember when I learned in confession that masturbation was something that had to be confessed to the priest. Oh, yeah. And I had to find out, I didn't realize what that word meant.

[00:18:03] And then when someone told me, I was like, I have to tell the priest that? Yeah. And suddenly a lot of bad things about the Catholic church make a lot more sense. They make a lot more fucking sense. I get this fucking letters to Penthouse in this little box every week. I hated confession. I would go in and I would just be like, I don't know. I swore I didn't do chores. Yeah. And then they were like seven Hail Marys. Well, because you and I also weren't.

[00:18:30] I mean, we're getting a little off topic now, but I feel like if you're a devout Catholic, confession probably is a really a healing process. I think when you're a kid and especially if you're not a devout kid, it does just feel like going to the principal's office. It definitely does. A little principal's office. And you're like, you're like, okay, what, what do I have to admit versus like, what can I just sort of be like? I don't know. I didn't do anything that bad. I guess I also weren't bad kids. No, we weren't bad kids.

[00:18:58] So it wasn't like I went in there and it was like, oh, crushed another neighbor's pet under my BMX wheel. Yeah. Experimented with the dog's organs this week. Yeah. And we didn't have any of that. So it was just like, oh, no, I didn't finish my chores. I think I was 30 years old when I found out that that's just a Catholic thing. So you paid no attention to religious education at any point. I don't remember any point in my religious education where they were like telling us what's exclusive to Catholicism.

[00:19:27] It wasn't until I started hanging out with friends who were just like generic ass Christian, non-denominational Christian, but they were like, oh, that's some Catholic shit. And I was like, excuse me? I feel like when I was in, well, you went to Catholic school. I went to a weekly religious education program. What was it? CCD? CCD. I had CCD as well. Oh, okay. Well, then in my CCD, I feel like I remember them talking about how confession was a special good thing that Catholics get to do this, that they get to have this relationship of forgiveness with God and other denominations don't.

[00:19:57] No, I don't remember that speech at all. The only thing I remember, I remember the feeling of the cold air getting dropped off at that church being like, well, I got it. My family's leaving me here with these strangers. I didn't love that. And the only thing I remember from CCD. I'm going to hell? Yeah. And then I had these like books. It's like a textbook, you know? And I didn't love that. And then also, I remember the kids used to say CCD stood for Central City Dump. Yeah, that was a Pennsylvania thing too.

[00:20:26] It worked its way down the East Coast or maybe up the East Coast. But yeah, Central City Dump was a... What the fuck? I don't know. I mean, it's a pre-internet meme, I guess. So crazy. Anyway, some of that will probably get cut down. But interesting stuff there. I was very scared of going to hell as a kid. Very scared. Oh, I didn't think about it as a kid. I think about it more now. I think about it way more now. Interesting. I don't know if I think about it more now. I probably... Because when I was a kid, I think we might have talked about this on the show before.

[00:20:56] But when I was a kid, I was really scared of the idea of eternity. Whether it was good eternity or bad eternity, I was scared of it because I couldn't comprehend it. I couldn't comprehend forever. Like, heaven... One of the reasons I was really skittish about the idea of Catholicism or religion in general was like, from a young age, I remember having a real problem with heaven as a good thing. Because from a young age, I just remember feeling like I couldn't conceptualize what it would be to be alive forever.

[00:21:25] And just the fact that I couldn't conceptualize it really scared me. And so, to add then torture on top of that, I was like, oh boy, this is bad. This is bad news. Bad news. And we talk a lot about this in the Bad Trips episode. So, a lot of people know my opinions on a lot of the hell stuff already. Yeah, because it's coming out after that. But these days, I mean, the fear a little bit still hangs over my head because it does get drilled in deep when you're a Catholic kid.

[00:21:53] I think if you're a lot of different kinds of Christian, it gets drilled in pretty deep. But these days, I'm about as worried about going to hell as I am worried about going to heaven, which is to say, not much at all. That's crazy to me. I feel like with each, I said this a minute ago, but each passing year, you know, a couple of near misses and shit this year too. Well, I didn't say I'm not afraid of dying. No, no, I'm saying no, I'm afraid of what's after. See, I'm- Because I don't, I think it's going to be nothing, but I don't want to be wrong. And that's why there's no atheist in a foxhole. Yeah.

[00:22:22] So, I have to start thinking, if it's not nothing, where do I land? Well, but if it's not, here's the, okay, here's how I think of it. More likely than not, it is some version of nothing. I would remain open to the idea that perhaps there is some sort of kind of Buddhist style cycling. Although there are, we'll get into it in a little bit, but there are some elements of hell, even in some of that kind of Eastern thought.

[00:22:47] But my feeling is, even if you are worried that there is an afterlife where there is a negative and a positive version to be experienced, there are so many different versions, even just within Christianity, of the rules and what matters and what's important and purgatory or not purgatory. And that, like, it's pretty much a coin toss.

[00:23:12] Sure, there's no atheist in a foxhole, but there's also, like, no one deciding which subset of evangelical Christianity they're going to become in that moment. Or if they'll be Mormon or if they'll become Muslim or if they'll be, you know, like, I guess what I'm saying is, if you're worried about experiencing someone's version of hell, then you have to hope that you are the one who is right. Because otherwise you're going to somebody else's hell.

[00:23:40] Yeah, for the first commandment, essentially, put no other god above this god. So that might be the same in another religion. And then it ends up being that religion runs things. Right, exactly. That you've already broken their first rule. Yes, you actually, I feel like for one of the few, well, that's a mean thing to say. No, you can say it. People should know what the pecking order around here is. I did say for one of the few times on this show, I feel like you actually helped clarify one of my ideas that was not coming out the way that I wanted it to. But no, you're exactly right.

[00:24:10] Like, yeah, you have to hope that whatever version of the afterlife you believe in, that you're right. Because otherwise you're probably crossing someone else's god and you will get sent to their hell. Which is part of why I try to not worry about it. Because the chance that I'm going to pick the one version of the afterlife that is correct is so small that, like, it's not up to me.

[00:24:30] But I think even evangelical Christians have some fucking thing about, if asked, well, what about the billion fucking Buddhists or Muslims or anything else who do believe in something else when they die? If you fully believe that Jesus is the one or whatever and this is the only religion, blah, blah, blah. I think their thought process is like, well, if they didn't know about Jesus, then they won't be penalized for it. Which I don't know how they can possibly know that.

[00:24:56] Well, every, it does, in doing a lot of research for this episode, most religions, and you can kind of imagine why, have some sort of an out for, well, what happens if a baby dies? Could a baby go to hell? Oh, yeah. Well, obviously no one wants a baby to go to hell. So everyone kind of has one. I want there to be so many babies in hell that they're like, that they're like, no room for you. Maybe it's a size thing. Maybe it's a finite amount of space. No.

[00:25:25] In which case, send them all down there so that there's no room for us. I think a fiery cavern full of screaming babies probably would be a version of hell. You're about to have. I might have had my kid by the time this episode comes out. Yeah. And if you had already had your kid and the fire did get to your house, you would have had a fiery cabin with a screaming kid. Yeah. Sorry, son, if you're hearing this. We're not fantasizing about your burning death. We're discussing it. What do you call it when a little kid dies?

[00:25:54] Is it fatalizing? There's a word similar to that. Well, infanticide is if you kill a child. Yeah. So we're not fantasizing, nor are we hoping for infanticide. Well, if a kid died in a fire, that wouldn't be infanticide. You have to kill the kid for it to be infanticide. It's like homicide. I mean, there's a lot of stuff swirling around. This is arson. I don't know what you were doing that night. Yeah. Yeah. I set the Pasadena fires. Don't you dare say it on the air. Can't even get a gas tank shipped here.

[00:26:28] This is already a fascinating conversation. It has gone way off of the research, but I feel like this is all really interesting. I guess the point that I was trying to make was that I'm not super worried about going to hell because I think it's almost impossible to be on the right side of whatever God there is because there's a thousand virgins. So I don't really worry about it too much because I also have to assume, I don't know, the older I get, I do get more broadly spiritual.

[00:26:54] And I generally believe that like as long as you are a good person and you are generally like I'm far from perfect, but I do try to live my life in service of others as much as I can. I try to not lose my temper. I try to be generous and kind and caring. I try to if I encounter someone, I want their day to be better for having had encountered me. And I try to live my life that way.

[00:27:17] And I feel like not that it'll be any better if I still end up in hell anyway, because I didn't pledge allegiance to the proper God. But I don't know. It's like, what else can you really do? Yeah, I'm a big golden rule guy. Yeah. Obviously a social contract guy. Yeah. I do think that if fucking tomorrow all of the religious doctrines of the world fell away, I would ultimately still find their way back to the golden rule in some way because you want to live amongst other people. You don't want to be just the worst or else you can't build a community.

[00:27:47] I don't think that it's surprising that the rules that will get you sent to hell if you break them tend to be the rules that are closest to... Like the laws of this land? Well, they're the rules that guide you as a product... Not even productive, but just a... Beneficial member of society. A beneficial member of society. Yeah. And then, I mean, of course, as we'll get into with a lot of this, many religions have very specific rules of things that can get you sent to hell that I think are kind of ridiculous. Which, well, I'm sure we'll get into that.

[00:28:17] But generally, the big ones for everyone revolve around like, hey, we're social animals. We have to work together to function. Here's generally, you know, if you are lusting after your neighbor's wife, if you're murdering, if you're stealing, you know, these are the things that will break down the ability to function. Even to live as cavemen. Like, you live as cavemen. Yeah, it makes sense. That's why I don't think we necessarily... I'm not the first person to say this. Maybe you are. No, I'm definitely not. I don't think we necessarily...

[00:28:46] I'm not saying to do away with religion by any means. It offers a lot. I think community is very important, even if that community is a church group or, you know what I mean? Like Sunday school or Big Brothers Club. Anything like that. Just a sense of community. Having something in your life where you feel a sense of community, I think, is important. And if religion is that for certain people, then absolutely I'm fucking for it. I'm not trying to get rid of it. But I do think that religion didn't come around. Like I just said, we would still fucking end up there.

[00:29:13] I don't think because the fucking Ten Commandments exist, we behave as a civilized group of people. I think you would have ended up there anyway. And then there's two versions of the Golden Rule, too, which are the same but kind of weirdly different. There's, you know, do unto others as you would want done unto you. But I think they're equally valid. Don't do unto others as you wouldn't want done unto you, which I think is more along the lines of Judaism has that version of the Golden Rule. Like the wording's different. Interesting. I didn't come across that.

[00:29:43] I'll cut this if it isn't. And if you're hearing it right now, then I guess I was more right than I was wrong. But real fast before we move on. It seems like in media, not the news, but like popular entertainment. I don't want like a defending your life situation. It's a good idea. I mean, I love the movie Defending Your Life. And there are elements in like Dante's Inferno and different things where there are these judges, like Minos, whatever his name is. Right.

[00:30:08] And you have to get sat down and they're going to tell you like, hey, while you're down here, I don't love that idea. You don't want to be judged or you don't want to have to defend your actions. I don't. I have no problem being judged. But yeah, I don't love the idea of defending my actions. And I also don't know if we're going to be given the opportunity to defend them in a way that makes sense.

[00:30:30] No, if there's a judgmental set of rules to the operation of the punishment or reward of the universe, you're not going to get a chance to defend yourself. There's too many people coming in. Yeah. And the entity in charge clearly at that point doesn't really care. Like the rules have been set.

[00:30:47] I mean, the gamble that I am taking, that you were taking, that sounds like I'm taking more so than you, is that there is no sentient entity who has written down a list of things that said, you're either going into this camp or you're going. Well, maybe I shouldn't use the word camp, but like, you know, you're either going into this room or that room, you know, like if that exists, then yeah, most of us are probably fucked. And I mean, it's taught to you at an early age, definitely for Christians.

[00:31:15] It's taught at an early age that like hell's a thing and you don't want to go there, but it's reinforced with Christmas where it's like, there's even a list of good and bad. Like there's punishment for not being good and bad, even on like Christianity's most happy holiday. Yeah, no, that's a really interesting. I went to a Baptist Christmas Eve service and even that service was fire and brimstone, man.

