Editor's Note:  We often introduce Citric Acid as "Orange County's unlikeliest literary arts journal." In an embrace of more unlikelihood, we're pleased once again to surprise and delight even ourselves (!) by sharing further entries from UCI Religious Studies Lecturer Dr. Joseph McKenna's unpublished lexicon, An Opinionated Dictionary of Religion. We keep the faith that Joe's book will soon be published.

Judgment

Undoubtedly owing to spotty police work, ancient immorality was regularly performed with impunity.

As humanity's moral conscience grew, morally sensitive people became dismayed by offenders.

And so moral laws were inscribed in soft stone or scratched onto vellum and displayed for public perusal. Injurious actions were prohibited. Proto-police multiplied. Judges emerged to mete out penalties. Thieves were apprehended. Sexual offenders nabbed. Felons made. 

Often the judgments were harsh and did not fit the crimes. But at other times there was an attempt to balance crime and punishment and let the punishment fit the crime—the eye for the eye, the tooth for the tooth.

And yet, in antiquity, even with a new public push for morality, offenders still performed their immoralities either under the cloak of night or when they were alone and unobserved.

A more perfect Judge was needed, one who was all seeing and one who could read humanity’s thoughts so that incontrovertible evidence could be brought against the offender. A perfect court was needed too, one that might permit no offender to escape penalty.

So, the ancients arrived at a common motif in the world's religions: the post mortem judgment of bad people. (The reason judgment was delayed until the next life is because people were did not receive proper judgment in this life. And that goes for afterlife rewards too.)

We see an example of post-mortem judgment in ancient Egypt when a disembodied soul is presented with its formerly beating heart set upon scales of justice and weighed against a feather.

We see post-mortem judgment in ancient Persia with the Bridge of Separation, a razor thin passage that a soul must pass over to get into paradise but from which wicked souls fall into a fiery torment.

We see post-mortem judgment in the rock and roll of Greek Sisyphus.

We see post-mortem judgment in the ancient Jewish Gehenna.

We see post-mortem judgment in the Christian hell, which Jesus preached and Dante renovated.

We see post-mortem judgment in Islam’s adoption of Persia’s Bridge idea.

We see post-mortem judgment in the lurid stories of Hindu and Buddhist temporary, tormenting hells. 

We see post-mortem judgment when a soul is re-incarnated into a lesser existence than a prior lifetime.  (That sharded beetle you’re looking at used to be a mathematician.)

In ancient times, religious writers from all of the hell-believing religions (East and West) offered many, many bilious and burlesque descriptions of hell’s torments, where the damned are burned in fires that will never be extinguished, boiled in oil, mauled by animals, flayed by demons, pierced by red-hot pokers, blinded and choked and tormented in every conceivable and inconceivable way, with body parts enlarged so as to feel pain more acutely, with endless scatological references and continuous and creatively perverse tortures administered to male and female genitals for sexual sins. (We could call this last bit ‘pious pornography.’)

What is going on here?

Afterlife judgments, found in most religions, offer idealized portraits of justice. The point of these idealizations is not the literalness of afterlife scenarios—a literal beatific paradise, a literal tormenting hell.

 Future-oriented, post-mortem religious judgment scenes (eschatologies) are not about the future at all. They are not about the afterlife at all.

Eschatological judgments are commentaries on a present moment, not a future moment. Eschatological judgments disclose heartfelt wishes about the present. Eschatological judgments seek to identify and articulate present moral values. Eschatological judgments are never prophecy, palmistry, or vaticination.  We’re not talking about the future here.

Eschatological judgments are always about the Now.

All the religions’ hellish torments may have been sadomasochistic revenge fantasies and the product of sick men’s dreams, but the sick men were trying to protect morality in every present moment.

Shall we judge them for this?

 Ka

Ka in ancient Egyptian religion alludes to a person's multiple souls.

It is only the lash of custom that prevents us from imagining that people have numerous souls: we have been instructed to think of one soul per person, just as a human gets only one chin, one liver, and one nose.

But in ancient Egypt, a person was expected to have at least five souls.

