Two Papers on Dante

In World Literature II, the class was asked to respond to Dante's Inferno. After reading this response to another class and discussing the topic for a bit, I felt I should write a bit more about the history of Hell. The next two posts are these two papers. I hope they are the finished, edited copies. I'm too lazy to go back and re-edit them if they are not.

*Disclaimer* The second paper cites Wikipedia. I encourage you to visit the Wikipedia articles. While some discount Wikipedia as inaccurate, I made sure only to cite articles which themselves where thoroughly cited. I visited many of the sources of this information via Wikipedia's article.

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How Many Will Enter Heaven?

Check out this quote I found online: "[C]onsider this fact: fewer than 20% of people actually think they are going to hell. And yet, in answering that question, Jesus says in Matthew 7 that FEW pass through the gate that leads to eternal life. 80% doesn't sound like few to me... do some of us have the wrong idea?" There are a number of problems with this quote. First of all, you it is assuming that "few" refers to the current ratio of professing Christians to non-Christians. What's to say that Jesus isn't referring to the entire population of all the earth over all time? In that case, it's entirely plausible that 80% of people now are really Christians, as long as there are still few total Christians when all is said and done. Maybe it applies only to the people in the crowd listening to Jesus. Or, it could refer to something else entirely (as I believe). Jesus was talking to a specific people living in a specific time. We cannot decontextualize his ...

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On the Biblical Mandate to Respect Authority

The SC choir chaplain brought up a passage in 1 Peter at the beginning of this week regarding submission to authority. It led to interesting conversation, and I'd like to reiterate part of that conversation here. 1) It is important to remember that the early churches who passed around these letters had a very practical use for them. The early church could have easily been stomped out had the early Christians been too anti-government. True, the church was persecuted. True, the church did get into trouble with the government. However, remember that the persecution happened for short bursts of time (historically speaking) and only in isolated areas. It was by no means universal persecution. Additionally, when you look at other early Christian documents, you see more injunctions to work with the rulers. And why not? The early church needed all the support it could get, while not compromising, of course. If they were all outspoken government radicals, they would not have lasted long. 2)...

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An Experiment In Honesty

This last week has been emotionally unsettling, and since I've been unoccupied all day (I'm at my dad's place until I leave for San Francisco), I'm feeling it in a strong sort of way. To sort it all out, I thought the best thing to do would be to start writing about it, so here it goes. This summer has been very influential in my development - I suspect more influential than I can really understand at present. I had to leave many new-found friends and watch as friends left me. The people at Yellowstone helped me to see what I want socially. There were few Christians (besides the anomalous Campus Crusaders) who were more than nominally religious (and I mean religious in the way that we see American Evangelicals or Catholics - there were many 'mystics'). I could talk honestly about questions of death or a god without fearing that evangelical backlash I'd get at Sterling College or The Master's College. In fact, I just enjoyed being able to hang out with an...

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And death i think is no parenthesis

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