Identity Outlives Belief:
[Begin essay]
Hell
George Orwell, 14 April 1944
Attacking Mr. C. A. Smith and myself in the Malvern Torch for various
remarks about the Christian religion, Mr. Sidney Dark grows very angry
because I have suggested that the belief in personal immortality is
decaying. "I would wager," he says, "that if a Gallup poll were taken
seventy-five percent (of the British population) would confess to a
vague belief in survival." Writing elsewhere during the same week, Mr.
Dark puts it at eighty-five percent.
Now, I find it very rare to meet anyone, of whatever background, who
admits to believing in personal immortality. Still, I think it quite
likely that if you asked everyone the question and put pencil and
paper in hands, a fairly large number (I am not so free with my
percentages as Mr. Dark) would admit the possibility that after death
there might be "something." The point Mr. Dark has missed is that the
belief, such as it is, hasn't the actuality it had for our
forefathers. Never, literally never in recent years, have I met anyone
who gave me the impression of believing in the next world as firmly as
he believed in the existence of, for instance, Australia. Belief in
the next world does not influence conduct as it would if it were
genuine. With that endless existence beyond death to look forward to,
how trivial our lives here would seem! Most Christians profess to
believe in Hell. Yet have you ever met a Christian who seemed as
afraid of Hell as he was of cancer? Even very devout Christians will
make jokes about Hell. They wouldn't make jokes about leprosy, or RAF
pilots with their faces burnt away: the subject is too painful. Here
there springs into my mind a little triolet by the late A. M. Currie:
It's a pity that Poppa has sold
his soul It makes him sizzle at breakfast so. The
money was useful, but still on the whole It's a
pity that Poppa has sold his soul When he might
have held on like the Baron de Coal And not
cleared out when the price was low. It's a pity
that Poppa has sold his soul It makes him sizzle
at breakfast so.
Currie, a Catholic, would presumably have said that he believed in
Hell. If his next-door neighbour had been burnt to death he would not
have written a comic poem about it, yet he can make jokes about
somebody being fried for millions of years. I say that such belief has
no reality. It is a sham currency, like the money in Samuel Butler's
Musical Banks.
[End Orwell essay]
Now consider that decades later only 12% of Britons claim to believe
in Hell, and yet this belief is as fake as Orwell describes.
Is there any genuine religious belief amongst the characterising
culture?
~Iain
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