[00:31:39] It was, hey, you know, you might think you're a good person, but you haven't proclaimed the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. It doesn't matter. You're going to hell. Guess what? You might love the Jews. You might love Muslims. You might love Mormons. Doesn't matter. They're going to hell unless they accept Christ as their Lord and Savior. And it is your job to help them achieve that. I've heard that before, too. And that kind of thought, I think, is really disruptive and awful. And because that's what results in so much conflict.

[00:32:08] And I'm not saying Christians are the only people who do this. I mean, obviously, most of the major or not even the major world religions, but many religions and many subsects of religions. You pick it. Religion, politics, anything. They all have to run the fucking news. You all have to run on. Like, if it bleeds, it leads. Yeah. And I just feel more kind of live and let live. Like right now, every time I've ever like questioned that shit at any age, they don't really want to talk about it. No. Anytime you ask like a logic based question to a lot of that shit, they get to fall back on like it's faith.

[00:32:37] That's the whole point of the word. Blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, well, just have faith that I'm going to go do all the things you asked me to do. You know, without feeling like you have to hold a sign outside of Comic-Con fucking screaming at a bunch of nerds saying that they're all going to go to hell for reading comic books. Because that's a good use of anyone's time. I'm going to butcher the line, but there's a line in the movie Conclave that came out this year, which I loved until like the last five minutes. And I felt like it was just that I understood what the film was trying to do, but I like I almost feel like the movie didn't need a twist. Didn't need a twist. Yeah. We watch it together. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[00:33:07] I didn't need a twist ending. But anyway, some of the debate in the film, the characters are debating the path that the Catholic Church should take, whether it should be a more open church or whether it should be a more conservative church. And there's a line that somebody in the movie says about how like being sure about religion is almost counterproductive because otherwise what is faith for? Like not being sure is where faith comes in.

[00:33:36] And if you try to create a church or any kind of group that is based around certainty, then you're losing faith. Well, I think certainty is the word they use in the movie. Yes. That like certainty is what gets them off on that discussion. But yeah, every time I brought it up, I mean, I have some questions. There's a thing that the Mormons do that it's I think they call it putting it on a shelf. Is that what it is? I don't know.

[00:33:59] Where like if you have like a question that's kind of too big for the church, their recommendation is just like put it on a shelf, which is essentially means shut the fuck up. Like I don't want to discuss this with you. I think I saw it in like Under the Banner of Heaven or something, so I don't even know how accurate it is. Yeah. No, you're right. I just I just looked it up. Okay. Putting questions on a shelf in the Mormon community refers to setting aside doubts or concerns about faith in order to maintain belief and avoid conflict with church teachings. Exactly.

[00:34:25] So that's what I feel like a lot of us are doing anyway with all religions, too, because you get to the point where you're like, wait, so if I don't have Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, me and everyone I know, we're going to go to hell. Well, I can't actually answer that for you. Well, there's plenty of there's plenty of Christians who would say I'll answer that for you. Absolutely. Well, their certainty is good, though. I don't think certainty is great when it comes to religion, because I think certainty creates conflict.

[00:34:50] I have no issue with people who believe for themselves whatever they want to believe and live their lives that way. But, yeah, that the certainty is can can become nasty, which is unfortunate. And this episode isn't about really any of this. So we don't have to continue on this this path. But, yeah, we have questions, as everyone should. I mean, that's that's what's so interesting about the mystery of faith and all that. And, you know, you can ask all these questions. You should be totally fine to ask whatever question you want. And I will say I will say before we move on.

[00:35:20] Last thing I'll say is I do for as angry as I was as a kid about religion and for as frustrated by it as I was and confused and all that. And my parents are very conservative Catholics. But while they would tell me that I was wrong when I would bring up questions, I was allowed to bring up questions. You know, there wasn't like just shut up and believe. Yeah.

[00:35:45] You know, like I was allowed to I would have the questions and it would usually come around to like, well, that's the mystery of faith. And it doesn't matter. You're going to church anyway. But I was never shut down in the asking. And I do think that is I'm very glad that my family allowed for that because not every family does. And even though it resulted in me drifting from the church, I think it's also resulted in me having a much more curious, open mind.

[00:36:11] And I've become more open to the idea of religion and other religions. And because I was allowed to ask these questions instead of just being told, no, it's this shut up, which, you know, that doesn't that's no good for anyone. Get it out of here. I mean, look, the founding fathers of this here United States were all about that separation of church and state. So they were.

[00:36:30] Well, you and I are not super worried about going to hell, but we are probably in the minority on this because according to patheos.com, a site that explores a wide variety of world religions, quote, nearly all religions believe in hell, a realm of retribution or purification. After death. Again, not necessarily the Christian hell. We're using the term hell just broadly here, a place of punishment, a place of retribution. Yeah, the royal hell. As a result, royal hell. Great band name.

[00:36:58] As a result of wicked activity or rejecting God, it is frequently linked to suffering or torment. While each religion has its own version of hell, they all share a common goal to deal with human depravity and its conflict with the divine. In the world's religions, hell is represented as both a physical and a metaphysical realm in which rebellious persons in the afterlife endure divine justice due to their sins and rejection of God.

[00:37:21] Hell is frequently characterized as a place of fire and suffering and is thought to be a place of perpetual separation from God. So we're living in hell. Los Angeles is fire and suffering. I think there's many people in this country that would probably tell you Los Angeles is hell, whether it's on fire or not. Yeah, they're the same people would also tell you that you're going to hell. Yeah. No exceptions, full stop. Christian hell, for the purposes of our discussion here, is pretty straightforward. You know it, you love it. You're hopefully doing your best to avoid it.

[00:37:51] But Jesus described hell as a region of, quote, outer darkness and, quote, everlasting burning in the book of Matthew in the New Testament. 17th century Puritan Christopher Love puts a finer point on it, telling us, quote,

[00:38:05] Hell is a place of torment, ordained by God for devils and reprobate sinners, wherein by his justice he confines them to everlasting punishment, tormenting them both in body and soul, being deprived of God's favor, objects of his wrath, under which they must lie to all eternity. Which sounds pretty drastic. But it also sounds like a bummer for the devil, because it's like, you're telling me God runs hell? If I'm the devil, I'd be like, can I have one thing?

[00:38:33] I fucking left to have one thing. That's true. Christopher Love here is trying to sort of reframe the idea of hell as a place ordained by God to put devils instead of giving the devil any credit for anything. Yeah. I would have left, too. Yeah. Fuck you guys. There's only so many times you can work and work and work without getting any level of recognition. In there, buddy.

[00:38:57] We'll get into it more in a bit, but the conception of hell in popular culture, as surprised as probably none of you, is derived almost exclusively from Christian depictions. Which, again, for our purposes here, is sort of less interesting because you've all heard of it. So I wanted to explore some other faiths depictions of hell. And that led me into an exploration of Muslim hell, because I don't really know anything about it. And again, this is where I don't want to offend if we have any Muslim listeners.

[00:39:26] I hope that I'm speaking somewhat accurately here for my research, but I have zero experience with this, and I do not claim to be any sort of a true scholar. So bear with me if I get any of this wrong. But from what I was able to read across a broad variety of sources, hell and Islam is actually pretty similar, if not maybe a little bit scarier than Christian hell.

[00:39:50] Muslims believe in, quote, eternal reward in heaven, which is known as Jannah. But disbelievers and evildoers face another destination, hellfire, which is Jannah. The Quran contains many warnings and descriptions of the severity of this eternal punishment. And it emphasizes that only those who follow the righteous path and adhere to God's commandments will be rewarded.

[00:40:15] Meanwhile, those who reject faith and commit wrongdoings are repeatedly reminded of the grave consequences awaiting them in the hereafter. There are a couple specific punishments detailed in the Quran. First being eternal blazing hellfire fueled by, quote, men in stones. One line in the Quran tells us, quote, but he whose balance of good deeds is found to be light will have his home in a bottomless pit. And what will explain to you what this is? A fire blazing fiercely.

[00:40:44] So Muslims have hellfire to look forward to in hell. Both those guys, Christian hell's got fire. They've got fire. I mean, they're all from that part of the, they're all from that region. Well, I don't think it's the region. I think there's just a, you know, if we're going with the idea that hell is real, maybe it's just fiery and people have different understandings of what sends you there. And then beyond that, I think fire is just sort of maybe the oldest and most painful way that people could consider dying. And it's scary. And it's scary.

[00:41:12] In the sense that the first, I think, I can't remember which, it might just be the original Cosmos, the book, not the show. Where Carl Sagan has this like unbelievable like chapter, but with some credible passages about like what first humans who saw fire must have, they must have thought it was an animal. They must have thought it was this. Oh, it hurt. It's like, oh, it's, I can't remember any to even paraphrase. There's a lot of really interesting, like to me, thought provoking ideas about like fire and its origin and how fucking scary it was. But anywho, yeah, you're right.

[00:41:42] Fire goes back a while. It sucks. And a lot of people who live in the fucking desert who were writing this shit originally is they're just used to how uncomfortable hot shit can be. Yeah. Then though, in the Quran, there's a lot of mention of something that isn't featured heavily or at all in Christian hell. Boiling water. Boiling water is a big punishment here. I think it makes sense that there wouldn't be much cool or moderately temperatured water in a burning, fiery hell.

[00:42:09] If hell is all about making things uncomfortable for you, it's kind of funny, actually, that they would just straight up not have cool water. But there are quite a few mentions of this boiling water in hell in the Quran. You ever put some noodles in a fucking pot too quickly and it splashes up on you? Boiling water is super hot. I mean, ask, you know, at lobsters, crabs. I did just see something that like there's some scientists in the UK that are trying to ban the use. It's like cooking lobsters because they can feel it?

[00:42:37] Yeah, because studies have shown that it is like a hard, painful, awful process. Get rid of them then. I don't eat that shit. Listen, lobsters, here's my advice. Evolve to scream. If we could hear you scream. They say they can hear it. Can they? That goes back a long time. Well, actually, yeah. I don't think it's like the Wilhelm scream. I think it's like its own little. Strike that from the record because cows and pigs and birds scream and we kill them by the millions anyway. Yeah, but that I do eat, so I'm in support.

[00:43:06] You heard it here first. Fucking monster. I'm going to get someone to throw a bunch of fucking like pig blood on me when I leave. Red paint. There are quite a few mentions of the water and hell in the Quran. From the soul's curse to wander around through boiling water to the, quote, boiling fetid water that is the only drink given to quench your eternal thirst. Oh, no. No, thank you. Boiling water? To this passage, quote, those who deny their lord for them will be cut out a garment of fire. Over their heads will be poured out boiling water.

[00:43:36] With it will be scalded what is within their bodies as well as their skins. In addition, there will be maces of iron to punish them. Every time they wish to get away there from, from anguish, they will be forced back and it will be said, taste the penalty of burning. So you're wearing a burning outfit. Yes. You're getting burning water, like boiling water poured on you. At which point? And they make you drink it. I feel like that must all feel the same at that point. Well, they must have some supernatural element. I mean, they must because we're living forever over there.

[00:44:06] True. But you can't. There's a lot of people who are tortured who die. Yes. During torture. And so they must have some sort of supernatural thing to keep us alive because there's no way you're getting through like even a third of that. Yeah, no. I mean, you're just suffering forever, basically. That sounds like a bummer, dude. They're laying it on thick. All because you use the Lord's name in vain once. Well, in this case, the fucking thing you said earlier about this Muslim one is that it said, was it deny the Lord and do bad things?

[00:44:33] He whose balance of good deeds is found to be light. No, no, no. I'm for that. If people are a fucking dick their whole lives, they should get out of here. Those who deny their Lord, for them will be cut out a garment of fire. No, no. I'm talking about when you first started this whole section. I'm not asking you to go back, but I did find it interesting that whatever it was, it was something like to basically not have God in your life. It didn't say that and do bad deeds. And I'll just pull it up on the fucking thing if I find it. It was that or bad deeds. It was like just straight up being like, I don't believe in God.

