The Obscurity of the Holy Spirit in the Traditional Revelation of Hell

 

Even if the scriptural revelation of Hell is obscure, Christians can respond by arguing that Jesus Christ promised to send the Holy Spirit to believers as a divine guide to His truth, and so the Holy Spirit can direct the church's tradition of interpreting scripture so that the truly revealed meaning of scripture becomes clear (for Christ's promise to send the Holy Spirit, see John 14:15-27, 15:26-16:15).  For example, many Christians believe the Holy Spirit inspired the Church Fathers in their reading of the Bible.

This idea is beautifully conveyed in the pictures above from St. Peter's Basilica.  These images are from the apse at the end of the central nave.  There is an online virtual reality tour of the apse.

In the center of the apse is the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter.  Peter is the "rock" of the Church through whom has passed the apostolic succession linking the popes to Christ.  Beneath the Chair are four huge statues (over 16 feet tall).  The two outer statues are figures of the Latin Church: St. Ambrose and St. Augustine (in the bottom picture above).  The two inner statues are of two Doctors of the Greek Church:  St. Athanasius and St. John Chrysostom.  Thus, it is suggested that these theologians from both the Latin and Greek churches have a consistent teaching that is descended from the Apostles through Peter.

Above the Chair of Peter is a brilliant dove that is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church through Peter and the theologians to the truth of revelation.

But this suggests a question:  Has the Holy Spirit succeeded in conveying the revealed truth of Christian doctrines such as Heaven and Hell, so that all Christians can agree on one orthodoxy?

On the issue of Hell as eternal torment, the answer seems to be No.  But even if all Christians cannot agree on this, perhaps most of them can agree.  Would this be enough to show the success of revelation through the Holy Spirit?

Actually, it is not clear that the majority of Christians throughout the two-thousand year history of the Christian tradition have believed that the torment of Hell is eternal.  There is some evidence that in the first five centuries of Christianity, the universalist Christians--who believed that those condemned to Hell would eventually be saved--were a large faction, and perhaps even the majority, of the Christians, particularly in the Greek Eastern Christian world.  Christian theologians like Origen (c. 185-c. 253) and Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-c. 394) advocated Christian universalism.  But then by the fifth century, theologians like Augustine (c. 354-c. 430) tried to refute the universalists and argued for eternal torment in Hell.  And as indicated by the prominence of Augustine's statue in St. Peter's Basilica, the Catholic Church has assumed that the Holy Spirit spoke through Augustine as representing the orthodox tradition of the Church.  And yet, how can we know that this is true?

Hart begins his book That All Shall Be Saved by stating: "The great fourth-century church father Basil of Caesarea (c. 329-379) once observed that, in his time, a large majority of his fellow Christians (at least, in the Greek-speaking Eastern Christian world that he knew) believed that hell was not everlasting, and that all in the end would attain salvation" (1-2).  

Writing for First Things, Michael Pakaluk argued that Hart was committing "theological fraud" in this assertion about what Basil had said.  But Hart replied to Pakaluk by showing that this is exactly what Basil had said.  Basil was not endorsing universalism because he was trying to show that it contradicted a clear scriptural teaching of eternal torment, but he was observing that "the great multitude of men" (hoi polloi ton anthropon)  among his fellow Christians had made the mistake of being universalists.  When polloi is given with the definite article, it means not just "many" but "the many" as opposed to "the few," and thus the majority as opposed to the minority.

Once the Catholic Church and other Christian churches adopted Augustine's position favoring eternal torment in Hell, that became the dominant majority tradition for most Christians for the next 1500 years.  But Hart's argument is that this was a mistake because of Gregory of Nyssa's defense of universalism is far more cogent--a more coherent and morally logical interpretation of scripture--than Augustine's position.

In The City of God, Augustine entered a "friendly-spirited" with those "merciful-hearted" (misericordes) Christians who deny the human beings condemned to Hell will suffer eternal punishment and never be saved (book 21, ch. 17).  Hart observes that "the merciful-hearted" is "an epithet that for him apparently had something of a censorious ring to it (one, I confess, that is quite inaudible to me)."

Augustine's main argument against these Christians who suffer from excessive mercy is that they fail to see how scripture--particularly, Matthew 25:41 and Revelation 20:10--teaches that the torment of Hell must be eternal.  This must be so, he asserts, because Jesus clearly indicates the parallelism of "eternal life" in Heaven and "eternal punishment" in Hell.  To say that eternal life shall be without end, while eternal punishment will have an end, is "utterly absurd" (book 21, ch. 24).

Hart has pointed out, however, that Augustine could not read Greek, and so he had to rely on the Latin translation of the New Testament.  Augustine did not know, therefore, that the Latin word aeterna is a translation of the Greek word aionios, which can mean "eternal" or "everlasting," but can also mean an "age" or "extended period of time."  He did not study how the Greek New Testament uses this Greek world aionios, and so he did not notice that Jude 7 speaks of the puros aioniou ("eternal fire") that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, although this fire lasted for only one day!

