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Hellhole Has
8
Levels Avaliable.
Hell Once
upon a time, there was the world, and it was good. Then people got all
pissed off about everything, and there was violence and sin, and that was
bad. Then people decided they needed a device to stop people from doing so
much violence and sin, and there was Hell, and it was good. Hell is the
ultimate deterrent — an eternity of pain and suffering. You can't come up
with a much more brutal retribution than that. The only catch is that the
deterrent only works when people a) believe in it, and b) fear it so much
that they lay off the violence and sin. There are a number of problems
selling Hell to the public at large. For one thing, eternity is a difficult
concept to get your head around. For another, everyone has a different idea
about how the cosmos works morally. For Hell to succeed, it has to be
horrific beyond belief, and ideally it needs to be drilled into the heads of
children at a very early age, so that the fear will stick even after the
intellect has grown past the concept. The earliest concepts of Hell were
less punitive than nihilistic. Early humans had to come to terms with the
concept of death, and a number of ideas were developed along these lines.The
most optimistic viewpoint was reincarnation, present in many cultures around
the world, but the ancient Jews were not the most optimistic lot, so they
added a layer of unpleasantness to the Great Wheel of Life. Before being
reincarnated, they believed, the soul made a pit stop in Sheol, a depressing
underground place where every day is Monday, and it always looks like it's
just about to rain but it never quite does. No eternal pit of fire, but the
good times are definitely over. Some Jewish sects believed that
reincarnation came after a spell in Sheol, others just kind of left souls
there to rot (or whatever souls do). Other early religions had various
concepts of a bad place where dead people hang out. The ancient Hindus
believed in Hell before switching over to reincarnation. Egyptians believed
in an underworld, where souls traveled through trials before returning to
their bodies. The Romans and Greeks shared a version of Hell called Hades,
which heavily influenced later renditions. But the Judeo-Christian Hell was
the one that really stuck. The Jewish Sheol eventually evolved into Gehenna,
which roughly equates to purgatory — a place where souls are punished or
cleansed of their sins — but the concept was never "proven" as an
established teaching, leaving the matter of an afterlife largely to
individual believers. The coming of the Christians changed all that. When
Jesus Christ arrived on the scene, a new set of contradictions arose. On the
one hand, Jesus taught of God as a loving father figure, in sharp contrast
to the vengeful God of the Old Testament. But love and hate are a
double-edged sword. Although the Christian God had a whole lotta love on
hand for believers, sinners were condemned to the fiery pit. As the
Christian church became more complicated, so too did the vision of Hell. By
the middle ages, Hell was a rather well-defined place. The ultimate map of
Hell was drafted by Dante in his epic poem Inferno, part of his
inappropriately named "Divine Comedy." Dante famously divided Hell into nine
concentric circles of increasing nastiness, behind a gate with the logo
"Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here": Circle One: Almost every student
struggling through a Catholic school education inevitably arrives at the
theological question: What happens to innocent people who are not baptized
through no fault of their own? The Church invented "limbo" for this concept;
Dante made it the first circle of Hell, a sort of Hell Lite. The first
circle of Hell offers a kinder, gentler repose for noble pagans born before
Christ and other generally cool historical figures who happen not to be
Christians, such as Homer, Ovid, Socrates and presumably figures like Ghandi
and maybe Malcolm X. Captives in the First Circle of Hell were subjected
mostly to the ravages of generalized anxiety disorder without the benefit of
Paxil but with all the side effects (nausea, asthenia, constipation,
infection, dry mouth, yawn, diarrhea, sweating, decreased appetite,
sleepiness, dizziness, insomnia, tremor, nervousness, and sexual side
effects). Circle Two: Lust! As the most understandable of the major sins,
lust only makes circle two of Hell, where lustful lovers are tossed about by
stormy winds and forbidden from making wild monkey love. It's unclear
whether they're allowed to jerk off. Home to Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde,
the Marquis de Sade and eventually Larry Flynt. Circle Three: Gluttons live
here, and are punished for their gluttony by being subjected to bad weather.
Seasonal affective disorder is a bitch! There's also a big dog. Captives
include Chris Farley and Divine. Circle Four: You don't hear a lot about
avarice these days, but the medieval mindset classified it as a major sin.
The greedy are condemned here to working for the man every night and day,
doing pointless and menial tasks. Future residents include Bill Gates and
Martha Stewart. Circle Five: The angry spend eternity duking it out here,
naked in a vast river of jello (or possibly water, my Italian is a bit
rusty). Look for Sean Penn, Dick Cheney and Jerry Falwell. Circle Six: This
circle of Hell is filled with "heretics," by which Dante mostly means
Muslims (though to be fair, Hell has several Popes in residence as well).
This circle would technically also include figures like Aleister Crowley,
Jack Parsons, Martin Luther and Rael. Rumor has it John Ashcroft is planning
random sweeps through the Sixth Circle in search of Terrorists. Everyone in
the Sixth Circle is just an ordinary guy, BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE. Circle
Seven: Ah, violence! You gotta love violence! Dante classified three kinds
of violence — against self, against others and against God. Inhabitants
spotted by Dante included Attila the Hun and Alexander the Great. Since this
category includes warmongers, George W Bush is a potential future inmate.
Dante's definition of "violence against God" inexplicably includes sodomy,
which he classes as a more serious crime than murder, so the Seventh Circle
could potentially host Robert Mapplethorpe and Oscar Wilde, who would be
flayed on burning sands, while Adolf Hitler would merely be turned into a
tree for the crime of Suicide. There is no justice. Circle Eight: If the
Seventh Circle offended your sensibilities, the Eighth is simply baffling.
In the next worst circle of Hell, the sufferings of the damned would be
inflicted on those who have committed the following sins (all of which are
deemed more evil than murder and warmongering). In order of increasing
severity: Pandering, flattery, hypocrisy, fortune telling, theft, giving bad
advice, instigating trouble, alchemy, impersonation, counterfeiting, lying,
and being a giant. Circle Nine: The Ninth Circle is for betrayers of every
stripe, with all the big names in betraying thoroughly represented. Judas,
Brutus, Cassius, Benedict Arnold, John Wayne Bobbit, Big Pussy from the
Sopranos, Cain, Lando Calrissian, Jim Bakker, Richard M. Nixon, the
Rosenbergs, Randy Savage, and finally, frozen in hell's center, Satan
himself. Judas, Cassius and Brutus are actually being eternally chewed by
Satan, who has an intense dislike for Shakespearean characters.
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