[00:45:03] It sounds like at the beginning of this was enough to get you down to this place. Oh, for sure. And that is fucking crazy. Well, I think across the board in certain more conservative denominations of many religions, you don't have to say or even think, I don't believe in God. You just have to break enough of God's rules, even if they're small, to kind of show that you don't give a fuck. And then that counts as you're not.

[00:45:29] Well, the way I don't like the wording of this thing earlier because I don't like that if I'm living my life by the golden rule, Sunday school teachings, straight up being an asset to the community, being a good person. And then you end up in hell because even though you did all that, you weren't like 100% committed to the fact that so and so is your Lord and Savior. Yeah. And then you still get sent down there. Bummer. That's bullshit. And I'm sure a lot of people say that to their faces when they get down there. Probably. You know what you're eating in Muslim hell? Boiling water? No.

[00:45:58] You're drinking boiling water. What you're eating is food from the tree of zakum, which sounds like the absolute worst. In heaven, there's plenty of fresh fruit and honey and milk, but in hell, there is a, quote, tree that springs out of the bottom of hellfire. The shoots of its fruit stalks are like the heads of devils. Truly, they will eat thereof and fill their bellies therewith. Then on top of that, they will be given a mixture made of, Ed, you did get this right, boiling water. Oh, shit.

[00:46:28] Then shall their return be to the blazing fire. Verily, another line says, the tree of deadly fruit will be the food of the sinful. Like molten lead, it will boil in the belly like the boiling of burning despair. Okay. Well, I don't know. That just seems like some of that language superfluous. Look, I think it's a, it is a, they're not pulling any punches here. It's a pretty vicious punishment. And they're overfeeding you, it sounds like, too?

[00:46:53] I think they're overfeeding you with the shoots of the heads of devils and boiling your guts. You remember that in The Simpsons when Homer goes to hell and they have to feed him donuts? Oh, yeah. Find a thing he loves and to make him hate it. But he was just like, the machines like break down. They're like, I've never, what the fuck is wrong with this guy? He just keeps eating donuts. Finally, the Quran makes a big deal out of the fact that anyone tossed into hell will really regret it. Which like, yeah. Obviously. But I also find kind of ease extensionally terrifying. Existentially.

[00:47:23] You always say ease extensionally. There's a couple words I will never pronounce correctly. And this is one of them, but I find this kind of existentially terrifying because realizing that you've made a terrible mistake after it's too late is kind of its own worst fear for me. Yeah, that's true. And I do it, well, too fucking often, honestly. Yeah. We've made some terrible mistakes in our past. But the thing is, those are terrible mistakes of like faux pas. Yes. They're not like, oh no, I'm in hell now. Oh, I doomed myself. Yeah.

[00:47:51] I think this goes for Christian hell, too. The idea of like, you will regret being down here. But the passages from the Quran are just like, mwah. So the Quran warns that when people are dragged into hellfire, many people will instantly regret the choices they made in their lives and will beg for another chance. Quote, And those who followed would say,

[00:48:19] And then another passage reads, That's a slap in the face. There's a real no return policy. There's a real no return policy. That's being enforced. I do like some of that language of like, given seven lifetimes. Yeah.

[00:48:49] In going back and being the best person you can ever fucking be. We're still not going to accept it as valid currency down here. No. Now, I will say, and this is one of the places where I was saying like, you know, it's, I'm a little bit unclear on some of this stuff. There does seem to be some debate as to how eternal Islamic hell is. It's 28 minutes. Well, I think it's a lot longer than that. Wait, 28 minutes of some of these things they described. You're not alive anyway. No.

[00:49:14] I found some sources like IslamQA.info that are clear that you suffer forever. Other sources like this one website I found about Islam.net say that true eternal hell is reserved for people who have committed the only unforgivable sin, shirk, or worshiping anyone or anything instead of or alongside God himself. No, that's us. Well, that's all. That's the number one. But I'm saying that's us.

[00:49:39] Like if it ends up being Allah, whomever is the real one. Yeah. Well, then they're saying right now we're, it's eternal for us. Yeah. But we didn't even know. We're eating the fruit of Zakkum, baby. Oh my God. We got Zakkum for days. We're done. Zakkum is always in season down here. Other believers who have not repented of their major sins may spend a duration in hell to purify themselves of their sins before being admitted into paradise. And Allah knows best who is a true believer. Shit.

[00:50:08] Did you ever read Dante's Inferno? Yes. So it's got the, it's like, it's not, when I was younger, I thought it was just about hell, but it's, there's like a hell one. And there's fucking paradise. And then there's purgatory. Yeah. The thing that blew my mind about it when I was reading the, like the non hell ones or studying them from some sort of cliff notes is because it's a giant poem guys. Calm down. Is, uh, and it doesn't even rhyme. It wasn't rhyme. It sucks.

[00:50:36] Is that like when people, it's kind of what you just said, when people go to heaven and you're at the pearly gates or whatever it would be. In my mind, I'm like, oh, you're a good person. Get the fuck in here. But in that they're like, no, no, no. No, you might have done shit in your life. It's like not a mortal sin, but it's greasy. And so you have to like sit out here essentially in the stocks. It's not the stocks, but I think there was like some fucked up shit. Like a tree root grows around you. Like you really can't move and shit. And it was like, you know what? You got to deal with this for 90 fucking years.

[00:51:06] And then that should cover the little sins you had done. Then we'll let you in. So surprisingly, like that story, the like Dante's Virgil story is strangely similar. Very similar to this Muslim rule you're talking about where, you know, you got a little penance to do, but then you can come on in. Well, it's purgatory. Yeah. Yeah. But so purgatory. It's just interesting to look at, for me, the similarities between these religions that are disparate. They're like from faraway places or. Yeah. But then again, this wasn't a faraway place. I think Jesus is in the Quran.

[00:51:36] He's in the credits. He's special. Thanks. So yeah, a lot of the websites that I used to do this research did, they did encourage you to not just read these websites, but to talk to your mom or a Quranic scholar about the answers to these questions. Instead, you decided to talk to me. So instead, I decided to talk to Ed.

[00:52:00] So again, all that information, I think I did the best that I could to research, but your mileage may vary with some of that. Buddhists have a conception of hell, too, though with pretty distinct differences from the Abrahamic religions. Buddhists' hell are called narakas, or various hell realms or states of intense suffering.

[00:52:22] As opposed to the eternal torment in Christian and Islamic versions of hell, these narakas are temporary states of existence where beings may be reborn as a result of their negative karma. In Buddhist texts, there are typically several major types of narakas. The hot narakas. Okay, I'm ready. So no, no, no. Oh. You know what this is. It's fire. There's eight levels of fire narakas where beings experience different degrees of burning and torture. I thought it was like a naraka centerfold. No.

[00:52:52] And then there's some big knockers on that naraka. Oh, my God. Narakas. Take that out of the throw. Can't figure it out. Or I'll leave it in. The cold narakas are also usually about eight levels where beings suffer from extreme cold. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Then the neighboring narakas which surround the major hell realms and the temporary or minor narakas. Each naraka is said to have specific types of suffering corresponding to particular karmic actions.

[00:53:19] So, for example, those who committed acts of violence might experience similar violence in certain hell realms. Take that, you piece of shit. One of the other major differences between hell, as most of us think of it, and these narakas is that in Buddhism, these states are not viewed as punishment from a divine being. A punishment passed down to you at the pearly gates, like you were saying, and defending your life situation. But instead, they are the natural consequences of one's own actions. Oh, that's fun.

[00:53:48] So, there is no being saying, you've done this, you go to this naraka, you've done this, you go to this naraka. Well, you haven't broken the rules of a superior entity. It's a mirror dimension where it's like everything you throw at this is just going to throw it exactly back at you. So, if you, when you were a human being, decided to be this, this, and that, well, guess what? You're about to meet like your nega self. Well, yeah, it's quite literally karma. I mean, it is karma. I should have just said karma. Although karma, I think, is misused a lot.

[00:54:18] In this case, it is literally the religious version of karma. Like, the duration of time spent in these narakas varies depending on the karma that led to that rebirth. But all the stays are temporary. So, once the negative karma is exhausted, the being, you, will be reborn into another realm. I'm liking this Buddha stuff so far. I like Buddha in general. I don't know if he's not the god, right? He's just a guy, Buddha? He's just the guy. He's the...

[00:54:46] I'm saying he's the one that most looks like me. He's... He's... Well, him and I have similar bods. And I like that he's got a lot of temporary shit. Yeah. The Buddha is just the teacher, not the... Yeah. The god. There's no, like, god, I guess. There might be multiple gods. We'll find out. Hindus also have narakas. Famously have multiple gods. Famously have multiple gods. And the idea here is pretty similar. Narakas in Hinduism are punishments that must be suffered in order to be purified and eventually reborn.

[00:55:15] But there are a few differences. One of these differences is the number of them. The holy books in Hinduism, the Puranas, or a sacred text like the Garuda Puranas, describes 28 main narakas as opposed to the main 16 in Buddhism. There are some texts that mention different numbers. Again, this is one of the things where, like, I couldn't quite figure out. Well, 16 is interesting because that's a multiple of eight, where 28 is a multiple of seven, which is a...

[00:55:44] Seven seems to be, like, in all of the world religions. So eight is interesting on its own. All right. Beautiful mind over here coming in with the numerology. I'm just... The myths made me think. It's true. No, you're right. You're right. I didn't use a fucking Enigma machine to do it. I just was... Hindu narakas also feature specific demon torturers called Yamadutas, carrying out the punishments named after Yama, the god of death and dharma, who acts as a judge.

[00:56:11] And that is really the big difference here is that in Buddhism, there is no judgment. They reject that idea. It's your actions cause the reactions. Whereas in Hinduism, this Yama, the god of death and dharma, judges what kind of suffering is going to be handed out to you. So it's not a natural consequence of your karma. Sure. I love the names and themes of some of the Hindu naraka realms. I'm sure you'll pronounce them all perfectly.

[00:56:41] I've got them lined up. Mispronouncing them could get you sent to a naraka, bro. There's Tamisra, the dark realm where people who steal others' possessions are sent. Okay. There's Antahatamisra, the realm of blind darkness for those who deceive and exploit others. There's Rarava. I can hear it in my head, but I can't get the consonants out. It's R-A-U-R-A-V-A. Rarava. Doesn't matter. Whatever it is.

[00:57:09] It's the realm of screaming is what it translates to. And I'll tell you right now, people who know what that word's supposed to be are living in a realm of screaming at their fucking podcast player. You're going to Naraka tonight. I think there's going to be a lot of people during this episode who feel the way that I do when I'm listening to people who don't know a lot about movies, try to remember the names or stars of movies. Yeah, it's infuriating. It drives me up the fucking walls. It's fine.

[00:57:37] Those people have already turned this episode off fucking 20 minutes ago. So I just love the idea that there is a realm of screaming for those who harm others. And then there is the Maha Rarava, the great realm of screaming, which is reserved for murderers and those who cause extreme harm. Do you notice that both of those were modifiers? Like both, and I may be using the word incorrectly, because that just goes with the shows in general. But like the first one, if I'm listening correctly, it was like darkness, then blind darkness.

[00:58:06] Then screaming and great screaming. Then great screaming. Yeah. So some sequels going on. Then there's the Kumbi Paka, where those who harm or kill animals are punished. I appreciate that. I think it's great to have. They get their own. Special section of hell. Yeah. Take that. All these people fucking cutting shark fins off. And then there is the Asepa Travana, the sword leafed forest for those who harm others through false testimony. Oh shit. So if you talk shit on somebody, basically,

[00:58:36] you might go to the sword leafed forest. I don't know. If I talked shit on somebody and that was true, what I was talking about, I'm not going to the sword leafed forest. Well, if it was true, but that, then it wouldn't be false testimony. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. You mentioned. Well, sure. I guess we're talking shit would have to be like, I made it up. I guess. Yeah. I mean, by talking shit, I guess I mean like spreading gossip and lies. Yeah. Yeah. Spreading gossip and lies. I'm honestly, I'm for a lot of these so far. Well, seek hell for Sikhs. The religion Sikhs. Oh, I didn't know that was a whole different thing.