Did the Holy Spirit fail to explain to Augustine the lexicography of New Testament Greek words like aionios?  

Why didn't that Dove of the Holy Spirit flying over the head of Augustine do a better job of guiding his reading of the New Testament?

The Obscurity of the Biblical Revelation of Hell, And the End of Esotericism

 Scriptural revelation does not give us a clear teaching about Heaven and Hell.  The Hebrew Bible says almost nothing about Heaven and Hell.  The New Testament says more about this, but what is said is vague and confusing, if not incoherent.  The Quran is more explicit and descriptive in its few accounts of Heaven and Hell, but it's still remarkably unclear.

In the controversy over the Bible's account of Hell, there have been two major questions.  Does the Bible support the predominant view of orthodox Christians that most human beings will suffer eternal torment in Hell?  If it does, does the Bible teach that the torment will be the same for everyone, or will there be different kinds of torment for different kinds of sin?

I won't say much about the second question except to note that the Bible says almost nothing about precise gradations of punishment in Hell (such as what Dante describes in his Inferno).  When Jesus condemned the hypocrisy of the "teachers of the law," he said: "They devour widow's houses and for a show make lengthy prayers.  These men will be punished most severely" (Mark 12:40).  But Jesus didn't explain exactly how such variations in the severity of punishment would appear in Hell.  Jesus also spoke in a parable about slaves receiving different levels of punishment for their disobeying their masters:  "The slave who knows the master's will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows.  But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows.  From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked" (Luke 12:47-48).  But Jesus didn't explain exactly whether or how this parable is meant to apply to different kinds of punishment in Hell.

There are many more scriptural passages that can be read as answering the question about eternal torment in Hell.  And yet these passages are so confusing and contradictory that almost every position in the debate over this question seems to have some scriptural support.

A good survey of the positions in this debate is Four Views of Hell, edited by Preston Sprinkle (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016).  In this book, Denny Burk speaks for "eternal conscious torment," which is the traditional interpretation of Hell as the place where most human beings will be condemned to eternal punishment, and they will never be saved.  John Stackhouse speaks for "terminal punishment," which is the idea that most human beings will suffer a period of punishment in Hell, but then they will be extinguished forever.  Robin Parry speaks for "universalism," for the thought that all those punished in Hell will all eventually learn from their punishment that they need to repent of their sins and accept the redemptive mercy offered by Christ, and thus in the end all human beings will be saved and enjoy eternal happiness in Heaven.  Finally, Jerry Walls for "Purgatory," for the idea that sinful people who die in a state of grace, but are less than fully perfected, need to go to a place where they can be purified before they enter Heaven.  

It is questionable whether Walls' argument for Purgatory belongs in a book on "views of Hell," because since all the people in Purgatory are saved and on their way to Heaven, Purgatory is not a mitigation of Hell but a modification of Heaven.  By contrast, Limbo is a real mitigation of Hell, because the unbaptized infants in Limbo are damned by original sin, but they suffer only the deprivation of the beatific vision in Heaven and not the sensible torment of Hell.  In Dante's Divine Comedy, Limbo is the highest level of Hell, just before Purgatory.

To my mind, the best defense of universalism is David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale University Press, 2019).  The best comprehensive history and critique of Christian universalism is Michael McClymond's two-volume The Devil's Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018).

All of the authors in these books are Christians who look to the Bible as the authoritative vehicle for divine revelation, and therefore they agree that any resolution of the debate over Hell must come from scripture.  The problem, however, is that there are many scriptural texts that seem to support opposing positions in the debate.  So, for example, Burk identifies 10 biblical texts supporting his view of Hell as eternal torment.  While Hart identifies 23 texts supporting his view that while some human beings will endure a period of punishment in Hell, ultimately all human beings will be saved and enter Heaven.

One of the clearest texts for eternal torment in Hell is what Jesus said about separating the sheep from the goats in Matthew 25:31-46.  "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne.  All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.  He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left."  The sheep on his right will enter the Kingdom of God and enjoy "eternal life."  The goats on his left will be condemned to "eternal punishment" and "the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

Another seemingly clear text for Hell as eternal torment is Revelation 20.  John foresees that Christ will return to earth to rule over all the earth for a thousand years.  At the end of that thousand-year reign, there will be a judgment of Satan, who will be thrown into a lake of fire and "tormented day and night for ever and ever."  Then, there will be a judgment of the dead, and "each person was judged according to what they had done."  "Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire."

Hart has his own interpretations of passages like this.  He notes that in the English translations of Matthew's references to "eternal punishment" and "eternal fire," the word "eternal" is a translation of the Greek word aionios, which is an ambiguous word in Greek.  It can mean a period of endless or indeterminate duration, but it can also mean an "age" or extended interval.  So Jesus might have meant that punishment in Hell will be over an extended period but not "eternal."