Each soul had its function and its peculiar destiny. One soul died with the body. One soul was everlasting. One soul could travel to the underworld. One soul could journey to the overworld and the underworld. One soul socialized with others of its kind.

There are hints of our multiplicity:

• Our everyday language suggests it when we say things like, ‘I told myself I wasn't going to like the show’ and ‘I gave myself a good talking to.’ You told who?  You gave who a good talking to? There's always that inner dialogue that ‘we’ are conducting with ‘ourselves,’ which suggests at least two conversationalists, maybe more. And the notion that 'we fool ourselves' is a universal experience, noted by philosophy and psychology as a real phenomenon. In self-deception, we are at once the deceiver and the deceived --- two personages.

• There are our many moods and personality swings, some of which, to ourselves and to others, seem very unlike ‘me.’

• There are the stages of life wherein ‘we’ are distinctly different persons than ‘we’ are in other stages.

• There are our inconsistencies and contradictory views on many issues, irreconcilable on paper but seemingly stable within our own minds.

• There is the Freudian trinity: Id, Ego, Superego.

Imagine if the multiple-soul concept was accepted as true in all religions. What would be the impact?

The first effect would be a decrease in anxiety over a soul's destiny. Which soul? In Jewish mystical Kabbalah, one soul stays with the dead body and that's understood. However, another soul will be heading to the infinite bliss of God's bosom, and that's a consolation.

Another effect might concern the care and feeding of the multiple souls within us. One soul needs solitude and ascetical severity while another soul requires swarms of fanciful personalities about it. One soul wants pious reverie and another wicked distractions. One like cakes and ale, the other unseasoned crackers and milk. All within one person.

Is it possible that a dead religion got something dead right?

Is it possible that ancient Egypt was correct to see in us a crowd?

Should Popeye have said “We are what we are” of himself, not “I am what I am”?  

Yahweh, too?

Limbo 

The Roman Catholic notion of Limbo was a triumph of graciousness over cruelty. In this case it was the cruelty implicit in the doctrine of hell. (Remember children: Human decency is more powerful than any creed.)

Let's back up and review the Christian soteriological scheme prior to the medieval acknowledgement of—creation of—limbo.

In the Christian schema, all souls bear the taint of an original sin that was bequeathed to humanity by the first parents, Adam and Eve, who sinned in the act of ignoring detailed instructions from God about a certain persimmon tree He was partial to. (The actual fruit of the tree is not identified in the biblical text and so we are free to speculate.)

This earliest sin tainted all human relationships with God, so much so that God devised a place of separation from Himself for the disembodied souls of humans. But separation itself did not sufficiently express God's annoyance with humanity.  So, God made the place of separation a torture chamber also. To further underscore God's infuriation with humanity, the separation and the torture were not to be temporary inconveniences but everlasting in duration.

The short list of those consigned to hell is rather long in that it consists of everyone.

There was a way to avoid hell, of course, and that was for each person to make an open declaration that he or she honestly believed the execution of Jesus was effective in delivering him or her from hell.

This prerequisite effectively prevented the vast majority of humanity from escaping post-mortem torment since most people had never even heard of Jesus, especially those who predated his life. It also left babies born outside the church in the lurch.

In the medieval period, it dawned on some soft-hearted prelate that it was simply too cruel to imagine good people who had never heard of Jesus being sent head first, heels kicking into hell.  Doubly cruel was the delivery of infants and children to eternal, fiery pain.

Enter limbo.

Limbo comes from the Latin word limbus, which means border.

Good people the world over who never heard of Jesus through no fault of their own, and babies and children, do not go to hell. They go to Limbo, a borderline shadowy territory between heaven and hell. Limbo is neither heaven nor hell, neither here nor there. It hasn't all the advantages of heaven, but it hasn't all the drawbacks of hell either.

In recent times, a few theological adepts petitioned to remove limbo from the Catholic lexicon, and they succeeded.

But they should have let limbo remain. As a badge of decency and a monument to human kindness, let limbo remain.

Dr. Joseph McKenna has been teaching religious studies as a Senior Lecturer at UC Irvine since 1999.