[00:59:06] I thought that was an offshoot of. For my money, Sikhs have one of the least scary, but also most compelling versions of heaven and hell around. According to weareseeks.org, Sikhs do not believe in heaven or hell as destinations. For Sikhs, heaven can be experienced by drawing near to God during life, while the suffering and pain caused by ego is considered hell on earth. In Sikhism, spiritual acts are positive experiences with effects felt on earth and after death,

[00:59:36] rather than sacrifices made in order to collect a reward that is waiting after death. Interesting. The main purpose of life, according to Sikhism is to become one with the God. This is pursued by a life focused on remembering the creator always, earning an honest living as a householder, and sharing one's abundance with the less fortunate. In death, we believe we become one with God and the universe. Huh. Plus, Sikhs get to carry sick daggers, so I think I might be Sikh curious, honestly.

[01:00:06] Oh, okay. Sure. You know what I'm talking about? The knives, the daggers they carry? To like kind of round? Yeah. To like kind of crescent shape? Fuck yeah. I love that idea though. Like, to me, that is exactly the kind of spiritual practice that is worth pursuing. Yeah. Yeah. I also like that they put a premium on being alive. Yeah. Well, because that's all we can be sure of. And while I think there's certainly, you know,

[01:00:31] an argument to be made that there are things in life that you should do or ways that you should act, even if you aren't explicitly sure of how it is benefiting you or somebody else directly in the moment because of something that might be beyond our understanding. I don't know. It does to me. It feels like it makes a lot of sense that you prioritize the here and now and the way you act in the here and now and the way you treat others in the here and now because that's what we have. Yeah. So. Yeah, it's interesting.

[01:01:00] It's the first time it's come up. Yeah. So that brings us to Jewish hell. I didn't even know they had one. They do sort of. It's called Shul. And according to the Torah dot com, the Hebrew Bible does not offer a clear cut depiction of what happens to a person upon death. Shul, whose etymology is unclear, is the most common term used for where people go after they die.

[01:01:29] It connotes going down into the ground. But many scholars feel it's ambiguous as to whether or not the term refers to a specific underworld as a place. The Torah dot com gives us a few examples of such ambiguity, like in Genesis 37, 35, when Jacob expresses his sadness for the untimely death of his son. Refusing to be consoled, he announces, for I will go down mourning to my son in Shul. And the meaning here is unclear.

[01:01:57] Does Jacob literally mean he will go down and see Joseph in the underworld? Or does he simply mean this poetically, stating that he will be dead like his son when he lies in the grave? In another example, after Yahweh tells King Hezekiah that he will shortly die, Hezekiah composes a poem. The text refers to it as a letter bemoaning his fate. In Isaiah 38, 10, it says, I had thought I must depart in the middle of my days. I have been consigned to the gates of Shul for the rest of my years.

[01:02:26] And here the article notes that while Shul could simply be elevated language for death, the reference to gates makes it sound like more than just a grave. There's a ton of really interesting information about the Jewish afterlife that I never knew. For instance, Ecclesiastes claims that people like animals. People are like animals. That people like animals. Oh, I mean, both are true. Both are true. Simply end in dust. Quote, For in respect to the fate of man and the fate of beast, they have one and the same fate.

[01:02:56] As the one dies, so dies the other. And both have the same life breath. Man has no superiority over beast since both amount to nothing. From dust to dust, man. From dust to dust. Why from ashes to ashes? Is that a saying? From, from, from the, yeah, the, the line in, at least as I learned it in Catholic school was, uh, from dust we came to dust we shall return. That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah. Is that what this guy's talking about? He just said. Basically, yes. Yeah.

[01:03:23] He's just, but he's also throwing in fucking birds and barn animals being like, they have, they're equally ash based, dust based creatures. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're all star stuff. Ecclesiastes 9.5 also claims that the dead do not know anything and that none of their personality, consciousness, or connection to the world continues after their death. Quote, their loves, their hates, their jealousies have long since perished and they have no more share until the end of time and all that goes on under the sun.

[01:03:50] A little bit later, Ecclesiastes 9.10, whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might for there is no action, no reasoning, no learning, no wisdom in Shoal where you are going. Oh, interesting. It's another person who kind of puts a priority on, on the living. Yeah. Yeah. This is all very modern and materialist sounding. Life is life and death is death and never the two shall meet. On the other hand, the article tells us that many biblical texts accept that the dead know

[01:04:18] things and several texts mentioned necromancers who can call on the dead and ask them questions. Who killed me? Well. That was a horrible movie. I watched that the other night. Yeah. I watched it. I know who killed me. The Lindsay Lohan movie. I watched it with the Shrug Buds guys and Hey, I actually thought about it earlier as you were talking about how that one of the hells had like cold in the raucous and there's a lot of torture porn in that movie. And some of it was using like dry ice to frostbite people's limbs off and stuff. Oh shit.

[01:04:48] Super fucked up. Wait, how many people get killed? And I know who killed me. I thought it was just Lindsay Lohan knew who killed her. Yeah. But I didn't know that there was such a torture porn element to her murder. For a second, I also, my brain just got really confused and I thought we were talking about conclave again. And I was like, I don't remember that. You went to the bathroom for that part. Stanley Tucci burned a bunch of fucking people with ice. And so, yeah, you know, I'm just saying that the dead, they know who killed them. And so there's a reason to use a necromancer. Yes.

[01:05:16] Well, this particular example isn't about asking a dead man who killed him, but there is- Missed opportunity. There is a story of King Saul. I don't think anyone killed anyone in this example. I mean, God, in the Old Testament was being like, kill your kids, kill your brothers, kill your uncles, kill your friends. In this case, King Saul asked a necromancer to call up Samuel, a man named Samuel, so that he can ask him a question. I think Samuel was like, I hope he asks me who kills me. No. Because I would love for this crime to be solved.

[01:05:46] I think Samuel just- You only get one question with the dead. I think he maybe had a heart attack. I don't know. There's no indication that he was killed in any way. Falafel killed him then. I don't know. He ate too much food, and now he's got a heart attack. Samuel appears to the necromancer as he appeared when alive. Naked and erect. No. No. He appears as an old man wrapped in a mantle. And his first statement to Saul is, why have you disturbed me and brought me up? It goes on from there. Do you think the opposite is referenced to his erection? No.

[01:06:14] As far as I know- Nobody's erect in the Bible? No, but well, they might be erect somewhere in the Bible, but they're definitely not erect in this story. The point that I'm trying to make, and the point that the article is trying to make that I'm pulling from here, is that it's pretty clear that this is a dead man living some kind of conscious existence in Shul, where he returns when the necromancer is finished with their questions. Otherwise, he wouldn't have asked, why have you disturbed me?

[01:06:40] If he had no consciousness, he would not know that he was being disturbed and being brought somewhere else. Yeah. He instead would have been like, oh shit, I'm back. Yeah. Yeah. So what's most important though, is that according to the Hebrew Bible, the righteous and the wicked, the mighty and the meek will all end up in Shul together. God in the Hebrew Bible has no relationship to the dead. And whatever qualities you give it, death, the grave, Shul is frightening and ungodly. Despite the fact that it is inevitable and universal, death is considered a bad thing that

[01:07:10] should be avoided for as long as possible. Nice. The goal in the Hebrew Bible is to live a long life and hold off on entry into Shul until death comes at a ripe old age. I like that. Another second time they put a premium on the living. Yes. So how did our modern understanding of hell come to be? And to answer that question, we turn to one of our favorite websites, howstuffworks.com. Do you think they're going to mention that if you make a bunch of jokes about people being erect from a holy book, you're going to go to hell? They don't specifically say that. I would encourage that.

[01:07:40] And if somebody I knew did act in such an unseemly manner, I would advise them to repent in order to not go to hell. Do a couple of our fathers after this. A couple of Hail Marys, a couple of our fathers, and keep your pants on while you're doing it. I never remember the Apostles' Creed. Yes. The Apostles' Creed. Oh my God. For some reason, I kept thinking Assassin's Creed. I do love Assassin's Creed a lot more than I love church. And Assassin's Creed does something.

[01:08:05] So the dead men don't speak in Assassin's Creed, but you can use that DNA time travel where you can go back to someone in your family tree. Yes. But that's a cool workaround. Otherwise, you need a necromancer. The Animus. Yeah. You can use the Animus, which is a cool workaround. Otherwise, you would need to get a staff of necromancers to raise up your ancestors. But instead, you can just kind of dip into being them. Yeah, which is a pretty cool use of technology.

[01:08:32] Unless you're that ancestor, I guess, and you're like, I've lost control of your body? No. So the Animus, as I understand it from playing way too many Assassin's Creed games, is like, it's not actually sending you back in time. It's creating a playable sequence of memories. Like a danger room from X-Men. Or a holodeck from Star Trek. Kind of, yeah. But it's based in a reality that happened that is encoded within your DNA so that you

[01:09:00] can learn information and bring it back with you. I mean, it's cool no matter what. We should stop talking about the godless creators of video games and go back to... And go back to how we came to our modern understanding of hell. Yeah. So HowStuffWorks.com gives us a brief history of hell and tells us that the earliest biblical mention of divine judgment is in the book of Daniel 12-2, written around 165 BC, in which the prophet is given a vision of the day of judgment.

[01:09:29] Quote, multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. Daniel gives us the first description of what historian Alan Bernstein calls, quote, moral death, where your eternal fate depends on how you lived your life. By the first century CE, the idea of a final judgment where God meets out different rewards and punishments was widespread within Judaism.

[01:09:55] In the New Testament, Jesus and his disciples introduce a new term for hell, the Hebrew word Gehenna. According to Jewish tradition, Gehenna was a valley outside the city walls of Jerusalem that doubled as a trash dump. Oh no, central city dump. Where garbage was continually burned. Central city dump? On fire? On fire? Maybe that's where some of this hell imagery comes from, that Gehenna was on fire. Quote, it was a foul, dank, smelly place.

[01:10:22] So it became a word used for this hellish, fiery pit where people are tormented. When the New Testament talks about hell, it still mostly envisions hell as the place where evildoers are sent only after the day of judgment, not directly after death. For instance, the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus shares the parable of the sheep and the goats, in which the king separates the good and the evil in the last days as a shepherd separates his sheep from the goats.

[01:10:47] The first real graphic depictions of hell and its torments come outside of the New Testament canon in the Christian apocryphal texts of the second century CE. One of the most colorful visions of hell is recorded in the apocalypse of Peter, which was widely known in Christian circles at the time, though it is not considered to be part of the modern biblical canon. I was about to say, I don't remember the apocalypse of Peter in school. It's one of those books that- It's like Book of Thomas? Tossed out, yes.

[01:11:14] I'm sure the original text is probably locked up somewhere beneath the Vatican. Did you ever read any of that Book of Thomas stuff? Whatever about Jesus during those intervening years where he brought a bird back to life and stuff? Yeah, I never read the Book of Thomas, but I've heard of the stories from it. Yeah, yeah. So in the Apocalypse of Peter, he describes heaven as, quote, exceedingly bright with light and the earth itself blooming with unfading flowers full of spices and plants, fair flowering and incorruptible and bearing blessed fruit.

[01:11:44] But then he gets into the juicy stuff where each punishment in hell, as opposed to this lovely heaven depiction, each punishment in hell is fitted to the crime you committed in life. Murderers were cast into a certain, quote, straight place full of evil snakes and smitten by those beasts, while the souls of the murdered looked on with satisfaction. Those who blasphemed and slandered the righteous were forced to, quote, gnaw their own lips and

[01:12:12] receive a red-hot iron in their eyes. The rich, who refused the orphans and widows, were made to wear, quote, tattered and filthy garments and to walk endlessly over, quote, pebbles sharper than swords or any spit, red-hot. In modern times, many theologians, including even Pope John Paul II, have downplayed the images of horror and stressed that the worst part of hell is not the snakes in the fire, which are likely not literal, but rather being separated from God.