There is a problem with this interpretation, however.  When Jesus speaks of "eternal life" for the saved, it's the same Greek word aionios that is translated as "eternal."  The parallelism here between "eternal life" and "eternal punishment" suggests that in both terms aionios really means "eternal."  Hart's response to this is to argue that since many verses in the New Testament say that God intends to save all human beings, Matthew's reference to punishment being aionios cannot be read as "eternal punishment" without contradicting what is said elsewhere in the New Testament.

Moreover, we can't be sure that Jesus meant to indicate a parallel in his use of aionios between the punishment of the age to come and the life of the age to come.  For that, we must look elsewhere in the New Testament as to how the word aionios is used.  In Jude 7, the phrase puros aioniou ("eternal fire") is used to describe the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah.  But Sodom's fire only lasted for one day!  So this suggests that for Jesus, eschatological life and punishment are parallel in belonging to the age to come, but are not parallel in needing to last forever:  life in Heaven must be forever, but punishment in Hell might be for a limited period of time.

And as to all the strange imagery in Revelation about Satan and the damned being thrown into the lake of fire, Hart dismisses the whole book of Revelation as "an impenetrable puzzle, one whose key vanished long ago along with the particular local community of Christians who produced it."

". . . True, the book does contain a few especially piquant pictures of final perdition, if that is what one chooses to cling to as something apparently solid and buoyant amid the whelming floods of all that hallucinatory imagery; but, even then, the damnation those passages describe chiefly falls upon patently allegorical figures like 'Hades' (Death personified) or 'the Beast' (Rome 'brutified'), which hardly seems to allow for much in the way doctrinal exactitude.  As it happens, the text also contains a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, horses with lions' heads and tails like serpents, giant angels, locusts with iron thoraxes, a dragon with seven heads and ten horns and wearing seven diadems, a great whore seated on the beast and bearing a chalice full of abominations, a gigantic city with streets of transparent gold . . . (and so on and so forth).  One would have to be something of a lunatic to mistake any of it for a straightforward statement of dogma" (107).

Indeed, throughout the New Testament, Hart observes, the language about the afterlife in Hell or Heaven should be seen as "an intentionally heterogenous phantasmagory, meant as much to disorient as to instruct" that provides no precise and literal description of life after death (119).  Moreover, the confusing language about Hell is somewhat hidden by the custom of using the single Anglo-Saxon word "Hell" as a collective translation for three Greek words--Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus.  Hades is the pagan conception of the world under the earth where all of the dead go.  Gehenna is the Greek form of Ge-Hinnom, "Valley of Hinnom," which is located southwest of Jerusalem, which was associated with child-sacrifice for worshippers of evil gods.  Tartarus was a pagan conception of a place where demonic spirits were imprisoned (112).  None of this can be considered a clear description of any Christian doctrine about the afterlife.

By contrast, Hart insists, there are some clear doctrinal statements in the New Testament of God's intention to save all human beings.  "So, then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all human beings, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings" (Romans 5:18).  "For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be given life" (1 Corinthians 15:22).  "Our savior God . . . intends all human beings to be saved and come to a full knowledge of truth" (1 Timothy 2:3).

But isn't there a contradiction between these scriptural statements that all people will be saved and the other statements that some people ("the goats") will go to Hell?  No, Robin Perry argues, there is no contradiction:  "it is arguable that we can legitimately infer that those in hell will be saved out of hell.  If postmortem salvation can be legitimately inferred from teachings that have good claims to being biblical, then the doctrine itself can claim to be biblical, at least in a secondary sense" (117).

But notice that he has to infer this as biblical "in a secondary sense," because there is no explicit statement about "postmortem salvation" anywhere in the Bible.  If this really is a biblical teaching, why did the biblical authors refuse to state this openly and explicitly?

One answer suggested by the proponents of universal salvation, beginning with the early Church fathers such as Origen, has been that universal salvation should be a "secret teaching" known only to the Christian intellectual elite because the common people need to fear eternal torment in Hell as the only way to scare them into good behavior.  Universal salvation must an esoteric truth known only to the intellectual few, while eternal damnation is the exoteric truth believed by the ignorant many.  Eternal punishment in the afterlife is a lie, but it's a noble lie because it deters bad behavior in this life.

One indication of this esotericism in the universalist teaching about Hell is that it has often been hidden in private manuscripts or in posthumous and anonymous publications (see Hart, 200-201; McClymond, 2-14, 20, 46-49, 158-59, 631-40, 696; and D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment [University of Chicago Press, 1964], 5-8, 48, 76-83, 158-62).  From Plato to Locke, philosophers have argued that the public teaching of atheism must be prohibited because atheists deny the eternal punishment of bad people in the afterlife that provides the only deterrence to immoral conduct for most people.

