h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This "If hell's in my mind, then I can't go to hell cos I don't believe in it" line is all very well for shutting up idiots... but it's not terribly sound, now is it?

After all, one can go mad without believing in insanity, or fall in love without believing in love, or get Alzheimer's disease without knowing what it might possibly be, or ... There's a world of difference between the state of your mind, and beliefs about the state of your mind.

Well, I reckon, anyway...

Actually, it was a pretty relevant bit. There really is a belief out there that the heaven or hell you attend is created from your mind. If a mind cannot conceive of a hell, can it actually go to one?

One can go mad without believing in sanity, but sanity is a relative term. Someone who is insane can only be defined as such with some relative normalcy to compare it to. So how do you compare hells, if you're the only one in it? One man's heaven is another man's hell...

Alzheimer's disease is a physical reality that can be observed. Hell cannot. But the effects of Alzheimer's disease can be invisible to the victim, which is the onset of senility. But senility is also a relative term. How can you be senile if you have no basis for comparison?

People fall in love all the time, and imagine that that love is being reciprocated perfectly. It is only when they approach the subject and are rebuffed that they know any different. Until that occurs, that relationship is very real to them. On the other hand, some people do not have an inkling that someone has romantic feelings for them, until the subject is broached. Until they become consciously aware of a relationship with the other person, that relationship does not exist to them.

So, that second example is the atheist response to a hell in the mind. We don't recognize that there is any such thing. If we don't recognize it, then it is not real, to us. And since we are dead, there is no external input to make us aware. So hell does not, and cannot, exist to us.

If you have someone who doesn't believe in insanity, - maybe even someone who cannot conceive of such a thing, and stick them in a total isolation chamber, then they will go mad. Where did this madness come from? From the mind itself. So could it be with hell.

I'm not sure what your relativism is trying to achieve - sanity is (possibly) a relative term, but Multiple Personality Syndrome is definately an absolute term - everyone could have it or no-one could have it, but we'd still be able to agree what it is and test people for it.

Alzheimer's can be observed, and hell cannot. This is why it is rational to discount the existance of hell while accepting the existance of heaven. But there's a world of difference between that, and using it as an argument to say that atheists *cannot* go to hell...