[01:12:40] And within Catholicism, there is kind of a debate that continues as to whether or not hell should be considered a real physical place or more along the lines of what Pope John Paul II said, which is that it is being separated from God. There's some people who feel, so in Catholicism, whatever the Pope holds true on earth is held true in heaven, which is sort of a workaround for why the Catholic Church can change its rules and it's still true. Which surprised to me when watching Enclave. I was like, this is just guys voting?

[01:13:10] Well, yeah. It's, uh... Like, I thought that smoke went up when, like, God sent a ray through a window of just one person he chose, you know? No. No. It's a very political... Choosing the next Pope is a very political process. It's not surprising to be very political when you're, like, one of the largest banks on the planet Earth. And, well, and also your own city-state. Yeah. But there is a debate that continues within Catholicism because some people feel that

[01:13:36] part of the reason Pope John Paul II came to this conclusion was that the Catholic Church was starting to lose parishioners in record numbers and that one of the reasons they knew that people were leaving was they didn't like the idea of eternal punishment. And so this kind of tweak was made that, well, you're not actually going to a hellfire pit, a lake of fire. You're just being separated from God and it's more of a state of being than a physical place. And why would that make you come back? Come back where?

[01:14:03] I mean, I wouldn't even want those people, like, as parishioners if you're so, like, I don't know, I might go to hell so I'm just not going to be into this. Like, that seems like they weren't that into it to begin with. I don't think that one thing was the sticking point for them. Well, I don't think it was seen as a... And I'll be Hail Mary to get people back to the church. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it was just, it was something that was, I think that is a theory that has floated as to why this change was made. I don't know that it was necessarily, you know, written down anywhere that that's...

[01:14:31] Well, however he puts it, I mean, and every story we've seen so far when you're separated from God, it always ends up kind of the same place, whether it's fucking red hot... It's misery. Yeah, whether it's red hot glass under your feet or even, like, Judgment Day itself where people will go up to heaven and others, whether left isn't a vibe. It's not like leftovers where you're just going to continue living your life. Yeah. It's like, no, there's like a battle going on and darkness for a thousand years and all that shit.

[01:14:58] So, yeah, I think being separated from God is miserable because they keep telling us it will be miserable where you are. Yeah. So maybe he's just saying, let's take that part out, the part about that, and just keep the misery, but without the imagery. Well, without the physical place. It's more of a spiritual punishment than a physical punishment. Well, spiritual punishment means we get to continue living our lives here on earth, but all of our good buds who believed in that went up to heaven. But the fact that the earth they leave us on is a fucking nightmare tells me they kept in

[01:15:27] the physical thing. You're saying that that's no longer the book of Revelation? Revelation is no longer the book of Revelation since this decree from John Paul II? Well, hell and the book of Revelations are two different things. Yes. But wouldn't you argue that the book of Revelation is hell on earth? You're separated from God and you're stuck here for a thousand years and all that bullshit and it's darkness and demons roam around? Sure. But they're still two different. I see what you're saying. Like we're not dead yet necessarily.

[01:15:54] Yeah, you can clarify the nature of what happens to a sinner after they die without having to change the nature of. Now that you're saying it, I completely understand. I guess in my mind it was still just like separated from. Yeah, you're right. You're right. Whatever. Whatever. There's a whole history of Satan too. He sounds cool. Tell me more about him. This guy, my friend, John Satan. Wernke. He wasn't always considered to, you know, like the way we think of Satan now is a red demon

[01:16:23] with horns and a pitchfork and cloven feet. Not in Dante's Inferno. He's got like huge wings and he's frozen up to his waist in ice. Well, because he was an angel who fell. He rebelled against God and was cast down. Yeah, but he doesn't even have any fire on his level. There's no fire. It's all ice. But well before even any of that. Oh, geez. The first album's better. Tell me about it. We are recording this in one of the hippest parts of Los Angeles. So we only go back to the beginning here.

[01:16:50] When we first meet Satan in the book of Job in the Old Testament, he's presenting himself to God along with several, quote, sons of God and comes up with the idea of testing the faith of Job by stripping him of everything he possesses. Because to the ancient Hebrews, Satan was an adversary, a tempter, and an accuser of men, but not pure evil. That view of Satan was actually most likely borrowed from Zoroastrianism, which was the religion

[01:17:18] of Persia, which ruled over the Jewish people for 200 years from 530 to 330 BC. By the time of Christ, Jesus's Jewish followers would have absorbed this Persian version. Ooh, Persian version. Wow. That's fun. This is a Persian diversion what's happening here. They've absorbed this Persian version diversion of Satan as the source of all evil and the chief opposition of God.

[01:17:44] So essentially, the idea being that Satan was initially this just sort of a personification of temptation to humans and not necessarily the source of all evil. That was kind of borrowed and put on to. Yeah. He was a line stepper and a shit stirrer. Like he was down here being a little fucking being a little stinker, but he wasn't necessarily the root of all evil. Yeah. And then as for the horns and hooves that we imagine him to have now, that imagery was

[01:18:13] likely borrowed from pagan gods like Moloch and Pan. And medieval authors like Dante gave Satan bat wings in Inferno to contrast with the feathered wings of the angels. Yeah. I mean, I was surprised. Let me put it this way. When I got to that part of Dante's Inferno, I was surprised. I was surprised by the whole situation. Surprised by the ice. I was surprised by the most horrific level of hell being for traitors. Yeah. And I was surprised that Satan was just frozen in ice being like, he had nothing to do. He couldn't do much. He's not in charge.

[01:18:43] I don't know a ton about the writing of Dante's Inferno or the life of Dante in general, but I feel like I've read that that poem specifically was Dante working out a lot of like personal slights and that a lot of his enemies are featured in that poem, which I wonder if that's what leads to traitors being the deepest circle of hell. Yeah. That he was upset at somebody. I'm sure when he was judged, they asked him to defend that decision.

[01:19:13] He was like, listen, man, it's creativity. I can't defend it. Realistically, he was like, listen, I was paid for by the church to write this big book about how scary hell is. I like, you know what I miss? And I feel like we used to have it a lot. Fun. Yeah. We used to have fun in this show. Yeah. I miss like Faust, like Faustian stuff where like you would have- Faustian bargains. Yeah. Faustian bargains, but like stuff where it seemed like the God and the devil, the God, the devil, and Bob. Remember that show? I do. I thought that was for the six weeks that that show aired. I thought it was the funniest thing on the face of the earth.

[01:19:43] Yeah. Isn't it like they're walking through like a museum in the beginning looking at dinosaur bones? I barely even remember it, but I just remember like that. It hit me at exactly the age where I was starting to like, I think read George Carlin, listen to Carlin, like my mind was expanding a little bit. And I just thought like, oh my God, like what? This was the most clever. I mean, the premise of the show was that the God and the devil made a bet. It's what a, it's a Faust, literally it's what Faust is. Yes. It's that the God and the devil have a bet over like winning one guy's soul. Yes. Yes. Which is what Faust is.

[01:20:13] Although I think in God, the devil and Bob, that's going to determine the fate of humanity. Something like that. I don't remember. I won't remember the opening. But anyway, I'm saying God, the devil and Bob or my beloved Randy Newman. Wrote a musical about Faust that it never got made. Cause they also do it with that Neil Gaiman. I don't ever let it say his name anymore. Neil Gaiman show that was not that great on Amazon, but that's the same thing. It's a Faustian bargain. Yeah. I think we need to bring back Faustian bargains and then put them on fucking draft Kings or FanDuel and that would get people back into the churches.

[01:20:43] Everyone would get involved real fast in religion. And all that is to say that I feel like Satan played a bigger role for a while. It seems like... In the mythology and literature and stories of the past. Yeah. He was around more. He was a character more and stuff. Well, I think, you know, there's that famous Time Magazine cover that says God is dead from like the 70s or something. And I think in a weird way, there's probably, you could also have a cover that the devil is

[01:21:06] dead because he's been so written about, thought about, picked apart, modernized, post-modernized, parodied. Like there's kind of nothing left in the idea of a pure evil being. There's nothing left culturally. Like we've moved so far beyond it that it's, you know, I'm trying to think the last even depiction of the actual devil in like movies. I mean, you're saying not as a human?

[01:21:34] Because as a human, my favorite of the last 20 years is probably from Constantine. I love the devil in Constantine. The devil is the best. Peter Stormare, devil in Constantine. He's only in it for like five minutes. And it's all you need. It rules. It fucking rules. He's really great. But what I was going to say is I can't even think of a devil that is like genuinely scary. Because even Peter Stormare's devil in Constantine is kind of a post-modern... No, he's not scary at all. And they have a relationship, him and Constantine.

[01:22:03] Which is also a Faustin bargain. All right. So that's an extremely top level look at the history of how us meager humans think of Satan. He actually might be his own episode of this show someday. Yeah, based on what we just talked about, I think he should be. Because there's a lot... He might even be like one of our cryptid episodes. He could be. He could be a Fear of the Unknown episode. Yeah. Another episode we're going to do someday is near-death experiences.

[01:22:30] And I bring that up because what I want to talk about next are hellish near-death experiences. Sure. Event Horizon. Exactly. Like the documentary Event Horizon. Yeah, sure. It was shot in real time. We're going to do a near-death experiences probably as its own episode someday. So we're not going to dive really too deep into the science and lore surrounding near-death experiences. So keep your science and lore around near-death experience emails to your fucking selves. We've preempted them.

[01:22:58] But one of the things that I think is really interesting about scary, hellish near-death experiences is that they are actually harder to study than pleasant near-death experiences. And that's because, according to a 2014 paper published in the Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association, quote,

[01:23:26] This whole paper published in the Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association is really interesting. And I'm going to be drawing from it heavily in this next section. It is in the show notes, of course, if you want to take a look at it. The researchers who put this paper together documented three types of distressing near-death experiences that they define as inverse, void, and hellish. And they all sound truly awful. Oh, great.

[01:23:51] The inverse NDE is a type of negative NDE or near-death experience in which the same features reported in positive near-death experiences are, in this case, perceived as hostile or threatening. So it's the inverse of the positive. Well, it's... That's how it got its name? Yes. You're witnessing the same things, but the connotation of what you're witnessing is horrific instead of... All right. So to, in some ways, quote Metallica, in the pleasant death experience, you see a bright

[01:24:20] white light that's warming and you're heading towards it. In the inverse near-death experience, that white light is a freight train coming at you. Yes. And basically, you know, the white light, the tunnel, the visions of seeing your family, all that same stuff occurs, but with deeply unpleasant effects. So the researchers, for instance, cite one story of a man who was thrown from his horse and found himself floating at treetop height watching EMTs working on his body. Pretty common experience.

[01:24:46] But instead of facing this experience with the peace or wonder or awe that many near-death experience reports entail, this guy did what I might do and panicked. We saw they were trying to give him a smoke enema to fix his falling off a horse situation. They've got the bellows. The bellows are out and he's like, oh God, no! It's not going to help at all! He screamed, no, no, this isn't right. Put me back. But the EMTs did not hear him. Next thing he knew, he was shooting through darkness towards a bright light flashing past

[01:25:15] shadowy people who seemed to be deceased family members waiting for him. He was panic-stricken by the bizarre scenario and his inability to affect what was happening, which loss of control, we all know. Yeah, you hate that. Big fear of mine. The paper's authors also tell the story of a woman in childbirth, Anna, don't listen to this, who felt her spirit separate from her body and fly into space at tremendous speed. I'm out of here, it said. She then saw a small ball of light rushing toward her. Quote, it became bigger and bigger as it came toward me.

[01:25:44] I realized we were on a collision course and it terrified me. I saw the blinding white light come right to me and engulf me. So sort of like what you were saying a minute ago, Ed, it's like the difference between it being a heavenly light and a train rushing at you. The void near-death experience is an ontological or metaphysical encounter with a perceived vast emptiness, often a devastating scenario of aloneness, isolation, and sometimes complete annihilation. Which is weird because it's kind of what you're hoping for, but you don't want it to be that you're experiencing it.

