A few days/weeks ago we saw a movie featuring Alec Baldwin, Anthony Hopkins and Jennifer Love Hewitt – I cannot recall the name of the movie. In the movie Alec Baldwin is an unsuccessful, broke writer who sells his soul to the Devil (Hewitt) for 10 years of fame and success. He panics when he’s about to run out of time (he’s never truly happy during those 10 years because he doesn’t get to write what he wants) and he seeks Hopkins’ help.
I’m just wondering, how difficult is it to resist the Devil? After dying, assuming, you either go to hell, or heaven, and when you sell your soul to the Devil, you certainly go to hell. That is an eternity of pain and torture, according to the information we have about hell.
The popular perception says that only the noblest, only the holiest among us get to go to heaven. Let’s say there’s a 99.99999999% chance of you going to hell and just 0.00000001% of going to heaven. You’re not going anywhere in terms of career and money, you don’t have a social life and there is a fat chance of you ever becoming rich, famous and loved. With this statistic, if the Devil comes to you and tells you that you can get whatever you want, for as long as you live on this earth, you can indulge in every kind of Bacchic pleasure you can think of and any conceivable sin, you are going to be the richest man or woman in the world and the people of the opposite sex (or the same sex) will satisfy your every possible sexual fantasy as if they were born to do just that and your loved ones will love you as nobody has ever been loved before, and in the history books you name is going to be written in golden letters, etc., and in return, the Devil is going to own your soul after you die. This means that you lose that 0.00000001% chance of going to heaven.
What are you going to do? Your choices are:
- Experience all worldly pleasures for as long as you live and then go to hell and experience pain for eternity.
- Live a miserable, non-happening life with a 99.99999999% chance of going to hell and experience pain for eternity.
- Live a miserable, non-happening life with a 0.00000001% chance of going to heaven.
Please share your thoughts. I’ll share mine in the next post.
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eternity of pain and torture? nope ..
but honestly .. i don’t think there’s that kind of hell and heaven. that’s very .. christian .. 
Just by the way, a great French writer once said ‘I’d prefer heaven for the climate, and hell for the company’!
I believe in neither a transcendent hell nor a transcendent devil. Such as devils and hell are our own creatioins here on earth. I have been to hell. Its earthly name is Delhi Nov – 1984. And I have seen the devil, a collective being comprised of Rajiv Gandhi, Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar, et al. Those are my personal hell and personal devils. Others will have different and equally valid lists.
As for the Abrahamic concept of Hell and Devil, as a parent, I could never permit my child to be tortured for a nanosecond, much less eternity; is God (by any name) less loving than I am? My concept of the Almighty includes the words “Nirbhao, Nirvair” which precludes any enemy, specifically a devil.
OK, it shows we couldn’t discuss the rhetorical, hypothetical aspect. In this post I wasn’t asking people whether they believe in hell/heaven or not. It’s about decision making I was talking about.
.. and i did say ‘nope’ to hell ..
OK, poor Amrit, you sound a bit disgusted. Soprry, I didn’t read carefully enough and missed your point. Please forgive me.
None of your choices appeal to me in the least, but since I am a chardi kala Sikh, I’ll choose the first and hope to god that you made a big boo-boo. If it is impossible for you to make such a boo-boo, I suppose I’d choose the third. Hell seems most unpleasant and rare events do occasionally happen.
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