It is remarkable, therefore, that Christian universalism and the denial of eternal torment are now being publicly advocated and debated rather than being hidden as a secret teaching.  It is even being promoted in popular best-selling books--like Rob Bell's Love Wins.

This confirms my argument that modern liberalism's success over the last two centuries has shown that esoteric writing is neither desirable nor necessary in a liberal open society.  We no longer see any need to persecute heretics or atheists.

Heaven and Hell in the Reason/Revelation Debate: In Defense of Zetetic Scientific Philosophizing

Over the years, I have written a lot about the reason/revelation debate, particularly as manifest in the thought of Leo Strauss and Charles Darwin.   I have made five claims. 

First, I have agreed with Catherine and Michael Zuckert in identifying Strauss as a zetetic philosopher--as someone devoted to Socratic inquiry into the nature of the whole without expecting to achieve full knowledge of the whole, who makes a rational choice for philosophy over revelation but without ever refuting revelation.  

Second, I have identified Charles Darwin as a zetetic scientific philosopher in choosing evolutionary science over Biblical creationism, while recognizing that he could not refute the revelation of God as the First Cause of natural evolutionary history, which would support theistic evolution.  

Third, I have argued that the Darwinian liberalism that emerged during Darwin's lifetime promoted the public debate over reason and revelation that was revived by Strauss, which shows how the liberal social order secures the freedom of thought that allows people to freely choose between the philosophic life, as satisfying the natural desire for intellectual understanding, and the religious life, as satisfying the natural desire for religious transcendence.

Fourth, I have said that the success of Darwinian liberalism over the past two hundred years has made esoteric writing undesirable and unnecessary, so that now the choice between reason and revelation can be an open and public debate, because in a liberal or open society, there is no natural conflict between the philosophic life of the few and the practical life of the many.

Fifth, although the zetetic scientific philosophers cannot refute revelation, they can show that revelation suffers from such obscurity that religious believers cannot agree on what is religious orthodoxy, and consequently, as Locke said, "everyone is orthodox to himself," which supports the need for religious toleration and liberty.

As one illustration of the last point, I have pointed out that neither biblical revelation nor natural revelation provides a clear teaching to resolve the debate among Christians over creation and evolution. 

Another illustration of the obscurity of revelation is in the disagreement among Christians about the afterlife in Heaven and Hell.  In some ways, this is the crucial teaching of Christianity because it's the question of the eternal destiny or final end of human beings in the cosmos:  Will we achieve eternal happiness in Heaven or eternal misery in Hell?

In my next three posts, I will take up the question of Hell.  And I will argue that neither biblical revelation, nor traditional revelation, nor natural revelation provide Christians with a clear teaching about Hell on which they can agree.

The zetetic scientific philosopher will infer from this that either God has not revealed the truth about Hell, or He has, but He has failed to reveal it clearly enough to be understood by all (or at least most) believers.

Then, in subsequent posts, I will take up the question of Heaven, and argue that the revelation of Heaven has been just as obscure as the revelation of Hell.

Darwinian Thinking About Life After Death

Darwinian science can explain the evolved natural desire for religious experience as a manifestation of the uniquely human evolved capacity for symbolism--for imagining symbolic worlds that can include life after death, perhaps with eternal happiness in Heaven for the saved or eternal torment in Hell for the damned.  We have an instinctive desire for preserving our lives, and our powerful imaginations can project our lives into an endless future after death.  

We create the symbolic reality of the afterlife by collective consent--by agreeing with one another that this symbolic world exists.  That is to say that we must persuade one another that it's real.  That also means that we can persuade ourselves that it is not real.  For example, as I have argued, the four possible ways of achieving immortality--staying alive forever, being resurrected after death, living forever as a disembodied soul, or living forever though one's legacy (fame or progeny)--can all be shown to be incoherent illusions, because a deathless existence could never preserve the personal identity of any human being.

But then if we were persuaded that the symbolic world of the afterlife is not real, we would have to learn to live with the inevitability of death without that knowledge ruining our lives.  We could do that if we could see that living forever is not as good for us, and death is not as bad for us, as we might think.  We would need to see that living forever cannot be really desirable because a deathless human life could not be a truly human life, a point beautifully conveyed in Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning," which teaches us that "death is the mother of beauty."  We also need to see that fearing death makes no sense because the dead know nothing, and no living human being can ever be dead, an argument that has been advanced by Epicurus and by Epicureans like Lucretius and Montaigne.

We might worry, however, that morality requires the cosmic justice of Heaven and Hell.  Do good people need to hope for eternal happiness in Heaven, while bad people need to fear eternal damnation in Hell?  Or does our moral conduct depend on the rewards and punishments that come to us while we are alive?  How we answer such questions might decide whether we can agree on the symbolic reality of Heaven and Hell.