[01:26:14] You just want it to be a nothingness like before you were born. Yes. In this case, you've gone to the nothingness with your consciousness and that's not a vibe. Not a vibe. The paper tells us about one woman, another in childbirth. Well, mother mortality rate was super high for a long time. Yes. In this country, I think that's for turning. That's that? Yeah. And most other countries it remains pretty high. I don't have a date or a location for this woman, although one might assume it was Missouri since that's where the journal was being published.

[01:26:41] But she found herself abruptly flying over the hospital and into deep, empty space. That's weird that both of them flew away. Lots of people in near-death experiences fly away. I mean, I guess I'm pretty familiar with the out-of-body experience of like, I'm six feet above. I am on the other side of the room. I'm watching myself. Wait, you're very familiar with this? I mean, that's what you hear the most, I feel like. Okay. But it's not happened to you? No, even during my car wreck, it got weird, but there was nothing like that. Yeah. But it's funny that these two women during childbirth were like, I'm fucking gonzo.

[01:27:09] Like both flew above the hospital out into space. Well, one thing I didn't see is whether or not these women were on any sort of drugs for childbirth, like epidurals or painkillers, or I didn't, it wasn't noted in the, at least not the version of the study that I was reading. The King James study. Yeah. This study did not include the Dead Sea Scrolls to help me decide whether or not I was getting the full picture here.

[01:27:37] But whether or not this is the effect of drugs or pain or a truly near death experience, this woman found herself abruptly flying over the hospital into deep empty space. A group of circular entities informed her she never existed, that she had been allowed to imagine her life, but it was a joke. That's a horrible version of the Matrix. She was not real. She argued with facts about her life and descriptions of Earth, but they told her no, none of that had ever been real.

[01:28:07] This is all there was. Oh my God. It's a prank. Her life's a prank. She was left alone in space. That is sort of super funny. I mean, it's kind of very funny. It was very funny for her. No, of course it wasn't. But that, what, could you imagine if we got to heaven, and that's not, I'm not saying that's where she was. Yeah. And you just found out that like, God's a fucking jokester, like a little prankster. Acosted by a collection of periods. If they were like, oh, please have a seat.

[01:28:35] We need to discuss some things before you go into heaven. And there's like a whoopee cushion on your seat and stuff. Yeah. Like, it would be crazy if heaven was just zany as hell. But in this case, hell could be zany too. Generally, I am averse to anything that can be described as zany. So I would not appreciate that. No, it would get old fast. You know, you don't want like God to be on all the time. But I'm just saying. Can you imagine if God was like your most annoying open mic friend who just never stopped?

[01:29:05] No, this is, I mean, there's a place in heaven and hell for improv. Yeah. But yeah, it's so crazy. That's really funny. It's a really funny. It's not, it's not at all funny. I should just say it's not at all funny. But to me, it's very funny. Just the idea of being like, where am I? It's like, you're in a void. Who are you people? Are you God? No, no, no. We're just, we're nobody. We're also nothing. You're nothing. You're nothing. And we're also nothing. And there never was anything. We implanted these memories. Yeah. Man, I could probably go on for six hours. This is my favorite story you've told me so far, but let's keep moving.

[01:29:34] A third woman in childbirth. Stop it. What, is she going to the ocean this time? Bro, get out of my head. A third woman in childbirth felt herself floating on water. Oh, shit. But at a certain point, quote, it was no longer a peaceful feeling. It had become pure hell. I had become a light out in the heavens and I was screaming, but no sound was coming forth. It was worse than any nightmare. I was spinning around and I realized that this was eternity. This was what forever was going to be.

[01:30:01] I felt the aloneness, the emptiness of space, the vastness of the universe, except for me, a mere ball of light screaming. Wow. Which is basically my fear that inspired the death in space episode, except she experienced death on earth and went to space to just be alone for eternity. Sounds like a lot of us end up in space. I guess. Every one of these broads went to fucking space.

[01:30:26] Another woman, this one, another woman, this one not pregnant or giving birth, attempted suicide and felt herself sucked into a void. She says, quote, I was being drawn into this dark abyss or tunnel or void. I was not aware of my body as I know it. I was terrified. I felt terror. I had expected nothingness. I expected the big sleep. I expected oblivion and I found now that I was going to another plane and it frightened me.

[01:30:56] I wanted nothingness, but this force was pulling me somewhere I didn't want to go. Wow. This isn't changing your mind? Any of these stories? We got four stories that are fairly similar. Well, now we have one more. A man who was attacked by a hitchhiker felt himself rise out of his body saying, quote, I suddenly was surrounded by total blackness, floating in nothing but black space with no up, no down, left or right. What seemed like an eternity went by. I fully lived it in this misery.

[01:31:25] I was only allowed to think and reflect. Which that sounds like a purgatory. That sounds like an absence of God situation. Sure. Where you've got nothing but yourself and time. Well, I hope something came for that fucking hitchhiker who attacked him. All of these were anonymous in the study and there wasn't a follow up as to how any of these people recovered other than obviously they all survived because they all were interviewed for the study. Yeah.

[01:31:50] But, you know, I assume most of these people were haunted for the rest of their lives by these experiences. I was listening to something or you told it to me about a guy who was on drugs or something who ended up what was like a minute for us was like seven years for him living a totally different life. Oh, yeah. I was telling you about that. There's a lot of those. There's a lot of stories like that. Was it in an episode we did? I don't remember if that was in an episode or... Hopefully it shows up in some episode.

[01:32:17] It was a really cool story, but I only brought it up because the idea that, yeah, you just go somewhere for a super long time and that's going to fuck you up. Yeah. Very scary. One of the reasons that we started our Bad Trips series that we kicked off a few episodes ago or maybe last episode, depending on what order these come out in, is because one of the earliest things that scared me on the internet was... I don't think exactly the story that you're referencing.

[01:32:43] But a story of some guy who tried some hallucinogenic drug and I remember reading that he lived this entire other life before coming back to his body and then reliving his life and being very confused about how long he'd been alive and who he really was and if he'd gone to another dimension or not. And that just scared the shit out of me.

[01:33:09] The only silver lining to this study of the worst experiences known to man is that overtly hellish experiences seem to be the least common type of distressing near-death experience. The paper details a few different ones of these hellish types that were collected, some from religious men and women and some from atheists. One man in heart failure felt himself falling into the depths of the earth.

[01:33:38] At the bottom was a set of high rusty gates, which he perceived as the gates of hell. Panic-stricken, he says he managed to scramble back up to daylight. Then there was a woman who hemorrhaged from a ruptured fallopian tube who reported a near-death experience involving, quote, horrific beings with gray gelatinous appendages grasping and clawing at me. The sounds of their guttural moaning and the indescribable stench still remain 41 years later. Wow.

[01:34:06] There is no benign being of light, no life video, nothing beautiful or pleasant. Another woman who attempted suicide felt her body sliding downward in a cold, dark, watery environment. She says, quote, Which, just to pause... What kind of teeth do you hear? Yeah, people talk about the gnashing of teeth. I don't know the sound of gnashing of teeth.

[01:34:35] Some Foley artist was given that task and they came up with it, but... Yeah, I'm doing it on the mic right now. So are you. And that's not much of a noise. No. Anyway, I saw these beings that resembled humans with the shape of a head and body, but they were ugly and grotesque. They were frightening and sounded like they were tormented in agony. I thought they were... Yeah, well... And then the centerpiece of this section of the episode. There's the story of Howard Storm. Great name. Great name.

[01:35:02] A man who underwent an emergency surgery in France. He wrote a book about it called My Descent Into Death. And I thought I'd share a fairly long excerpt from it here. So sort of like the last book that we quoted at length from Go By My Descent Into Death. We'll put an Amazon link. This excerpt takes place after Howard's been whisked into the ER and he's waiting on a surgeon while he has all these digestive fluids sucked out of his stomach. So you think this is called The Calm Before the Storm, this chapter?

[01:35:32] Yeah, this is the heaven part of the heaven and hell. Because his name is Howard Storm, right? Yes. Very good. Yeah, you almost moved on from that. I almost did move on from that because I was so excited to tell you about how miserable he's about to become. I wanted a little levity before then. Howard Storm in this moment having these digestive fluids sucked out of his stomach for this like mystery ailment that he's been experiencing. He's in a shit ton of pain.

[01:35:56] He's half conscious and he and his wife are both trying to tell the doctors that they think something is very wrong with him. Which I think the doctors kind of knew at this point. They're sucking shit out of his stomach? Yeah. Yeah, lady, you shouldn't even be in here. Howard starts to fade in and out of consciousness and then wakes up outside of his own body looking at himself in the hospital bed. His senses are all heightened and he's no longer in pain, but no one else in the room can hear him. Howard hears voices though.

[01:36:23] Voices calling to him from outside the hospital room. Howard, Howard, they were calling. They were pleasant voices, male and female, young and old, calling in English. None of the hospital staff spoke English, so clearly they couldn't pronounce the name Howard very well. And oh, I should say this excerpt is in the first person. So I was hopelessly confused. Howard was hopelessly confused. Beverly, his wife, and Monsieur Fleurien didn't seem to hear them.

[01:36:52] I asked who they were and what they wanted. Come out here, they said. Let's go. Hurry up. We've been waiting for you for a long time. And they're all speaking English this whole time and he's a Frenchman. No, Howard is an American in France being treated by French-speaking doctors. Oh, I didn't know he was American. Yeah. Sorry, I should have. You just said Howard Storm. So he's not Howard LeStorm. I didn't say Howard, yeah. Howard LeStorm.

[01:37:18] So Howard is hearing all these English-speaking voices outside the hospital room and he tells them, I can't come out. I'm sick. Something's the matter with me. Something's wrong in here and I need an operation. These voices say, we can get you fixed up. If you hurry up, don't you want to get better? Don't you want help? Help, which is the creepiest thing to be saying through a closed door to a man in a surgery room. Yeah, this is giving fucking Goodfellas where he's like, oh, the coats are right down here.

[01:37:47] He's like, no, walk it. Just come on out. No, the coats. Just step on out. Just over here are the coats. No, you're fight or flight. That situation, you got to run. Don't fall left. Well, Howard had never seen Goodfellas and he decides to step out into the hall. Oh, my God. He says, quote, The area seemed to be light but very hazy like a television screen with terrible reception. I couldn't make out any details. It was like being in a plane passing through thick clouds. The people were off in the distance and I couldn't see them very clearly,

[01:38:14] but I could tell that they were male and female, tall and short, old and young adults. Their clothes were gray and they were pale. As I tried to get closer to them to identify them, they quickly withdrew deeper into the fog, so I had to follow farther and farther into the thick atmosphere. I could never get closer to them than 10 feet. I had lots of questions. Who were they? What did they want? Where did they want me to go? Did he ask those questions? Well, does his voice only travel nine feet? It seems like he did.

[01:38:43] Where do they want me to go? What was the matter with my wife? How could this be real? Wait, his wife? Because she couldn't hear them. She couldn't see him. So he's confused in this moment. I have to say, was she, since we last met the wife, she's now on the operating table next to him? No, she, no. No, he just wants to know why this situation is so weird, basically. They don't have answers. These fog people, they're garbage. The fog people, he says, they wouldn't answer anything. Their only response was to insist that I hurry up and follow them,

[01:39:11] which should be just red flags all over the place. They told me repeatedly that my problems were meaningless and unnecessary. Tight. Rude. Yeah. In emotional distress, I followed them, shuffling along in my bare feet with the memory of the pain in my belly, feeling very much alive. I was moist with perspiration, quite confused, but not at all tired. I knew that I had a problem that must be operated on right away, and they, these shapes, these beings, appeared to be my only hope.

[01:39:41] Every time I hesitated, they demanded that I keep up. They continued to repeat the promise that if I followed them, my troubles would end. We walked on and on, and my repeated inquiries were rebuffed. They insisted on hurrying to get to our destination. I mean, at this point, this really does just like, have you ever heard of a trickster? Yeah. I mean, this just seems like... This is Loki or Puck. Yeah. During the journey, I attempted to count how many of these people there were and figure out something about their individual identities, but I couldn't.