Charles Darwin thought that there was a natural moral sense that could move people to moral conduct without any belief in heavenly rewards or hellish punishments.  He claimed that "a man who has no asssured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward" could still derive moral guidance from social praise and blame and from his own rational judgment or conscience.  And yet he also thought that "the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality." 

Darwin agreed with the Epicurean denial of life after death, even though he rarely spoke about this in his public writing.  He was led to this both by his evolutionary science of life and death and by his personal experience with death, particularly the death of his ten-year-old daughter Annie in 1851.  She died of tuberculosis (known at the time as "consumption").  Darwin's way of understanding and dealing with the death of his child was to keep a careful record of her childhood and her sickness and to preserve his memories of her--particularly, the "joyousness" of her character--in a written memorial essay.

Darwin looked forward to the day that scientists would understand the natural causes of her sickness and perhaps the remedies for it.  He was excited, therefore, when in 1877 he saw an article by Dr. Robert Koch with the first photographs of bacteria, along with Koch's argument that such microorganisms could cause diseases.  Darwin said that it would be the "greatest triumph of Science" to discover the origin of infectious diseases such as the one that killed Annie.

In March 24, 1882, Koch announced that he had identified the cause of tuberculosis as a bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis.  This was only a few weeks before Darwin's death on April 19.  Over the next forty years, scientists developed antibiotics for treating tuberculosis and a vaccine for preventing it.  In 19th century Europe, 25% of all deaths had come from tuberculosis.  So this medical advance contributed to the remarkable lengthening of the average human lifespan.

Of course, this prolonging of human life by natural science cannot secure life after death.  Unlike his wife Emma, who was a Universalist Unitarian who believed in the universal salvation of all human beings in Heaven after death, who could therefore seek consolation in the thought that she could someday see Annie in Heaven, Darwin saw no reason to believe in the orthodox Christian doctrine of Heaven.

But Darwin and Emma did agree in their rejection of the orthodox Christian doctrine that most human beings would suffer eternal torment in Hell, which Darwin called a "damnable doctrine."

In fact, many Christians like Emma had been persuaded to deny the symbolic reality of Hell as eternal torment as a morally incoherent idea contrary to the scriptural texts of the New Testament.

Over the past fifty years, a growing number of Christians have been led to this conclusion, particularly by people like David Bentley Hart.  In my next post, I will reflect on this as a dramatic example of the cultural evolution of human symbolic thinking about the afterlife.

Kamala Harris Will Win--At Least in the Popular Vote

Allan Lichtman has predicted (in a video produced by the New York Times) that Kamala Harris will win the presidential election.  As I said in a previous post in 2020, Lichtman (a historian at American University) has persuaded me that he has the best model for predicting presidential elections based on his study of all the presidential elections since 1860.  But there is one flaw in his model: although it almost perfectly predicts the popular vote winner, it cannot predict those cases where the loser in the popular vote wins in the Electoral College.

In 2000, he predicted that Al Gore would win, and indeed he did win the popular election by about 544,000 votes.  But Gore lost the Electoral College by a narrow margin (271 for Bush, 266 for Gore).  The Electoral College vote was decided when Florida's 25 electoral votes went to Bush.  The U.S. Supreme Court halted the recount of votes in Florida with Bush leading Gore by 537 votes out of almost 6 million votes cast.

Lichtman tried to argue that his prediction was not a failure because he had correctly predicted Gore's popular vote victory.  So, he seemed to concede that his model predicts the popular vote but not the Electoral College vote.

But then, in 2016, Lichtman became famous for predicting Trump's win, even though most people had predicted a Clinton win.  Of course, Trump actually lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes.  So, in claiming that he had correctly predicted the election in 2016, Lichtman was contradicting what he had said in 2000--that his model only predicted the popular vote winner.  Lichtman should have admitted that in 2016 his model failed to predict Clinton's popular vote win.

In 2020, Lichtman correctly predicted Biden's win, who won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

In 2020, I argued that Lichtman needed to add a 14th Key to his "13 Keys to the White House" that would say "The likely voters for the incumbent party are evenly distributed across the states so as to minimize wasted votes in the Electoral College system."  Answering yes to this statement would favor the incumbent party.

But now I see that this doesn't work as a modification of his model.  Instead of that, I would suggest that he needs to add a qualifying statement to the model:  This model predicts the popular vote winner in almost every case (except for elections like 2016), but it cannot predict when the popular vote winner is the loser in the Electoral College.

Lichtman is wrong, therefore, when he says: "Kamala Harris will be the next President of the United States."  What he should say is: I predict that Kamala Harris will win the popular vote for President, but it is possible that Trump could still win the Electoral College.

The reason for this weakness in his model is that the Electoral College allows presidential elections to be decided by a few votes in a few key states in ways that are not predictable by any model of presidential elections.  For example, in 2016, Trump won all 16 of the electoral votes for Michigan, even though he won by only 10,704 popular votes out of a total of 4,548, 382 votes.  In 2020, Biden won all 16 of the electoral votes for Georgia, even though he won by only 11,779 votes out of a total of 4,935, 487 votes.  The problem here is that the "winner-take-all" system of the Electoral College in most states (except for Nebraska and Maine) gives all of a state's electoral votes to the popular vote winner in the state, even when only a few thousand votes have made the difference, and thus the votes cast on the losing side have been wasted.

This obvious unfairness could be eliminated by either abolishing the Electoral College or by having state legislatures abolish the "winner-take-all" process for allocating electoral votes.

Let's turn now to Lichtman's model as applied to the 2024 presidential race.

Lichtman's fundamental insight--based on his study of presidential elections--is that voters in a presidential election are mostly judging the past performance of the incumbent party, and that what happens in the presidential campaign--campaign tactics, fluctuating polling, presidential debates, campaign fundraising, campaign advertising, and so on--don't really matter all that much, because all that matters for the voters--the past performance of the incumbent party--has been determined long before the campaign began.  Of course, this contradicts what most political commentators assume, which is that the outcome depends upon the day-to-day events of the presidential campaign.

From his study of the history, as laid out in his book Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020 edition), Lichtman decided that there were 13 conditions that favor reelection of the incumbent party.  These 13 conditions could be framed as 13 statements, so that when six or more of these statements are false, the incumbent party loses.  Here I will state each of the keys followed by Lichtman's answer for 2024.

KEY 1  Incumbent party mandate:  After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections.

False.  Although the Democrats did better than expected in the 2022 midterms, they experienced a net loss in House seats.

KEY 2  Nomination contest:  There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.

True.  Harris won her nomination without any contest for the nomination.

KEY 3  Incumbency:  The incumbent-party candidate is the sitting president.

False.  The Democrats lost this key when Biden withdrew his candidacy for a second term.

KEY 4  Third party:  There is no significant third-party or independent campaign.

True.  With RFK Jr.'s withdrawal from third-party candidacy, this key goes to the Democrats.

KEY 5  Short-term economy:  The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

True.  Despite the fact that some people have complained about the economy, there is no clear evidence of a recession.

KEY 6  Long-term economy:  Real annual per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the two previous terms.

True.  Growth during Biden's term has exceeded the growth over the two previous terms.

KEY 7  Policy change:  The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.

True.  Biden has made some major changes in policy--such as rejoining the Paris Accords on Climate Change, the CHIPS Bill, the Inflation Reduction and Climate Change Bill, and the Infrastructure Bill.

KEY 8  Social unrest:  There is no sustained social unrest during the term.

True.  Although there has been some social unrest associated with the pro-Palestine student protests, this has not been sustained over a long period.

KEY 9  Scandal:  The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.

True.  The attempts of the Republicans to find Biden guilty of some great scandal have failed.  Hunter Biden's legal problems have not created a personal scandal for the President.

KEY 10  Foreign or military failure:  The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.

Undecided.  It's not clear right now whether the Biden Administration's policy for a cease-fire in Gaza will fail.

KEY 11  Foreign or military success:  The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

Undecided.  For the reason just indicated for foreign or military success.

KEY 12  Incumbent charisma:  The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

False.  Kamala Harris does not have a broadly bipartisan charismatic appeal (comparable to someone like Ronald Reagan).

KEY 13  Challenger charisma:  The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

True.  Although the cult of Trump treat him like a God, this is a narrow base in the electorate.  Most voters find Trump repulsive rather than charismatic.  This makes an interesting point about Trump's "populism"--contrary to his claim to speak for all or at least most of the people (the "true Americans"), he speaks only for a minority.  That's the fundamental weakness in most populist movements.

This gives Harris and the Democrats eight true keys, and that's enough to win.  Even if the two foreign policy keys were to flip to false, that would constitute only five false keys, not enough for the Republicans to win.

                             Lichtman Applies His 13 Keys to Harris, 1 Hour and 14 Minutes

Are Most of Us Going to Hell? Is Don Giovanni Already There?

J. D. Vance has said that Kamala Harris "can go to Hell" for her failure to investigate the killing of 13 U.S. military service people during the evacuation from Afghanistan in August of 2021.  When he was asked whether he should apologize for using such language, he said that he would not apologize for using "a colloquial phrase" to express his moral disgust with Harris.  Of course, he is right that most of us today use the words "go to Hell" as a "colloquial" expression of our emotional disgust with someone.  

This suggests that we have forgotten that for most of Christian history, orthodox Christians spoke of "going to Hell" as a literally true Christian doctrine--that most human beings after they die will go to Hell where they will be eternally tormented by God as punishment for their wickedness.  As I have indicated in my recent posts on Vance and his association with Catholic Integralism, Vance professes to be a traditionalist Catholic who believes in the truth of Christian orthodoxy, who also believes that the identity of America as a Christian nation depends on enforcing belief in that Christian orthodoxy.  