[01:40:10] The fog thickened as we went on, and it became gradually darker. They moved around me, and their numbers seemed to be increasing. I was confused about the direction we were taking. Yeah, to their village, it sounds like. I got new people showing up. I knew that we had been traveling for miles, but I had the strange ability to occasionally look back and see through the doorway of the hospital room, although the door was getting smaller and smaller. My body was still there, lying motionless on the bed. Beverly was sitting there, frozen. And so I think what he means is like,

[01:40:40] the door isn't physically getting smaller. It's just he feels like he's getting further and further away, even though he can still... He's traveled for what feels like miles, but he can still see this hospital door. Yeah. Suddenly, these shadow people turn on Howard. They tear at his body and clothes, and he says, I was aware there were dozens or hundreds of them all around and over me. My attempts to fight back only provoked greater merriment. As I continued to defend myself, I was aware that they weren't in any hurry to annihilate me.

[01:41:09] They were playing with me just as a cat plays with a mouse. Every new assault brought howls of cacophonous laughter. They began to tear off pieces of my flesh. To my horror, I realized I was being taken apart and eaten alive, methodically, slowly, so that their entertainment would last as long as possible. These guys are jerks. While I couldn't see in this total darkness, every sound and every physical sensation registered with horrifying intensity. These creatures were once human beings.

[01:41:37] The best way I can describe them is to think of the worst imaginable person stripped of every impulse of compassion. Some of them seemed to be able to tell others what to do, but I had no sense of there being any organization to the mayhem. They didn't appear to be controlled or directed by anyone. Simply, they were a mob of beings totally driven by unbridled cruelty. In that darkness, I had intense physical contact with them when they swarmed over me. Their bodies felt exactly as human bodies do, except for two characteristics.

[01:42:07] They had very long, sharp fingernails, and their teeth were longer than normal. I'd never been bitten by a human being before this. So how do you know? It's also totally dark. Well, I mean, I think even if you've never been bitten by a human, you can tell if someone's teeth seem extremely long. I don't know. During our struggle, they felt no pain. Other than their lack of feeling, they appeared to possess no special abilities. During my initial experience with them, they were clothed. In our intimate physical contact, I never felt any clothing.

[01:42:37] The level of noise was excruciating. Countless people laughed, yelled, and jeered. In the middle of this bedlam, I was the object of their desire. My torment was their excitement. The more I fought, the greater their thrill. Eventually, I became too badly torn up and too broken to resist. Most of them gave up tormenting me because I was no longer amusing. Oh, it's like bully tactics. Yeah, these are the ultimate bullies. I'm saying show that it doesn't bother you and they don't have any interest anymore.

[01:43:05] A few still picked and gnawed at me and ridiculed me for no longer being amusing. I had been torn apart. In that wretched state, I lay there in the darkness. I haven't described everything that happened. There are things I don't care to remember. In fact, much that occurred was simply too gruesome and too disturbing to recall. Returning to the paper in the Missouri Journal of Medicine, the doctors who studied all of this write that these near-death experiences are traumatic in their realness.

[01:43:36] They're rupturing the sense of worldly reality and the power of the questions they raise. Three common responses cut across all experience types. The turnaround response, reductionism response, and the long haul. We're turning around being that I turned around and I saw the door. I turned around and I saw myself. No, you'll see. Oh boy. Not physically turning around. Emotionally and spiritually turning around. Every now and then I feel a little bit torn apart. Yeah, can't monetize the show now.

[01:44:04] This next section, to me, and maybe I'm reading a little too much into it, but to me, this sounds a little, I don't know, pushy about finding a religion, particularly Christianity. In the Missouri paper? Yeah. The paper gets unscientific for a minute? You'll see what I mean. But it was enough that I felt weird and I went and I did look up the authors of the paper to just make sure that, you know, lots of doctors can be doctors from weird schools and whatever.

[01:44:33] So they're credentialed as Nancy Evans Bush, President Emerita International Association for Near-Death Studies, which sounds like they made it up. Sounds questionable. That sounds less made up. And Director, Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. And they tacked on that made up part at the end. Well, you know, he sounds like a real doctor for sure. Anyway, you'll see what I mean here.

[01:45:02] The turnaround, or I needed that. A classic response to profound spiritual experience is conversion. Not necessarily changing one's religion, but in the original sense of the Latin convertere, meaning to turn around. The terrifying near-death experience is interpreted as a warning about unwise or wrong behaviors and to turn one's life around. So it's hitting a rock bottom. Kind of.

[01:45:27] Those people find God pretty, like that's kind of, that's definitely a gateway drug to finding God. Hitting the rock bottom of the pit of hell. The on fire rock bottom. This one person anonymously quoted says, I was being shown that I had to shape up or ship out. One or the other. In other words, get your act together. And I did just that. Movement toward a dogmatic religious community is common in this group. Clinical social worker Kimberly Clark Sharp observed that,

[01:45:55] quote, all the people I know who have had negative experiences have become Bible-based Christians. They might express it in various sects, but they all feel they have come back from an awful situation and have a second chance. Fear may remain a powerful influence, but a strict theology may offer a way out. Howard Storm, he's a professor and he was an atheist. And he left his university and attended seminary. After this crazy story. After this crazy story.

[01:46:22] I'm not that surprised because if you're seeing anything after you believe you've died, you have to then go, God is real. The devil's real. Something's real. Allah is real. Yeah. Because the scientific alternative of we just get eaten by bugs and it's like going to sleep only has the go to sleep version. All these other religions have some version of there's something in an afterlife. Yeah.

[01:46:47] So I'm not surprised that they've become religious or have sought out religion because they now have this feeling that there's something after, which wouldn't be the case if it's just, you know, atheist science stuff. Yeah. So Howard Storm was an atheist professor and he left his university and attended seminary. Others also reported newfound devotion with one patient reporting, quote, I've stopped drugs, moved back to Florida, and now I'm in Bible college. I used to have a casual attitude toward death, but now I actually fear it more. So yes, it was a warning.

[01:47:16] I was permitted another chance to change my behavior on earth. I've taken my fear of death and given it to the scriptures. Since then, I have dedicated my life to the most high God, Jehovah, and spend 60 hours a month speaking and teaching about the creator of heaven and earth and all living creatures. I'm not worried now about when I die because now I know that God has promised us something far more. And I guess the reason I say that this kind of puts some red flags up is just because these are the examples cited in the paper.

[01:47:43] There's no mention of someone who turned their life around or who converted to Judaism or Islam or... It's exclusively people who got on board with Christianity. With Bible-based Christianity, with, you know, seemingly fairly conservative... To these other religions, maybe not. I don't know. Seems like Christianity's got a lot of loopholes. We get a lot of like, I was ruined by drugs. I was ruined by crime. I was ruined by this. And then I found Jesus. And now I'm, for whatever reason, okay and going to be good.

[01:48:11] And I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father and all that stuff. Do other religions maybe not have that kind of out? Which is like, if you just take Jesus's name in your heart as your Lord and Savior, you're all fine. Well, I think... I don't know. I'm asking. No, I mean, I... It's okay to not know. Well, I also... I don't know the answer to that specific question of how many religions have a sort of easy out, so to speak. You know, an acceptance of a particular God kind of saves you from all suffering.

[01:48:37] But I was going to say, you know, in defense of the authors of this study, I can see how if you have an experience like this, particularly in America, particularly in Missouri, although again, I don't know if all these people running this that are quoted in this study are from Missouri. But in America, if you have a near-death experience like this and you come out and you are looking for a way to very quickly turn your life around so that you don't experience this when you die

[01:49:04] eventually for real, I can see how many of those people would ultimately be led into the arms of a fairly conservative Christian solution because you're surrounded by that. And as we discussed, if you explore Judaism, there is, you know, the best you can hope for is the black embrace of Shoal where there's nothing. Yeah. So... Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no like you're missing out on heaven. Yeah.

[01:49:30] So I can see how, especially in America, your options are sort of automatically fairly limited. But also I can see if you had this experience and you believed it was religious, you believed like, oh my God, this is, religion's real. I've been to hell. I guess that would make you or activate you to be some sort of like evangelical, if I'm using that correctly, where you're like, I need to tell everybody. Yeah. Like I need to get Jesus in my heart and you motherfuckers need to get Jesus in your heart

[01:49:59] because I'm telling you, I've been there. Yes. You don't want to be me. So get in here and get real into this shit. It might be that guy. You ever see that guy who's always dancing with the fucking cross on the street with the headphones on? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody went as him for Halloween this year. I saw it. I feel like everyone in LA has seen that guy. Yeah. We'll put him in the show notes. But yeah. But I'm saying, I feel like this guy had a near. Sir, if you're listening, by the way, you're welcome to come be a guest on the show. Come on the show. I mean, he's on my dash cam. Like this dude, he's always out here all over the place.

[01:50:26] He dances in the street with a cross and he's really into us not burning in hell. Yeah. And so maybe he had a near death experience that was hellish. But here's another question I have, and maybe this is a discussion best to save for the end of the episode. So you can tell me if you just want to move on. But I wonder if part of what we could be witnessing here at the very core of people's religious beliefs is that there is some sort of experience we go through at the moment of death that can

[01:50:56] be pleasant and can involve white light and memories coming by. Memories coming back, people you love who have passed, or it can be an awful, smelly, violent, physically painful, existentially painful experience. And we can assume, let's say that is a scientific reality that our brains go through this process as we die. And not everyone who begins that process finishes it.

[01:51:25] So throughout time, we've had people having near death experiences coming back and saying, oh my God, I saw the most wonderful thing. Or oh my God, I saw the most horrible thing. And that that has baked itself into many major world religions because it is a reality that we face. Now, whether or not that reality is eternal, if you actually make it to death, or if it is a temporary passage, we don't know. Sure.

[01:51:51] But I sort of wonder if that's an alternative explanation for what could be going on here, that the process of dying and the experience of dying is much older than any religion. And maybe we're building our religions from the experiences drawn from that. Yeah, maybe. I mean, you definitely can't ask me that question and expect an answer that's, you know what I mean, going to be any good. Listen, number two on this list of the ways that people respond is reductionism or it was only.

[01:52:19] These fucking subtitles are unbelievable. As a response to a distressing experience, reductionism has been described as the, quote, defense that allows one to repudiate the meaning of an event which does not fit into a safe category and to treat the event as if it did not matter. I gave the experience of almost dying three shrugs. Pretty much. The first example here is a woman whose anaphylactic reaction precipitated a near-death experience with both loving and frightening elements.

[01:52:47] And she concluded that, quote, there are actual rational explanations for what I experienced. The brain under stress releases natural opiates that stop pain and fear. Lack of oxygen disrupts the normal activity of the visual cortex. Too much neural activity in the dying brain causes stripes of activity. Our eyes, even closed, interpret those stripes of activity as the sensation of moving forward in a tunnel. There are more brain cells concentrated in the middle of the cortex than on the edges.

[01:53:14] So as we get closer to death, the brain interprets all those dense cells with their crazy activity as a bright light in the middle of our visual field. It's all very scientific. Said the lady who almost died from a peanut. I don't know where the fuck her problem was. Her conclusion is that based on the scientific evidence, the experience had no ontological meaning and any lingering anxieties will go unaddressed. Now, again, this woman's response also kind of made me feel like maybe the authors of this

[01:53:41] paper have a little bit of a preference for the turn your life around model because this woman's anonymous quote about her belief in it having a rational explanation sounds like something that the evil professor in a Christian movie would say. Yeah. You know, like it like addresses everything just a little too perfectly and ends with her saying, quote, it's all very scientific. Yeah. It feels a little planted or massage.

[01:54:11] I don't know. Or it was how it was explained to her when she was like, mommy, daddy, how come I can't have peanuts like the other kids? And they were like, oh, well, it's very rational. Some kids can't have peanuts because... Because God hates them. No, but they didn't say because God hates them. They said, I don't know what they said to her, but that lady sucks. She's a fucking drip. Well, and this is, I mean, this is, I guess it's kind of halfway to what I was saying, which is that I guess I wasn't saying the idea that there is a fully rational scientific experience,

[01:54:41] but just that there is some underlying experience that we are drawing from when we share these stories. Maybe we should have my mom on. She has hospice training. Does she know anyone who had a near death experience? I don't know. We should ask her. I don't know. I don't know. I think the hospice thing was supposed to start and then COVID started. I think she took all the classes and exams are all she got to do. And maybe right before she was supposed to go, they were like, you know what? People dying naturally isn't fast enough. We got to throw COVID to the mix.