For the Catholic Integralists, the highest end of man is to avoid eternal torment in Hell and enjoy eternal beatitude in Heaven.  And achieving that end requires a Catholic theocracy: the temporal power of the state must serve the spiritual power of the Catholic Church, the only true Church that can lead human beings to eternal salvation and away from eternal punishment.  But as I have argued previously, the Catholic Integralists don't really believe this, because they are still liberals who accept the liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration.

Moreover, people like Vance and the Catholic Integralists--and most Christians generally today--believe that the truth of Christian orthodoxy has been divinely revealed by the Holy Spirit through scripture and tradition.  But that belief is denied by the fact of religious pluralism--by the fact that devout Christians cannot reach agreement on fundamental Christian doctrines such as the doctrine of Hell as eternal torment for most human beings.  This confirms Locke's claim that "everyone is orthodox to himself," and for that reason we need to secure the religious liberty and toleration that will allow a free debate over religious doctrines without any coercive enforcement of one church's orthodoxy over another's.

Last year, the Gallup polling organization reported that the proportion of Americans professing to believe in God, Heaven, and Hell has declined over the past 24 years.  In 2001, 90% believed in God, 83% believed in Heaven, and 71% believed in Hell.  In 2023, that had gone down to 74% (God), 67% (Heaven), and 59% (Hell).  In some other countries, the percentages are lower.  In Great Britain, for example, it's 49% for God, 41% for Heaven, and 26% for Hell.  Hell is always less popular than Heaven.  Nevertheless, the international surveys report that in a few countries--like Egypt and Morocco--almost 100% of people report believing in Hell.

Over the years, I have written many posts on the evolutionary history of Heaven and Hell.  And in the last four hundred years of that evolutionary history, particularly in Europe and North America, there has been a notable decline in belief in the Christian orthodox doctrine of Hell as the place for the eternal torment of most human beings.

DID DON GIOVANNI GO TO HELL?

Recently, I had to think more about this when my wife and I attended performances of Verdi's La Traviata and Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Santa Fe Opera.  Don Giovanni was a legendary libertine who was reputed to have seduced (or raped) over 2,000 women.  The Italian libretto for Mozart's opera, written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, is based on this old story.

At the beginning of the opera, in seventeenth-century Seville, we see the Don struggling with Donna Anna, who is resisting his sexual assault.  Donna Anna's father, the Commendatore, comes out of his palace, and he challenges Don Giovanni with a sword.  At first, the Don is reluctant to fight with an old man, but finally he draws his sword and easily kills him.  Leporello, the Don's servant, is horrified by what he has seen.  The Don and Leporello leave together.  

Meanwhile, Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, her betrothed, come out of the palace and are shocked by the dead body of the Commendatore.  Together, they sing about their "oath to the gods . . . to avenge that blood."  That sets the recurrent theme in the opera of "vengeance" as indicated by the many appearances of the Italian word vendetta in the libretto.  Every woman who is assaulted or betrayed by Don Giovanni seeks vengeance against him.  And as they warn other women about his predatory ways, the Don fails in all his attempts at new conquests because he cannot escape his bad reputation.

Near the end of the opera, the Don and Leporello are walking through a graveyard with monuments and statues, including one of the Commendatore.  The Commendatore's marble statue speaks: "You will cease laughing before dawn!"  Mozart uses three trombones here for the first time in the opera.  In the eighteenth century, trombones were used mainly for religious music and for supernatural scenes in operas.  This sudden entrance of trombones in what is a comic opera must have awed Mozart's audiences.

Don Giovanni is surprised, and he asks Leporello to read the inscription on the statue: "Here I await vengeance [vendetta] on the wicked man who brought me to my death."  Leporello is frightened.  But the Don is amused.  He invites the statue to come to dinner.  The statue agrees.

Later, Don Giovanni is having a grand party in the banquet-hall of his palace.  The statue arrives and enters the room.  He invites the Don to have dinner with him.  The Don agrees.  He gives his hand to the statue as his pledge.  The statue's hand is freezing cold.  He orders the Don:  "Repent, change your life, it is your last moment!"  Giovanni refuses to repent.

Roaring flames begin to surround Giovanni, and demon voices are heard from below: "All is as nothing compared to your crimes! Come!  Worse is in store for your!"

Giovanni cries: "Who tears my spirit?  Who shakes my innards?  What twisting, alas, what frenzy!  What hell.  What terror."

With the demon voices screaming, Giovanni cries "Ah!" as he is enveloped by flames and sinks to hell.

A few minutes later, all of the main characters appear in the room.  Leporello explains what happened: "right over there the devil swallowed him up."  Don Ottavio says: "we all have been avenged by heaven."  The opera ends with all singing the "very ancient song"--"And the death of wicked men is always just like their life."

Don Giovanni has always been one of the most popular of all operas.  And some opera critics have said that it is the greatest of all operas.  And yet many people have found the end of the opera with the Don's descent into Hell unsatisfying.  This ending just does not feel right.

                     Don Giovanni, the Commendatore Scene, from the Movie Amadeus

Or perhaps it does not feel right only for modern secular audiences and opera directors who have no understanding of Mozart's Catholic Christian conception of Hell as the place where evil men like Don Giovanni will be eternally tormented for their sins.  

But that's not a good answer, because the religious language in Don Giovanni sounds more like a vaguely pagan polytheistic view of the Underworld rather than a Christian view of Hell.  The characters invoke "the gods" without any reference to the God of the Bible or to Jesus.  In explaining what has happened to the Don, they say that he has gone to be with "Proserpina and Pluto"--the ancient Roman gods of the Underworld.  This is very strange for people supposedly living in the Catholic Spanish world of 17th century Seville!

Furthermore, whenever the characters appeal to a "just heaven" to punish Giovanni, they seem to be projecting their own personal vendetta onto "heaven."  For example, Donna Elvira tells Giovanni: "A just heaven willed that I would find you, in order to accomplish its own vendetta and mine."

What I see here is confirmation of Judge Morris Hoffman's claim that evolution has built our brains to punish cheaters.  Our brains incline us to three kinds of punishment.  As first-party punishment, most human beings punish themselves for cheating through conscience and guilt.  As second-party punishment, wrongdoers are punished by retaliation and revenge (delayed retaliation) from their victims.  As third-party punishment, we punish wrongdoers for harming others with retribution.

It's clear to me that Don Giovanni has no moral conscience or sense of guilt, and so he doesn't punish himself for his wrongdoing.  He's a psychopath or what I have called a "moral stranger"--someone who does not feel the moral sentiments that most of us feel.

Nevertheless, Giovanni is punished by the second-party retaliation and revenge coming from his victims and by the third-party retribution coming from those who observed his wrongdoing.  If he really was sent to Hell by the gods of a "just heaven," that would be a supernatural form of third-party punishment.

Stephen Barlow--the Director of the Santa Fe Opera's production of Don Giovanni--disagrees with my claim that Giovanni has no conscience, and he even designed his production of the opera to show that Giovanni's guilty conscience drove him to kill himself at the end, and this self-inflicted punishment takes the place of his being thrown into Hell.

Barlow's idea was to alter the staging of Don Giovanni to make the story similar to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Dorian Gray is a young man in Victorian England whose beauty is admired by both men and women.  When an artist paints a portrait of Dorian, he realizes that while he will always be beautiful in the painting, he will lose his beauty as he ages.  So, he wishes that the face in the portrait would age, while he remains young and beautiful.  His wish is fulfilled.  He devotes his life to beauty and sensuous pleasures, and he experiments with every vice, even murder.  Reflecting the increasing degradation of his soul over the years, his portrait becomes ever more hideously ugly, while he still looks beautiful.

Struggling with his guilt, he decides that he must destroy the only evidence of his vicious conduct--the portrait.  He takes a knife and stabs the picture.  Doing that, he actually stabs himself in the heart and dies.  The next day, when people find his body, they see a withered and ugly corpse, while the portrait beside him is young and beautiful again.

To mimic this story, Barlow staged his Don Giovanni in Santa Fe as set in Victorian England.  At the opening of the opera, the audience sees a young and beautiful Giovanni having his portrait painted.  Then, at the end of the opera, the statue of the Commendatore is replaced by a portrait of the Commendatore, who looks like an aged and ugly Giovanni.  The Commendatore steps out of the portrait to challenge Giovanni.  Refusing to repent, Giovanni rushes toward the painting and stabs it with a knife.  But then Giovanni falls back and collapses.  He has actually stabbed himself and dies.  His guilty conscience has driven him to kill himself.

I do not see any evidence in the music or the libretto of Don Giovanni to justify Barlow's claim that Giovanni is punished and finally killed by his own guilty conscience.  The Don as depicted in this opera acts like a psychopathic libertine who has no conscience, whose punishment comes not from himself but from those provoked by his wrongdoing into a vendetta of retaliation and retribution.

I suspect, however, that many people in the Santa Fe audience found Barlow's clever alteration of the opera's ending more satisfying than Mozart's staging of the Don's descent into the eternal torment of Hell.  This is because in recent centuries, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, belief in the Christian doctrine of Hell as a place of eternal torment has been in decline, particularly in Europe and North America.

In my next post, I will say more about this cultural evolutionary history of the symbolic reality of Hell, so that increasingly many people today, even devout Christians, can no longer believe in that traditional doctrine of Hell.