[01:55:09] They hand her a gun and they're like, whatever you got to do. She's like, what? And they're like, that's a test. You give it to all the new people. The fact that you didn't take it means you can work here. Another woman who had a terrifying experience during childbirth. Oh, during childbirth. Of course, likewise dismissed the reality of the experience saying, quote, perhaps it was the effect of the ether and not a near death experience. Did she fly to space? We don't know. It doesn't say. I'm willing to bet she flew to space.

[01:55:35] A woman attacked by a lion dismissed the memory of her near death experience as hallucinatory. She says, quote, I often wonder if in the shock of the attack, my mind played tricks on me and that I may have just been unconscious and my brain deprived of oxygen. Sounds like if you were anywhere near enough a lion to get attacked by one, you might have a brain deprived of oxygen to begin with. A man who for many years had spoken publicly about his radiant near death experience had

[01:56:03] a second experience in which he felt attacked by, get this, gigantic, sinister, threatening geometric forms. Oh, shit. He went to Flatland. He went to Tetris. Oh, no. It's even worse. He went to the bottom of the Tetris board. That song? That fucking crazy Russian song? It's like stuck in my brain forever. Whatever. This experience left him with a deep seated pessimism and terror of dying. That sucks, right? That's a guy who had like a bunch of good trips that had like one bad trip. And he can't play Game Boy anymore. And now he's fucking pissed.

[01:56:32] Learning that drug induced hallucinations include geometric forms. He concluded that his second NDE was, quote, only a drug reaction. This may be an appropriate conclusion clinically, but the experience remains. Reductionism, the paper says, provides a temporary buffer to mass questions and anxieties, but does nothing to resolve them. And again, that last sentence is true, but I feel like there's a lingering like, but what would resolve them? I don't know, man. I feel like you're giving it too much shit. I don't know.

[01:57:02] I'm team. I'm always, I'm just, I'm suspicious when there's too much religion and not enough science in my science paper. Everyone's a, yeah, I get it. But you know, but again, this is a subject that resides in a very gray area. So it's like those gray beings that took that lady. Yeah. And gelatinously slapped her. Yeah. I don't know. I guess I'm team. I'm like, like the authors of this paper. I guess I'm a little bit more team.

[01:57:27] If the experience has a positive impact on your life, that's better than, than it not. Maybe. I mean, it would be much better for these experiences to have a positive impact on your life. That is true. Yeah. The third way that people react to this is called the long haul or what did I do? They, the paper tells us that other experiencers have difficulty comprehending or integrating terrifying near death experiences.

[01:57:56] These people years later still struggle with the existential implications of the near death experience. Good job. With one person reporting that, quote, I had an experience which has remained with me for 29 years. It has left a horror in my mind and I have never spoken about it until now. I shit my pants in a classroom. And it was, and I said, oh no, super loud. And everyone stared. Another person says, quote, after all these years, the nightmare remains vivid in my mind.

[01:58:23] For some reason, 31 years later, all the memories are back and vivid. It's like living it all over again. And I don't want to. Speaking of real fast. Did you see that woman? There's a woman who has a rare disease that she can remember every day perfectly. It's a disease that people have. We'll have to do an episode on it. But that woman said, I know that's not what this lady's saying. She's just saying that it feels like it was yesterday again. It was really interesting. We got to do an episode on this or at least have somebody on who has this fucking disease.

[01:58:51] Because you can ask them anything about like, oh, what happened on January 8th, 1979? And they'd be like, oh, it was a Tuesday. It rained that morning. This thing happened. I was supposed to go here, but I burnt my toast. And they'd like fact check that shit. And they do like a bunch in real time. And they're all accurate. This sounds like a disease made up for a network cop show. Oh my God, that'd be great. Oh my God, you're right. It should be called like, I remember. We should just have the authors of this paper write it. They have the best titles and fucking subtitles ever.

[01:59:20] It should be called the lead character. It should be, their name should be I remember. Oh my God. I-R-A. Yeah, I remember. And then last name member. I remember. Holy shit. Bro. We're, we got to get off the, we got to stop the episode right now. Copyright, scared all the time. Copyright. Scared all the time home video. We're going out tonight with this. Oh my God. So we'll see you guys later. This has been scared all the time. We got to get to the fucking writing room right now.

[01:59:44] Uh, this group of experiencers is often kind of categorized as articulate people haunted by the existential dimension of their near-death experience, searching for a cognitively and emotionally grounding explanation. They find a literal reading of the event intellectually unacceptable. So the religious reading, uh, but they find reductionist explanations only assign a cause without addressing meaning. So they're caught struggling to make sense of the distressing near-death experience without

[02:00:12] destroying them and their trust in the workings of the world in the process. Wow. More than others, these experiencers tend to enter psychotherapy, some for many years, though without data, this may indicate nothing other than openness and financial means. Too often physicians prescribe medications to mass questioning and dismiss the NDE as fanciful or pathological. Therapists will not address the matter or leave the client feeling blamed or romanticized spirituality

[02:00:39] and cannot deal with its dark side. And the clergy have no idea what to say or sometimes even reject the experience outright. Don't like that. The religious element of these near-death experiences is often an absence. So I pulled a series of quotes here. I was filled with the sense of absolute terror and of being past the help of anyone, even God. And then another person said, I looked around me consciously searching for God or some other angelic creature, but I was alone.

[02:01:10] I expected the Lord to be there, but he wasn't. I called on God and he wasn't there. That's what scared me. Overwhelmingly, their questions include some variant of what did I do to deserve this? Or what are the rules if the rules I lived by don't work? Oh, interesting. Not for a long time, if ever, do they lose their fear of death. One of these men quoted above, the one attacked by a hitchhiker, still struggled with the aftermath and says, I've pondered if I was in that hell, will I go back on my death?

[02:01:39] Was I sent there for something perhaps I'll do in the future or something I did in the past? I don't believe in a hell, but it was such a strong experience. There's always that underlying uncertainty and trouble and fear. I get that. I mean, I'm supposed to fly this weekend, but now we're driving because I'm just worried that my ears are a little off and I don't want to be in that pain. And I'm not saying it's the exact same thing, but it's created a fear that I don't want right now this week. Well, I wanted to end on that quote. And I fucked it up. No, no, it's okay. It's okay.

[02:02:09] But I find the idea that you could suffer a near death experience, a hellish near death experience for something that you have not done yet to be very frightening. Oh, do you think that's what he means by that? That the thing that's going to put you in hell hasn't happened yet? Well, he says, was I sent there for something perhaps I'll do in the future? Oh, that's not how I heard you say it. But now that you say it, it's exactly probably right. Which is a real mind bending. Precogs, dude. Well, yeah.

[02:02:37] Like the devil is a precog. Devil's a precog. But like. Well, divine, well not divine intervention, but what's the other one? Pre, in the Randy Newman musical, they ask, he asks why this murderer is in heaven or whatever. And it's like, you know, God works in mysterious ways, but there was predestination. Yeah. Predestination. So you can, this guy can end up with a predestination for hell, not heaven. But here's the real fucked up thought I had when I read that is what if the act of

[02:03:05] going to hell is the drop of water in the pond that ripples out into you doing the thing that gets you sent to hell. Oh, it's like in the Matrix where she's like, don't worry about the vase, but you're going to be thinking all day about would you have not did it over if I didn't say anything? Kind of. Yeah. And so, yeah. Like if going to hell made, made him lose his mind. Now he's. And then he eventually like, yeah, I see somebody because of the new, the new broken state of mind. He's in.

[02:03:35] He's constantly worried about going to hell. Yeah. Wow. I hate that. I hate that too. But I think I might've mentioned it definitely in the live show, if not an episode, but when I got in my accident, people like my mom and a lot of people say it, but people have the tendency to say like, Oh God saving you for something. Oh, you, you should have died. You could have died. And when I was in high school, I fractured a couple of vertebrae playing sports. And the doctor was like, Oh, if you had fallen like a dimes with to the, this way, it would have you be paralyzed right now, blah, blah, blah. And you get at that same time, people are like, Oh God saving you for something.

[02:04:05] And I had made the joke in the live show. I think if not, not a real episode where I was like, no one ever says you're being saved for something worse. Like this could only get worse and they want you to see how much worse it can get. Um, so it's kind of very similar to what you were saying, but yeah, the saved for is interesting in how saved for ripples out into the world is really, yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. I hope that guy doesn't go to hell, but it sounds like he's going.

[02:04:31] I mean, sir, if you're listening, uh, how's hell, sorry about the flames, but with that, I think it's time to wrap this episode up. Where would you place, assuming that you are not being judged for laughing at those people's stories, where would you place your fear of going to hell on the fear tier? Fucking nine. Okay. I don't want to go full 10. I don't think, I think we should save tens. Now, are you putting it in a nine because you are allowing for the possibility that it

[02:05:01] is very real in very much a classical way that you would have been taught? And so I guess there's a couple of the rockers I kick around in, I put a couple of the rockers at like a three, but I think like traditional Christian fire and brimstone hell, if that exists, I'm going nine to 10, but then you put in the curve grading on the curve of being a good person.

[02:05:25] I guess I'm down to like a three now and let's just call it a solid five after you factor everything in the median outcome. Yeah, I think I was going to put it at a five because it's a 50-50 chance no matter what. Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. You took the words out of my mouth. It feels like a 50-50 chance and it's the sort of thing where if any particular religion's hell is real, I'll probably end up there for not believing in that particular religion.

[02:05:51] But I'm also not really afraid of it being real because I don't believe that there is anything after we die or at least not anything. Well, then why don't you kill people, Chris? Yes, because who says I haven't? Oh, shit. You're going to hell then, dude. You're going to so many Naracas? No, because that's a fucked up thing to do. I don't need- Golden rule. That's all we have to say. Social contract, golden rule, live by both. Here's the thing. You're good to go. I'm probably going to upset some people.

[02:06:21] Oh, we got all the way through the episode without upsetting anyone that we're going to open their email. I think most of the- well, we sort of said this at the beginning, but just to put a finer point on it. Most of the important rules of any religion are shared by all the religions. Once you get past those- Yeah, some version of the golden rules in all of them, probably. Once you get past those, you're really just talking about who's not allowed in your club. That's true. And at that point, that seems like a very silly thing to be damned for. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[02:06:49] So that's why I don't really get too worked up about it because it just seems- I guess if I'm burning in hell, I won't be going, boy, these fools. I feel like I don't belong here. I'll tell you right now. If I- I don't think I'll belong there, but if I go, my first question is not going to be why me and how did I end up here? My first question is going to be where the fuck are a few people that I better fucking see here. That I thought I took with me. Not even that.

[02:07:19] Not even that, but then again, that might be what that guy's being saved for. Yeah. No, for real. I want to be like, I want a fucking roll call done of people in my life and people from history that I better fucking see here with me because all I did was like, use the Lord's name in vain. Yeah. Like, I shouldn't be here if fucking Hitler's not here. Yeah. I shouldn't be here if my- Not here. I think Hitler would be there. I don't know, man. I don't know. Predestination, dude.

[02:07:47] Anyway, so we're agreed. Going to hell, a couple of fives on the fear tier. Not five stars. Not five stars. We rate going to hell. Do you ever watch Review? I love that fucking- I love Review. Love that show. One of the best shows ever. It's so fucking good, but I just heard Andy Daly's voice being like, going to hell, half star. All right. So until next time, I'm Chris Killari. And I'm Ed Vecola. And you know this show is called Scared All the Time. And we'll see you in hell.

[02:08:15] Scared All the Time is co-produced by Chris Killari and Ed Vecola. Written by Chris Killari. Edited by Ed Vecola. Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew. And Mr. Disclaimer is- And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon and get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access, and exclusive merch.

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